Poor monkeys!

 

I had to laugh at this report from the BBC.

Two Australian mathematicians have called into question an old adage, that if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Known as the "infinite monkey theorem", the thought-experiment has long been used to explain the principles of probability and randomness.

However, a new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta has found 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.

Which means that while mathematically true, the theorem is "misleading", they say.

As well as looking at the abilities of a single monkey, the study also did a series of calculations based on the current global population of chimpanzees, which is roughly 200,000.

The results indicated that even 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.

There would be a 5% chance that a single chimp would successfully type the word "bananas" in its own lifetime. And the probability of one chimp constructing a random sentence - such as "I chimp, therefore I am" - comes in at one in 10 million billion billion, the research indicates.

There's more at the link.

I wonder how many man-hours of research went into that particular study - and at what cost per hour?  What's more, the report says it was "peer-reviewed".  Precisely what "peers" are we discussing?  Gorillas?  Orangutans?  Perhaps the gibbon or the colobus were asked to opine?  (Although, since Australia has no native species of monkey or ape, the platypus or the Tasmanian devil might have to stand in for them.)

On the other hand, with odds like that, perhaps we could turn loose a troop of monkeys among the slot machines in a top Las Vegas casino, along with an infinite supply of quarters to feed them.  Who knows what they might not win?

Peter