Monkeys Will Never Randomly Type Shakespeare

The old adage goes that if you give an army of chimpanzees typewriters, one will eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare by chance. The so-called infinite monkey theorem is a thought experiment meant to demonstrate that events with a non-zero probability will occur over infinite time. In other words, a chimp typing at random will pen the text of Hamlet eventually. But it's a misleading idea, according to Australian mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta, who had a bit of fun testing out the concept while considering the constraints of our finite universe, per the BBC. Though mathematically true that a chimp could randomly produce the works of Shakespeare, it would take seven universe lifetimes, according to the study published in Franklin Open.

Assuming all of the roughly 200,000 chimps on the planet pressed one random key each second on a keyboard with 30 keys (the 26 English letters, plus some punctuation marks), the chance of a chimp writing "bananas" during its 30-year lifetime is just 5%, per the Guardian. The chance of a chimp writing "I chimp, therefore I am" during its lifetime? 0.000000000000000000000001%, per New Atlas. It's almost certain a chimp would write "I chimp, therefore I am" before the heat death of the universe in 1 googol years (1 followed by 100 zeros). But the chance of penning the 1,800 words of a Curious George book involves "more than 15,000 zeroes after a decimal point," while the chance of penning the 83,000 words of the original Planet of the Apes novel "involves almost 700,000 decimal-place zeroes," per New Atlas.

Researchers suggest all of the world's chimps would take four universe lifetimes to write Curious George, nearly six universe lifetimes to write Planet of the Apes, and seven universe lifetimes to write the complete works of Shakespeare. The probability of those 884,647 words coming together before the heat death of the universe involves almost 7.5 million zeroes after the decimal, per New Atlas, which jokes that "we can't even imagine the frustration of a monkey making a typo in the last line of The Two Noble Kinsmen and having to start over." The study notes Shakespeare himself "provided the answer as to whether monkey labor could meaningfully be a replacement for human endeavor as a source of scholarship or creativity. To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: 'No.'" (More probability stories.)