Monkeys Cannot Produce Shakespeare | NextBigFuture.com

There have been two studies disprove the hypothesis infinite monkeys could eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

For number-crunching purposes, the researchers assumed that a keyboard contains 30 keys including all the letters of the English language plus common punctuation marks.

As well as a single monkey, they also did the calculations using the current global population of around 200,000 chimpanzees, and they assumed a rather productive typing speed of one key every second until the end of the universe in about 10^100 years – that’s a 1 followed by 100 zeros.

The results reveal that it is possible (around a 5% chance) for a single chimp to type the word ‘bananas’ in its own lifetime. However, even with all chimps enlisted, the Bard’s entire works (with around 884,647 words) will almost certainly never be typed before the universe ends.

Given plausible estimates of the lifespan of the universe and the amount of possible monkey typists available, this still leaves huge orders of magnitude differences between the resources available and those required for non-trivial text generation.

There are not infinite monkeys. The lifespan of universes and planets are finite. The habitable period of planets is finite.

Monkeys Do NOT Randomly Type

University of Plymouth researchers actually tried to get monkeys to type.

A single computer was placed in a monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo to monitor the literary output of six primates.

The six monkeys – Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan – produced five pages of text which consisted mainly of the letter “s”.

Towards the end of the experiment, their output slightly improved, with the letters A, J, L and M also appearing.

However, they failed to come up with anything that remotely resembled a word.

At the start monkeys chose to smash the keyboard with a rock. The keyboard was badly damaged. Monkeys also choose to poop and pee on the keyboard.

A famous gorilla, Koko, was taught sign language. It seems the only way to get Shakespeare is to train monkeys and to breed them for intelligence. Ultimately evolving them towards human levels of capability.