A recent BBC news story by Hannah Ritchie reports that a new peer-reviewed study by two Sydney-based marhematician-researchers has called into question the "infinite monkey theorem", an old adage claiming that given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually be write the complete works of William Shakespeare.
The study led by Sydney-based mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta has determined that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare's plays, sonnets and poems "would be longer than the lifespan of our universe."
IMAGE CREDIT: GETTY IMAGESEven if every chimp in the world was enlisted and able to type at a pace of one key per second until the end of the universe, they wouldn't even come close to typing out the Bard's works, they concluded.
Their conclusion was that there would be only a 5% chance that a single chimp of the estimated global population of 200,000 chimps would be able tosuccessfully type just the word "bananas" in its own lifetime, and just one chimp constructing a random sentence such as "I chimp, therefore I am" has a probability of only 1 in 10 million billion billion.
Read the Hannah Ritchie's report "Monkeys will never [be able to] type Shakespeare, study finds" in BBC News now!
