Back in 2005, I reported on researchers at Plymouth University in England who tested the old theorem that given an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters, the monkeys will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. In that experiment, the researchers left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo. Eventually the monkeys produced only five pages of text, primarily filled with the letter S. The researchers noted that in addition to their paltry literary output, the monkeys seemed very interested in defecating and urinating all over the computer’s keyboard.
The story of the typing monkey experiment caught my eye because good monkey stories and good writing are two of my favorite things. But I was troubled then by the lack of important information about the details of the experiment. For example, no mention was made of the kind of computer the monkeys were given. Was the computer screen set up in a monkey-friendly configuration? Could the monkeys’ admittedly crude treatment of the computer’s keyboard actually be an editorial comment on the quality of the hardware or software provided to them?
Could it be that the monkeys’ repeated typing of the letter S was actually an attempt to write in English the name of their Sulawesi homeland from which they were no doubt forcibly removed? Perhaps the repeated typing of the letter S was a crude attempt to send a simian “SOS” into the Ethernet in the futile hope of reaching a higher monkey power who could liberate those six captives from their London cage and its lousy and antiquated typewriter. And just where the hell is Sulawesi anyway, and does it have a reputation for being home to a strand of particularly unintelligent monkeys?
Well, it turns out two Australian mathematicians decided to put the “infinite monkey theorem” to a more rigorous scientific test. Their conclusion was that the time it would take a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets and poems would be longer than the life span of our universe. They looked at both the possible literary output of a single typing monkey as well making calculations based on a typing pool made up of the entire current global population of chimpanzees, which is about 200,000.
It was assumed that each chimp would be able to type at a pace of one keystroke per second until the end of the universe. The researcher’s calculations concluded that all those chimps would not come close to typing even a single one of Bard’s literary works. They figured that, at best, there was a 5% chance a single chimp might successfully type out the word “banana” in its lifetime, while the probability of a single chimp completing a random sentence was one in 10 million billion billion. Sadly, the Australians calculations concluded that, even with improved typing speed or an increase in the global chimpanzee population, “monkey labor will never be a viable tool for developing non-trivial written works.”
That is a disappointing result for those of us who were keen to establish a monkey-based literary business. But like the British experiment for me this study raised more questions than answers. Most notably, the British experiments involved monkeys, while the Australian study focused on chimpanzees, which as we all know are apes, not monkeys. Apes, of course, are mankind’s closest evolutionary cousin, and therefore would seem more likely to have literary aspirations than mere monkeys. (As an aside here, whenever I get a little overly full of myself I can be brought back to earth simply by remembering that we humans are evolutionarily risen apes as opposed to fallen angels.)
I also wondered how the Aussie researchers calculated the date on which our universe will end. Turns out they used the most widely accepted hypothesis for the end of the universe that is based on something called the Heat Death Theory which, despite its name, theorizes that the end of the universe will be slow and cold.
And there is always a question about whether the apes are just gaming us, and are actually fully capable of typing full Shakespearian sonnets but are instead intentionally playing dumb as part of an elaborate evolutionary practical joke they hatched with dolphins and cockroaches for when they take over the world. Based on a glance at today’s newspaper headlines, that day may not be as far off as we once thought.
Tom Tyner writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.
