Two Australian mathematicians recently made news for confirming what we have long suspected about monkeys and Shakespeare.
You would have heard the old trope that an infinite number of monkeys, banging randomly on a keyboard for an infinite period of time, must eventually recreate the entire works of Shakespeare.
While this is ‘true’ given the nature of infinity, Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta from UTS calculated that the chance that a single monkey would, in their lifetime, type just the word “bananas” is only about 5%.
A single monkey paraphrasing Descarte’s famous philosophical observation and typing “I am chimp therefore I am”, is a 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance.
If every monkey on Earth typed superfast for the predicted length of the existence of the universe, the odds of repeating even a single Shakespeare play is vanishingly small.
(It really is a miracle my band of chimps’ produced this week's newsletter with barely a mezsprint!)
This Infinite Monkey Theorem long been used to illustrate the idea of random chance, and featured in everything from 'The Simpsons" to "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.”
It even gave British cosmologist and super hunk Professor Brian Cox * the name for his excellent science/ comedy podcast The Infinite Monkey Cage.
But as is often the case, when gorgeous cultural meme butts up against mathematics … all of a sudden, things get real!
That’s all from me for now. If you'd like more geeky fun, please check out my other newsletters below, or connect with me on LinkedIn and/or X.
Yours in nerdiness,
Adam
Comments