You’ve probably heard of the Infinite Monkey Theorem before. It’s a thought experiment that posits the idea that if you give a monkey a typewriter and an infinite amount of time, it/they would eventually hammer out the collected works of William Shakespeare.
The idea is less an exercise in comical absurdism and more about probability. With the right conditions, and given enough time, even something as surreal as monkeys writing Shakespeare could conceivably occur. Well, scientists just declared it’s all bullshit. Monkeys would never have enough time to write Shakespeare.
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Mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta from the University of Technology Sydney said it would actually take way longer than the entire lifespan of our universe for a single typing monkey to randomly produce the complete works of Shakespeare.
To be clear, the pair aren’t necessarily disagreeing with the premise here. They still think that, given enough time, a monkey could re-create all of Shakespeare’s works, from Hamlet to Henry V to Romeo and Juliet to Twelfth Night and everything in between. The problem is just that, in practical terms, there would never be enough time for that to occur. The universe would die before it happened.
Honestly, this sounds a little Neil Degrasse Tyson-y. Oh, you think there’s no way humans would ever be able to create a contained tube of light that could be turned into a laser sword like in Star Wars? No shit, idiot. That’s why it’s a sci-fi fantasy story with knights and damsels in distress and evil rulers. It’s a fairytale in space!
The researchers say the inherent flaw in the theorem is the concept of infinite time. They aren’t just fighting a word problem with logic; they used a lot of complicated mathematics to reach their conclusion, which you can read all about over here.
In short, the researchers concluded that we’d be extraordinarily lucky if an infinite number of monkeys or a single monkey given infinite time with a typewriter could even produce the 1,800 words that make up a Curious George book before the heat death of the universe.
That is still mightily impressive to me. Maybe the original creators of the theorem were aiming too high with the whole “collected works of Shakespeare” thing? If infinite monkeys can churn out a single children’s book, the monkeys have more than earned a reward for their hard labor. Perhaps infinite bananas.
