Science & Technology

Monkeys don't have enough time to write Shakespeare, study finds

By T.K. Randall
November 24, 2024

Image: Statue of William Shakespeare
Credit: Elliott Brown / CC BY 2.0 (adapted) It might seem like a strange premise, but the question of whether or not a bunch of monkeys trapped in a room with a typewriter would be able to reproduce the works of Shakespeare by pure chance has remained a topic of mathematical and philosophical debate for years.

Known as 'Infinite Monkey Theorem', this peculiar thought exercise considers the likelihood that any culmination of random events will eventually produce something extraordinary.

There is one snag, however - the theorem requires that either there are an infinite number of monkeys or the monkeys have an infinite amount of time available to accomplish the task - neither of which being viable options in practice.

So given a finite number of monkeys and a finite amount of time, how likely is it really that a bunch of mischievous primates could accidentally recreate thousands of pages of established text on a typewriter ?

Now in a new study, mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta of the University of Technology Sydney in Australia have calculated that there wouldn't actually be enough time left in the entire estimated lifespan of the universe for the monkeys to come up with the works of Shakespeare.

In fact, it is unclear if there would even be enough time for them to write out an 1,800-word children's book."The Infinite Monkey Theorem only considers the infinite limit, with either an infinite number of monkeys or an infinite time period of monkey labor," said Woodcock.

"We decided to look at the probability of a given string of letters being typed by a finite number of monkeys within a finite time period consistent with estimates for the lifespan of our universe."

The numbers involved are kind of mind-boggling to say the least.

The researchers determined that if up to 200,000 monkeys were put in a room with a typewriter and given 10^100 years (that's 1 with 100 zeroes), the likelihood of them producing Shakespeare is approximately 6.4 x 10^-7448254 - a number so unspeakably, infinitesimally small that it might as well be zero.

"It is not plausible that, even with possible improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, these orders of magnitude can be spanned to the point that monkey labor will ever be a viable tool for developing written works of anything beyond the trivial," the authors concluded.

In other words, it's just not going to happen.

Source: Science Alert

Tags: Monkey, Shakespeare