FranOp: all the chimpanzees in the world will not have time to reprint Shakespeare before the end of the Universe

Australian mathematicians at the University of Technology Sydney tested the “infinite monkey theorem,” a thought experiment showing that an unlimited amount of time can turn something highly unlikely into probable. The study was published in the scientific journal Franklin Open (FranOp).

The original theorem states that if a monkey works indefinitely at a typewriter, sooner or later it will randomly recreate all the works of William Shakespeare.

In the new study, the team introduced a new condition to the task, limiting the time allotted for completing the task to the approximate lifespan of our Universe. It is expected that one day the cosmos will completely cool down, but this will happen in about a googol of years (a googol is a number with 100 zeros after one).

Calculations have shown that the probability that one monkey will accidentally type the word “bananas” during its lifetime is about 5%. There are 884,647 words in Shakespeare's canon, but bananas are never mentioned among them.

To expand the experiment, mathematicians turned to chimpanzees. There are about 200,000 chimpanzees on Earth today, and the study predicted that this population would remain stable until the end of time.

Scientists have concluded that even an army of chimpanzees could not reproduce all of Shakespeare's dramas until the end of time.