Paris:
If a monkey types randomly on a keyboard long enough, he will eventually write the entire works of Shakespeare.
This thought experiment has long been used to express how an infinite amount of time makes something incredibly unlikely – but still technically possible – likely.
But two Australian mathematicians have found the old adage misleading, concluding that even if all the chimpanzees in the world were given the entire life span of the universe, they would “almost certainly” never write the Bard's works.
The 'infinite monkey theorem' has been around for more than a century, although its origins remain unclear. It is usually attributed to the French mathematician Emile Borel or the British anthropologist Thomas Huxley, and some even think that the general idea goes back to Aristotle.
For a light-hearted but peer-reviewed study published earlier this week, the two mathematicians set out to find out what would happen if generous but finite limits were placed on the monkey typists.
Their calculations were based on a monkey typing one key per second on a 30-key keyboard for about 30 years: the letters of the English language plus some common punctuation marks.
It was assumed that the 'heat death' of the universe would occur in about a googol of years – that is, a one followed by 100 zeros.
Other, more practical considerations – such as what the monkeys would eat, or how they would survive in a few billion years as the sun engulfed the Earth – were pushed aside.
Monkey labor falls short
According to the research in the journal Franklin Open, there was only about a five percent chance that a single monkey would randomly write the word “banana” during its lifetime.
Shakespeare's canon contains 884,647 words, none of which are bananas.
To expand the experiment, the mathematicians turned to chimpanzees, humans' closest relative.
There are currently approximately 200,000 chimpanzees on Earth, and the study assumed that this population would remain stable until the end of time.
Even this huge monkey staff fell very, very short.
“It's not even one in a million,” co-author Stephen Woodcock of the University of Technology Sydney told New Scientist.
“If every atom in the universe were a universe unto itself, this still wouldn't happen.”
And even if many more chimpanzees were added that typed much faster, it was still implausible “that ape labor will ever be a viable tool for developing written works beyond the trivial,” the authors wrote in the research.
The study concluded by noting that Shakespeare himself may have inadvertently provided an answer to the question of whether “monkey labor could meaningfully substitute for human effort as a source of science or creativity.”
“To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: 'No'.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)