Epic Fail: Million Monkeys Will Never Type Shakespeare

Even with infinite trials and all available time,
this old icon cannot succeed, scientists say

We already knew this, but it’s good to have independent corroboration from academia.

The “infinite monkey theorem” began in some previous era, perhaps with Thomas Huxley or predecessors of his, as a workaround for highly improbable events. Stated simply, a million monkeys typing randomly on typewriters could type all the works of Shakespeare by chance, given enough time. Is that true? Scientists at UTS decided to check the numbers.

It’s not to be. Universe too short for Shakespeare typing monkeys (30 Oct 2024, University of Technology Sydney). Two scientists engaged in a “light-hearted” study to evaluate the probability of the Infinite Monkey Theorem. Their answer blows away all hope, even if you had a million monkeys to call on.

A new study reveals it would take far longer than the lifespan of our universe for a typing monkey to randomly produce Shakespeare. So, while the Infinite Monkey Theorem is true, it is also somewhat misleading.

By “true” they mean conceivably true. After all, infinity has no limits. But Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta, publishing their results in the December 2024 issue of Franklin Open, show that the iconic thought experiment is not practically true. Why? There are not infinite monkeys to call on, and the universe is not infinitely old.

For number-crunching purposes, the researchers assumed that a keyboard contains 30 keys including all the letters of the English language plus common punctuation marks.

In their film The Case for a Creator, Illustra Media simulated a group of chimpanzees playing with typewriters.

As well as a single monkey, they also did the calculations using the current global population of around 200,000 chimpanzees, and they assumed a rather productive typing speed of one key every second until the end of the universe in about 10^100 years – that’s a 1 followed by 100 zeros.

The results reveal that it is possible (around a 5% chance) for a single chimp to type the word ‘bananas’ in its own lifetime. However, even with all chimps enlisted, the Bard’s entire works (with around 884,647 words) will almost certainly never be typed before the universe ends.

“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 authors muse.

Chimpanzees will never randomly type the complete works of Shakespeare (31 Oct 2024, New Scientist). Reporter James Woodford took note of this study, agreeing that “the amount of time needed is much longer than the lifespan of the universe.” He obtained some additional quotes from Woodcock and Falletta:

“We did the maths from one monkey to the scale of infinity monkeys and we can say categorically it’s not going to happen,” says Woodcock. “If every atom in the universe was a universe in itself, it still wouldn’t happen.”

One take-away from the study deserves emphasis:

The astronomical odds against humans’ close relatives writing Shakespeare emphasise how miraculous it is that humans have such abilities, says Woodcock. “We are, ourselves, the lottery-winning chimps.”

As we reported back in 28 Sept 2023, an actual test of what monkeys would do with typewriters was attempted a few years ago. The only chimp that got some output on paper typed the letter “e” repeatedly. Other chimps in the cage urinated and defecated on the keyboard or quickly got bored with the unfamiliar object.

Does Woodcock really believe that chance mutations in human ancestors yielded brains with abilities that could miraculously overcome the odds? He should expand his study to evaluate the probability of that happening. We’re confident that he would have to agree that such an accident, too, would be miraculous. Humans are endowed with creative intelligence, part of the image of God in man. Shakespeare could conceive beautiful language in his mind, and use his hands, eyes, and fingers to bring them to the printed page.

An atheist might still have a way to preserve this iconic tale. Finding the works of Shakespeare typed by monkeys might be too improbable in our universe, but it would certainly obtain in an infinite multiverse. In The Design Inference 2nd Edition (2023), William Dembski and Winston Ewert concede the point: with infinite probabilistic resources, anything can happen, but that does not mean it will happen in the real universe we know. Nor is it worth arguing for practical purposes. Let’s face it; monkeys get bored, they wreck the typewriters, and they don’t care what appears on a piece of paper. The chimps will grow old and die, and the typewriters will rust and get destroyed long before anything interesting happens.

The best overall argument for rejecting the Infinite Monkey Theorem was presented by the late triple-PhD chemist A.E. Wilder-Smith: the letters do not stay on the page. They fall off! In physical chemistry (his specialty), Wilder-Smith knew that all the biochemical reactions that the Infinite Monkey Theorem were meant to simulate are reversible. If amino acid sequences or DNA letters link up by chance, they are equally likely—if not more so—to fall apart by chance. In the monkey-typewriter analogy, would a line of Shakespeare ever appear if the letters kept falling off the paper within seconds after they were typed? Absolutely not. It would never happen. This, I believe, is the best way to dispense with the silly Infinite Monkey Theorem once and for all.