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This is certainly the blurst of times.
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will “almost surely” type any given text eventually, including the complete works of William Shakespeare or an original novel that has the potential to become the best-selling book of all time. The first recorded mention of this mathematical concept came from French mathematician Émile Borel in 1913, but the first megalomaniacal multi-millionaire to attempt to turn the infinite monkey theorem into a business model was Montgomery Burns in the 1993 all-time classic Simpsons episode “Last Exit to Springfield.”
Since Burns’ time on this Earth isn’t quite infinite (despite the fact that he was born when the only continent was Pangea), he attempted to speed up the process by chaining 1,000 chain-smoking monkeys to 1,000 typewriters in hopes that they could complete “the greatest novel known to man” before Mr. Burns’ enemy, the sun, burns out.
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Unfortunately for Mr. Burns, and for the monkeys who will likely become vests as soon as he gets this telegram, the BBC recently reported that Australian mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta have determined that, even if all 200,000 chimpanzees on planet earth typed at one keystroke per second 24/7, the amount of time they would need to reach even an outside probability of completing a novel, play or sonnet is longer than it will take to reach the heat death of the universe.
In other words, Australia just gave Mr. Burns’ literary aspirations The Boot.
According to Woodcock and Falletta’s findings, given the immense number of possible sequences for letters and numbers, a chimp who spent its entire life typing randomly on a keyboard would only have a five percent chance of writing the word “bananas” before it died, presumably of lung cancer. “It is not plausible that, even with improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, monkey labor will ever be a viable tool for developing non-trivial written works,” the study states disappointingly.
Woodcock added in a statement about his very important work, “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.”
So not only would Mr. Burns’ monkey workforce fail complete the greatest novel known to man, but they wouldn’t be able to write any novel of any degree of quality — they probably couldn’t even finish a single article for Gigantic Asses.