Given enough time at a typewriter, a monkey will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare by randomly punching keys on the keyboard.
That's the popular adage among scientists who hold time up as the creator of all things. However, the Infinite Monkey Theorem has been disproven by a couple of researchers in Sydney, Australia.
A new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falleti 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.
Just how long are we talking here?
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.
'It is not plausible that, even with improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, monkey labour will ever be a viable tool for developing non-trivial written works,' the study says.
In other words, the heat death of the universe would occur long before a chimpanzee wrote a single sentence.
The Infinite Monkey Theorem suffers from the same issue that serious mathematicians raise with Darwin's theory of evolution: There's not enough time for the math to work out within the life and death of the universe for evolution to occur, no matter how you spin it.
I guess now we'll wait for scientists to produce a genius monkey using Einsteins DNA and prove these Infinite Monkey Theorem-debunking scientists wrong!
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