Chimpanzees could never randomly type the complete works of Shakespeare, research shows

Could a chimpanzee ever randomly type the complete works of Shakespeare? According to a pair of researchers in Australia, the answer is no.

Mathematicians Stephen Woodcock And Jay Falletta wanted to test the “infinite monkey theorem,” a famous thought experiment that suggests an unlikely event can happen, given an infinite amount of time and resources, due to random chance.

More specifically, the theorem states that if a monkey had an infinite amount of time with a keyboard (or if there were an infinite number of monkeys), he would eventually type any text, including the works of Shakespeare.

Mathematically the statement is correct. But in practice it is “misleading” given the limitations of our finite universe, researchers conclude in a new study published in the journal Franklin opened.

“Yes, it is true that with the infinite resources, eventually any text of any length would inevitably be produced,” says Woodcock. CNN‘s Amarachi Orie. “While true, this also has no relevance to our own universe, as ‘reaching infinity’ in resources is not something [that] could ever happen.”

The origin of the theorem is somewhat mysterious, but is usually attributed to the French mathematician Émile Borel or the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. The concept may even have roots in Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

But Woodcock and Falletta – both from the Australian University of Technology in Sydney – wanted to put the proposition to the test. To do that, they ran a series of calculations using realistic but generous numbers.

For example, they assumed that the world’s current population of chimpanzees – about 200,000 – would remain constant throughout the universe. They also took into account the “heat death‘ of the universe, which they assumed would take place over about a googol of years (a large number written as the number 1, followed by 100 zeros).

They decided to focus on chimpanzees, which they assumed could type one key per second on a thirty-key keyboard. They also used the animal’s average lifespan of about 30 years.

Even if all the world’s chimpanzees were to type for the entire lifespan of the universe, they would “almost certainly” never reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare, according to the researchers’ calculations.

In addition, a single chimpanzee has only a 5 percent chance of randomly typing the word “bananas” in its lifetime, they found. The chance of a chimpanzee typing a short sentence like “I am a chimpanzee, therefore I am” is 1 in 10 million billion billion.

Together, all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, plays and poems add up to almost 885,000 words – and not one of them is ‘bananas’.

“We have the [math] from one monkey to the scale of infinite monkeys and we can say categorically that this is not going to happen,” says Woodcock New scientistby James Woodford. “If every atom in the universe were a universe unto itself, this still wouldn’t happen.”

Even as the researchers played with the variables — for example, increasing the number of chimpanzees or increasing their typing speed — they concluded that chimpanzee labor will never be a “viable tool for developing written works of anything beyond the trivial.” ‘, they write in the paper.

Although the researchers’ calculations are sound, other mathematicians doubted the need for such research at all.

The statement “certainly does not need to be refuted,” says Martin Haarera mathematician at Imperial College London who was not involved in the research NBC News‘David Hodari. “It’s something that everyone has always known. The universe could die and be reborn millions and millions of times, and it still wouldn’t happen.”

This isn’t the first time mathematicians have tried to test the infinite monkey theorem. About twenty years ago, researchers in England discovered given a computer to six Sulawesi crested macaques living in captivity in a zoo. After almost two months, the animals produced only five pages of text – and they had mostly typed the letter ‘s’.