I’ve always known, of course, that some of our fellow primates — monkeys, chimps, baboons, apes, politicians — are very smart. After all, Darwin tells us we’re their direct descendants. (Well, maybe not the politicians.)

What I had not heard of, though, is something known as the “infinite monkey theorem” — a thought-experiment used to explain the principles of probability and randomness. The basic tenet is that, given an infinite amount of time, a monkey randomly pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually type out the complete works of Shakespeare.

Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle! That’s truly incredible . . . except that it could never happen.

Or so say two mathematicians from Australia. Researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta have conducted a peer-reviewed study that determined that the amount of time it would take for a monkey with a typewriter to reproduce all of Shakespeare’s works — plays, sonnets and poems — would be longer than the lifespan of our universe. [Hannah Ritchie, BBC News, October 31, 2024.]

Wait . . . what?!! Our universe has an end date? That’s not what I wanted to hear today . . . or ever.

But I digress. Back to the monkey business.

Woodcock and Falletta’s calculations tell us that, while mathematically acceptable, the theorem is “misleading.” And this was not just their gut feeling; they did the hard calculations, which were based on the current global population of chimpanzees, which is around 200,000.

And they concluded that, enlisting every chimp in the world, and teaching them to type one key per second until the end of the universe (mercifully, they don’t say when that is expected), they still wouldn’t come close to producing Shakespeare’s complete works. In fact, there would only be a 5% chance that a single chimp would even type the word “bananas” in its own lifetime. And the probability of that one chimp constructing a random sentence would be one in ten million billion billion. [Id.]

But give that little monkey-face a whole bunch of bananas for making the effort.

The study’s conclusion is this:

“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.” [Id.]

So it seems that our hairy brethren are destined to remain forever the purveyors of party tricks, much like J. Fred Muggs and his appearances on the Dave Garroway Show of yesteryear.

*. *. *

By the way, the BBC article went on to discuss the most widely-accepted hypothesis for the end of the universe. In typical scientific double-speak, it is called the “heat death theory,” although it envisions a slow, cold death. Go figure.

Whatever it’s called, it describes a final act wherein the universe “continues to both expand and cool — while everything within it dies off, decays, and fades away.” [Id.]

Sounds pretty much like any individual human being, getting older — expanding, cooling, decaying, and fading away — also with no known “use by” date.

God really does have a diabolical sense of humor.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
11/1/24