‘Infinite monkey theorem’ challenged by Australian mathematicians

As well as looking at the abilities of a single monkey, the study also did a series of calculations based on the current global population of chimpanzees, which is roughly 200,000.

The results indicated that even if every chimp in the world was enlisted and able to type at a pace of one key per second until the end of the universe, they wouldn’t even come close to typing out the Bard’s works.

There would be a 5% chance that a single chimp would successfully type the word “bananas” in its own lifetime. And the probability of one chimp constructing a random sentence – such as “I chimp, therefore I am” – comes in at one in 10 million billion billion, the research indicates.

“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,” the study says.

The calculations used in the paper are based on the most widely accepted hypothesis for the end of the universe, which is the heat death theory.

Despite its name, the so-called heat death would actually be slow and cold.

In short, it’s a scenario in which the universe continues to both expand and cool – while everything within it dies off, decays, and fades away.

“This finding places the theorem among other probability puzzles and paradoxes… where using the idea of infinite resources gives results that don’t match up with what we get when we consider the constraints of our universe,” Associate Prof Woodcock said in a statement about the work.