Paris:

If a monkey types randomly on a keyboard long enough, it will eventually write the complete 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 — possible. – becomes possible.

But two Australian mathematicians have debunked the old adage that even if all the chimpanzees in the world were given the entire lifetime of the universe, they would “almost certainly” never write the works of the Bard. Will not close.

The “infinite monkey theory” has been around for over a century, although its origins are still unclear. It is usually attributed to either the French mathematician Emile Borel or the British anthropologist Thomas Huxley, and some believe that the general idea is from Aristotle.

For a light-hearted but peer-reviewed study published earlier this week, the two mathematicians set out to determine what happens if generous but restrictive limits are placed on monkey typists.

Their calculations were based on a monkey spending about 30 years typing one key per second on a keyboard with 30 keys — the letters of the English language and some common punctuation.

The “heat death” of the universe was assumed to occur in about one gogol years—that’s one followed by 100 zeros.

Other more practical considerations — such as what the apes would eat, or how they would survive the Sun encircling the Earth in a few billion years — were set aside.

Monkey’s labor is reduced.

According to research in the journal Franklin Open, there was only a five percent chance that a monkey would randomly type the word “banana” in its lifetime.

Shakespeare’s canon contains 884,647 words — none of them bananas.

To broaden the experiment, the mathematicians turned to chimpanzees, a close relative of humans.

There are about 200,000 chimps on Earth right now, and studies show that population will remain stable until the end of time.

Even this great number of monkeys became very few.

“It’s not even like one in a million,” study co-author Stephen Woodcock of the University of Technology Sydney told New Scientist.

“If every atom in the universe were itself a universe, it still wouldn’t exist.”

And even if more fast-typing chimps were added to the equation, it was still implausible that “the labor of apes would never produce anything more than trivial written works.” will prove to be a viable tool for,” the authors wrote in the study.

The study concludes by saying that Shakespeare himself may have unwittingly answered whether “monkey labor can meaningfully substitute for human effort by scholarship or creativity”.

“Quoting 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.)



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