No matter how talented monkeys are, they will never be able to type the entire works of William Shakespeare, or even a short book, according to a new study.
THE Infinite Monkey Theorem is a famous thought experiment that states: if an infinite number of monkeys kept pressing random keys on typewriters for an infinite period of time, eventually one of them would end up typing some classic of literature, such as, for example, one of Shakespeare’s works.
However, in the published study in the journal Franklin Opentwo mathematicians from the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, rejected the theorem and classified it as “misleading” within the limits of our finite universe.
They challenged this idea by analyzing the Finite Monkey Theorem, in which there is a finite amount of time and a finite number of monkeys.
They made the assumption that the current population of about 200,000 chimpanzees would remain the same throughout the lifespan of the universe of one googol of years (unit of measure which is 1 followed by 100 zeros). They also assumed that each chimpanzee would type one key per second for every second of the day, with each monkey having a lifespan of just over 30 years.
Using these assumptions, the researchers calculated that among these randomly typing monkeys, there is only a 5% chance that a word as simple as “bananas” will occur in a chimpanzee’s lifetime.
They found that a short phrase like “I am a chimpanzee, therefore I am” will almost certainly never be produced by any living chimpanzee, study co-author and mathematician Stephen Woodcock, an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney, told CNN on Friday.
“When you think on the scale of an entire book, that probability is billions and billions of times smaller,” he continued.
Woodcock and his co-author Jay Falletta, a senior research consultant at the university, concluded in the study that even with more chimps or faster typing, it is “not plausible” that ape work would be a viable tool for “developing written work of anything beyond the trivial.”
“Even if every atom in our known universe were its own universe on the scale of ours, we would still have virtually no chance of seeing anything as long as a short book before the end of the universe,” Woodcock told CNN .
“Personally, I find it fascinating how misleading the well-established result for the case of infinite resources is,” he added. “Yes, it is true that, given infinite resources, any text of any size would inevitably be produced eventually. While true, this also has no relevance to our own universe, as ‘reaching infinity’ in resources is not something that can happen.”
Interdisciplinary clinical scientist Chris Banerji, Clinical AI theme lead at the Alan Turing Institute in London, agrees that monkeys randomly typing Shakespeare’s works is unlikely, as the Finite Monkey Theorem is “correct”, but he told CNN on Friday that the Infinite Monkey Theorem “is still valid.”
“Although the situation seems dire, there may still be hope for the monkeys,” said Banerji, who was not involved in the study. “The universe is very big, and there is room for many more chimpanzees than live here on Earth; under some cosmological theories there may even be infinite space or infinitely many universes.”
He said that “if we accept the possibility of these infinite worlds,” then “the successful replication of Shakespeare by apes is an ‘eventual certainty,’” as the Infinite Ape Theorem states.
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This content was originally published in Infinite monkey theorem is questioned in new study; find out what it is on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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