You've heard of the infinite monkey theorem. It states that "a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare." It has been used to describe the work here at Neatorama, but we don't have any monkeys. It's really about the idea of randomness. No one expects monkeys to learn how to write, but how much time would elapse before a certain set of words could be produced by random typing? There have been actual experiments to test this theorem.
Getting your hands on infinite monkeys is a bit challenging, let alone hiring infinite zookeepers to clean up infinite piles of feces, so computer programmers have attempted to simulate the monkeys using random text generators. One of the first attempts, in 2004, saw a tiny bit of success when one of the monkeys bashed out the phrase 'VALENTINE. Cease toIdor:eFLP0FRjWK78aXzVOwm)-‘;8.t', the first part of which was in Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
That took the simulated monkeys 42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey years. The entire works of Shakespeare, it's fair to say, would take a long time.
That's close enough to an "infinite amount of time." That wasn't the only experiment using random text generation to crunch the numbers. Only once has it been tried with actual monkeys, at Paignton Zoo in Devon, England. Learn how that and other such experiments turned out at IFLScience. -via Strange Company
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