Two mathematicians have debunked the ‘wise monkey paradox’, the scientific theory that, given enough time, a monkey typing on a keyboard could at some point write the entirety of Shakespeare.
Two mathematicians broke it down “paradox of the wise monkey”the scientific theorem that, given enough time, a monkey typing on a keyboard could at some point write the entirety of Shakespeare.
This theorem, which formulated almost a century agoexpresses the idea that, given enough time, something improbable but technically possible could become possible.
Australian mathematicians have calculated that if all the chimpanzees in the world had time equal to the duration of the Universe, they would “almost certainly” never be able to reproduce the works of the English playwright and poet.
In their study published in the scientific journal Franklin Open this week, they explain that they calculated what a monkey could write by randomly hitting the keys of a 30-character keyboard at a rate of one keystroke per second for 30 years.
For their calculations they arbitrarily assumed that the Universe would have a duration of one googol, that is, 10 thirty-two million years, or the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. They did not take into account parameters unrelated to the experiment, such as what the apes would eat during this time, or how they would survive after the Sun goes out in a few billion years.
Based on their calculations, a single monkey would have a 5% chance of accidentally typing the word “banana” if it devoted its entire existence to typing.
However, the word “banana” does not appear among the 884,647 words that make up the entirety of Shakespeare’s work.
Mathematicians tried to give the monkeys a chance by recruiting chimpanzees, the species most closely related to humans, for the experiment. Today there are an estimated 200,000 chimpanzees living worldwide, and the study took it as a “given” that their population would remain stable until the end of the world.
The implication is that even such a workforce would be insufficient. Their chances of success would not be “one in a million”, study co-author Stephen Woodcock, of the University of Technology Sydney, told New Scientist.
If the number of chimpanzees or the speed at which they type increased, nothing would change.
Ironically enough, the study concludes that Shakespeare himself had answered the question of whether “the work of a monkey could really replace human effort as a source of knowledge and creativity,” citing “Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87 : No.”
Source :Skai
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