If every chimpanzee on Earth were given a typewriter, they wouldn’t reproduce the works of William Shakespeare even if they kept on typing until the heat death of the universe, researchers have calculated.
The so-called infinite monkey theorem states that if you had an infinite number of primates, or one primate had infinite time, they would almost certainly type out any given text an infinite number of times.
The origins of the theorem are obscure, but it is commonly attributed to mathematician Émile Borel or biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. The general idea may even extend back to Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
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at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia, says that while the theorem is mathematically true, it is “totally misleading”. “The reality of an infinite universe or infinite monkeys does not apply to us,” he says.
He and his colleague , also at UTS, have now mathematically tested a more realistic proposition, which they call the finite monkey theorem.
In their scenario, the current global population of around 200,000 chimpanzees would type one key every second until the end of the universe in about 10100 years (a 1 followed by 100 zeros).
They estimate that it would take a single chimp 300,000,000 random keystrokes to write the word “bananas”, and the probability that one of those 200,000 apes would actually achieve the modest feat in its lifetime would be just 5 per cent.
However, the chances rapidly become infinitesimal as the task becomes more complicated – so the probability of a single chimp randomly writing “I chimp therefore I am” is just 1 in 10 million billion billion.
The entire works of Shakespeare, comprising nearly 885,000 words, would take 107448366 random keystrokes, requiring much more time than the expected lifespan of the universe.
“We did the maths from one monkey to the scale of infinity monkeys and we can say categorically it’s not going to happen,” says Woodcock. “If every atom in the universe was a universe in itself, it still wouldn’t happen.”
The astronomical odds against humans’ close relatives writing Shakespeare emphasise how miraculous it is that humans have such abilities, says Woodcock. “We are, ourselves, the lottery-winning chimps.”
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