The monkey and Shakespeare, and why the twain won’t meet 

Research has worked out that the time it would take for a monkey to write Shakespeare would be longer than the lifespan of our universe
| Photo Credit: AFP

There is a rite of passage in life that has been generally ignored. I was told when I was a child that beating your father at chess was a sign that you were now a grown up. There are other measures too, obviously. The journey from childhood to adulthood is often accompanied by, in fact, hastened by the realisation that stuff we were taught at school was wrong. 

Take that bit about the three angles of a triangle adding up to 180 degrees, for example. After we leave junior school we are told that sometimes, in other geometries, the angles could add up to less or more than 180 degrees. We know that the shortest path between two points on earth is not a straight line, but a geodesic (which is defined as the shortest path between two points on earth). 

With such realisation comes another – that maturity is fast approaching. And now comes the clincher. The annihilation of the infinite monkey theorem. We were told that given enough time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare. It was a comforting thought, suggesting you or I could have written Hamlet, but Shakespeare got there first because he had oodles of time on his hands. How nice to know that any monkey could have written Macbeth. 

Most comforting of all was the implication that randomness and uncertainty rule our lives, and all attempts at predictability, through religion, philosophy or indeed mathematics were futile. 

Now two Sydney-based researchers tell us that there is certainty and predictability in the infinite monkey problem. Their research has worked out that the time it would take for a monkey to write Shakespeare would be longer than the lifespan of our universe. Even if every simian in the world were commissioned at this moment to do the job and typed at the rate of one second per key till the end of the universe, they wouldn’t complete the job. It’s official now – your favourite chimp at the zoo will never surprise you by typing out Henry IV or Richard III in their spare time. 

There is, apparently, a five percent chance that a chimp might type the word ‘bananas’ in its lifetime. The probability of writing a random sentence – such as “two bees or not two bees stung me” is one in ten followed by 24 zeroes. Forget chimps, even humans will find it difficult to put a name to that number. 

The universe dies not of boredom while waiting for the chimp to finish at least one play by Shakespeare, but because of the Big Chill – the opposite of the Big Bang – which signifies the end of the universe. 

According to an AI source, the word ‘monkey’ never occurs in any of Shakespeare’s works. Now we know the word ‘Shakespeare’ is unlikely to occur in any monkey’s work. So here we are back to asserting the uniqueness of the individual, and reaffirming that man is the centre of the universe.