Scientists confirm that monkeys do not have time to write Shakespeare: ScienceAlert

If you sit enough monkeys in front of enough typewriters and give them enough time, randomly hitting them will eventually reproduce Shakespeare’s works.

And so he confirms Infinite monkey theorema thought experiment that considers the possibility that the accumulation of random events can produce something of great meaning. no one truly A group of little furry primates would expect to emerge with hair that sings to the soul… and that, according to new research, might just be the case, too.

Mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Guy Valletta of the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, crunched the numbers and concluded that there would not be enough time in the entire estimated lifetime of the universe for apes to accidentally hit a series of keystrokes that matches village.

“Infinite monkey theory takes into account only the infinite limit, either an infinite number of monkeys or an infinite time period of monkey work.” Woodcock explains. “We decided to look at the probability that a given string of letters would be written by a limited number of apes within a specific period of time that corresponds to estimates of the age of our universe.”

Experiments were conducted on Testing the validity of the theorybut somewhat less well known is the finite monkey theorem, where the number of monkeys and the amount of time are finite. This is more consistent with what we might experience in the real world, where both monkeys and time are expected to eventually run out.

The calculations were based on varying numbers of “monkeys” ranging from 1 to 200,000 – the current estimated number of chimpanzees in the world – in front of keyboards with different numbers of keys, typing with one keystroke per second for a period of time. com. googol Years – the estimated time until the universe Subjected to thermal deathwhich would effectively put an end to any simian pecking.

By varying these variables, they were able to make calculations about how long it would take to produce different works within different time frames. Well, the results aren’t promising for fans of The Bard.

A chimpanzee typing on a 30-key keyboard has a 5 percent chance of coming up with the word “banana” during its lifetime.

Would Shakespeare’s complete works of 884,647 words be reproduced by 200,000 chimpanzees in Google years? This does not happen. The probability is 6.4 x 10^-7448254 -It may also be zero.

In fact, we’d be very lucky to get the full text of the nearly 1,800-word children’s book Curious George By the end of the universe. The team’s calculations reveal a probability of 6.4 x 10^-15043 For this one.

The researchers say the result classifies the theory as a paradox, along with other paradoxes in which infinite and finite scenarios have directly contradictory outcomes. These include St. Petersburg paradoxregarding the infinite rewards in a game of chance that no one would pay to enter; Zeno’s dual paradoxwhich suggests that an object covering infinite portions of distance can never reach its destination; and Ross Littlewood’s paradoxWhich indicates that the vase can be filled with an infinite number of balls.

None of these scenarios work in a limited real world; Woodcock and Valletta have shown that this is also the case for the infinite monkey theorem.

“It is not plausible that, even with the possibility of improved writing speeds or increased numbers of chimpanzees, these ranks could extend to the point that monkey work would one day be a viable tool for developing written works of anything beyond the trivial.” They write in their paper.

“We must conclude that Shakespeare himself inadvertently provided the answer to whether ape labor could be a viable alternative to human endeavor as a source of science or creativity. villageAct 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No.”

The work was published in Franklin is open.