A monkey couldn't write Shakespeare before the universe dies, new study finds
Two mathematicians in Australia now say that the Infinite Monkey Theorem is wrong and monkeys could not write Shakespeare before the universe dies.
It’s a staple of popular fiction, but two mathematicians in Australia now say that an age-old maxim is nothing more than bananas.
The Infinite Monkey Theorem hypothesizes that, given a typewriter and an infinite amount of time, a monkey could in theory produce the full works of William Shakespeare. It has long been used to illustrate the idea of random chance, and featured in everything from 'The Simpsons" to "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
Now, two academics at the University of Technology Sydney have written a paper in which they claim that even if all the world’s simians were working around the clock to replicate works such as "Hamlet," the universe would almost certainly die before they had a chance to pose the bard's famous question, “to be or not to be.”
The study is published in the December edition of the peer-reviewed Franklin Open journal.
“It’s one of those examples where the mathematical concept of infinity gives you a result which is grossly misleading in the real world,” Stephen Woodcock, an associate professor at the university’s School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and one of the paper’s authors, told NBC News.
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