As the old adage goes, a monkey left with a typewriter for an infinite amount of time would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare purely by chance.
The so-called Infinite Monkeys Theorem has long been used to demonstrate the principles of probability and randomness, having been widely referenced in pop culture from The Simpsons to A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and believed by some to owe its conceptual origins to Aristotle.
But a new study suggests that the thought experiment is “potentially misleading” – because our universe would have ended long before the monkey was able to type “all but the most trivial of phrases”, let alone the nearly 900,000 words comprising the works of Shakespeare.
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