Two mathematicians have debunked the “monkey paradox”, a scientific theorem which states that given enough time, a monkey typing on a keyboard could produce all of Shakespeare’s works.
This thought experiment, imagined over a century ago, expresses the idea that given enough time, something improbable but technically possible can become probable.
Australian mathematicians have calculated that if all the world’s chimpanzees had the duration of the Universe, they would “almost certainly” never be able to reproduce the works of the playwright and poet.
In a study published in the journal Franklin Open this week, they explain that they have calculated what a monkey could produce typing the keys on a 30-character keyboard at the rate of one keystroke per second for 30 years.
They also used a theoretical duration of the Universe of one googol of years, i.e. 1 followed by one hundred zeros.
And dismissed trivial aspects of the experiment, such as the diet of the apes or their means of surviving the extinction of the Sun in a few billion years.
According to their calculations, a single monkey would have a 5% chance of randomly typing the word “banana” by devoting its entire existence to it.
A word otherwise absent from the 884,647 written by William Shakespeare throughout his work.
The mathematicians wanted to give monkeys a chance by “recruiting” chimpanzees, the primate closest to man.
The current population of chimpanzees worldwide is estimated at around 200,000 and the study assumed that it would remain stable until the end of time.
The conclusion is that even such a workforce would be quite insufficient. Its chances of success would be “not even one in a million”, study co-author Stephen Woodcock of the University of Technology Sydney told New Scientist.
“If every atom in the Universe was itself a universe,” to repeat the experiment as many times, “that wouldn’t happen either,” he added.
Increasing the number of chimpanzees or their keyboard typing speed would not change anything, according to the study.
Ironically, she concluded that Shakespeare himself was able to answer the question of whether “the work of an ape could really replace human effort as a source of knowledge and creativity” by quoting “Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: +No+”.
