I have bad news for one of statistics favorite sayings.
As the story goes, given enough time and enough monkey’s randomly pressing keys on a keyboard, the complete works of shakespeare will eventually get typed out purely by chance. This is called the Infinite Monkey Theorem.
The only problem is, according to work by Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta, our universe won’t last long enough for this to happen… given just one monkey.
And when the increased the count to equal the number of chimps – which are not monkeys – they found that 200,000 chimpanzees typing on keyboards with only 30 keys at a rate of one key press a second would not be able to accomplish the task…
Although…
Any given monkey had a 5% chance of randomly typing bananas in their own lifetime.
So, ah, I guess we should all be glad of the primates who are capable of writing and typing in non-random ways.
This is your reminder – there are amazing books out there. Pick one up and take yourself to another world – no monkeys or apes required…
References
- It’s not to be. Universe too short for Shakespeare typing monkeys
- Woodcock, S., & Falletta, J. (2024). A numerical evaluation of the Finite Monkeys Theorem. Franklin Open, 9, 100171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fraope.2024.100171