Mathematicians disprove classical theorem involving monkeys and Shakespeare; to understand

Contrary to the Infinite Monkey Theorem, two Australian mathematicians argue that: Primates would not be able to write complex texts such as the works of William Shakespeare before the end of the universe.. The conclusion is contained in a study recently published in the journal. Franklin Open.

Based on the limits of the finite universe, professors Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta of the University of Technology Sydney (Australia) examined the theory, published in 1913, with real-world examples. In the analysis, they considered two scenarios, the first involving a monkey and the second involving the entire chimpanzee population on Earth.

In the first, a monkey would spend 30 years pressing one key per second on a 30-key keyboard, bringing up all the English letters and punctuation marks. In the second, approximately 200,000 chimpanzees would continuously steal a key every second for the rest of the universe’s lifetime.

According to mathematicians, Primates couldn’t copy Shakespeare’s works even if they kept writing for years – one digit followed by 100 zeros – estimated time for the “heat death” of the universe. Questions such as what animals will eat and how they will survive the death of the Sun were not taken into account.

What is the Infinite Monkey Theorem?

The theory was created more than a century ago suggests that something extremely unlikely can become possible over an infinite period of time. An example of such a situation is that a monkey that writes randomly for an infinite period of time recreates Shakespeare’s work completely randomly.

For the authors of the study, the theorem is true but also misleading. The results showed that if a single chimpanzee spent all his time writing, he had only a 5% chance of randomly typing a short word like “banana” throughout his life.

The mathematicians concluded: “Even with increased speed of writing or increased chimpanzee populations, it is not credible that monkey study would prove to be a valid tool for developing non-trivial written works.”

It is worth remembering that the works of the English poet and playwright total more than 880 thousand words, which would take much longer than the lifetime of the universe to be copied by primates.