A team of Australian mathematicians has challenged the long-standing "infinite monkey theorem," stating that the idea of a monkey eventually typing out the works of William Shakespeare is improbable over any conceivable timeframe. This theorem, often used to illustrate concepts of probability and randomness, was scrutinized in a study led by Sydney's Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta.
Their findings suggest the time necessary for a monkey to replicate Shakespeare's plays, sonnets, and poems would far exceed the age of the universe. This revelation indicates that while mathematically plausible, the concept is misleading. The researchers also assessed the typing capabilities of the world's chimpanzee population, around 200,000. They concluded that even if every chimp were to type at one key per second until the end of time, success would be improbable. Particularly, there’s only a 5% chance a single chimp would type "bananas" within its lifetime, with constructing a random sentence rising to a staggering one in 10 million billion billion.
The paper suggests that increasing typing speeds or chimp populations still wouldn't make this labor feasible for producing significant written work. Their calculations were based on the heat death theory, the foremost hypothesis regarding the universe's end, which depicts a slow, cold decline rather than an explosive finale.
Woodcock explained that the infinite resources consideration of this theorem yields outcomes that are incompatible with the realities constraining our universe. The study thus places the infinite monkey theorem in a category of mathematical curiosities, showing that imaginative concepts do not align with empirical understandings of probability.
