Monkeys Love Shakespeare – The Weird Side of the Internet

Monkeys Love Shakespeare – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

Have you ever heard the phrase “if a million monkeys sat at a million typewriters with enough time, one of them would inadvertently write the complete works of Skakespeare”? I kind of keep that as a mantra to say that with enough time and numbers, anything is possible. But it also kinds of means that, under optimal conditions, monkeys could do our jobs, at least those of us that are writers.

But in a fluff sort of peer reviewed scientific paper, this has been disproven. It starts out with some theoretical monkeys, which we presume did not any of them get their Masters in Fine Arts. In fact, it starts out with 200,000 chimps, not a million, because there aren’t a million chimps, and why chimps? Least likely to fling sh*t at the typewriters. And they were given a fair amount of time; theoretically the entire rest of the time the universe has left before it suffers heat death, so one googol years, or a 1 with 100 zeros. If they can’t do it by then, well we’re not going to be here and neither are they, because the earth is set to get swallowed by the sun in about four billion years, which is nine zeros.

So the sad truth. One monkey has about a 5% chance of randomly typing out ‘banana.’ That’s one word. And something a chimp might want to spell. The complete works of Shakespeare has 844,647 words.

So could it be done theoretically? Sure. If a million chimps had infinite time to type random letters, it would happen. But the monkeys would have to be immortal, which would’ve had t be true in the earlier example. And if humans were immortal and had infinite time, I would marry my high school sweetheart, but everybody would have married and divorced everybody else a million times over. A Googol times over.

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