Infinite monkey theorem

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Is it true that if a monkey was typing on the computer for an infinite amount of time, it would eventually type out the works of Shakespeare? Would it also type out an article on the infinite monkey theorem itself?

Um...what?

Hmm... I doubt it. The reason is that words are non-random, and monkey bangings are likely also non-random, and the patterns in both would conflict with each other. If you had a means of punishing the monkeys that were being particularly nonsensical, and rewarding the ones that were doing a good job typing out words, then perhaps eventually given a long enough period of time.

Sand?

The monkeys are only there for poetic effect. The question basically resolves into if there are only twenty six letters plus a finite number of marks and spaces possible if all possible combinations of these finite units are made will it contain everything that has been and could be written. I would guess yes. The problem is sorting through the mountains of garbage to find the worthwhile material.

FORTY BILLION MONKEYS CAN'T BE WRONG

Forty billion monkeys
Working five billion hours
Typing twenty -six letters
Over countless whiskey sours
Wrote the works of William Shakespeare
Harold Robbins, Milton, Blake
And the endless dirty limericks
Of a guy signed "Jake",
Also scribbled out the Bible
In most ancient Aramaic.

Then they lay in jumbled heaps
In soft chaise longues
slupping forty billion onion soups
With long pink tongues.
They mumbled broken phrases
As they lolled upon their chaises
Where they spoke of random error
In a pointed kind of terror
Which harried every letter
On its passage to the page,
So that fate's fickle finger
Would halt their thoughts to linger
A moment or an age.

So, returning from their couches
In their beastly shuffling slouches,
They crouched upon their stools
With their pens upraised.
At the firing of a gun
Their session has begun
And they dashed off Dashiell Hammett
With a mildly cursed, "Goddamnit" .
Thus began their second run
Where they polished off Tolstoy,
Both the man and the boy,
And finished off - with flourishes,
John Donne!

With the interlarded garbage
Running ninety-nine percent,
Their literary output
couldn't even pay the rent.
Especially, as they could see,
The works that would outpour
Had authors (mostly classic)
That were written down before.


Therefor, driven by ennui
They flicked on their TV
To distract them from the problems of the day.
Eighty billion fingers snapped
As they saw they could adapt
Their torrential to this voracious medium.
With its capacity gigantic
With an input, both pedantic,
And of inundating overwhelming enervating tedium.

Now the primates are well paid
When their output is assayed -
Ninety-nine percent of awful worthless junk.
It forms the great foundation
For the evenings of a nation
With a monumental appetite for gunk.

One further point. The exercise is definitely not something involved in randomness. The ideal effort should be with a computer of the proportions envisioned by Douglas Adams which would elicit every possible combination and be intelligent enough to discard nonsense. It might take a time frame beyond the extent of the life of the universe but it is not eternity.

In a way the universe is this computer playing with its various limited elements and concise forces to produce variations that resulted in DNA whose variations are rendered useful or useless through Darwin's evolutionary processes. It's a thought, anyway.

If they monkey had to do that much typing it would want to be paid... at least more bananas and it would also need medical insurance for the repetitive strain injury in its fingers. Besides, if it could type that much I'm sure that before that long it would type its letter of resignation; having found a better job as a secretary in a nice air conditioned office somewhere.

Of course ! But be sure the amount of time will be very very very very long, and the amount of random trash in it as infinite as the period of time the monkey typed on the computer
And, as other members said, it will be quite difficult to realize this experience, as the monkey may not want to type on the computer, might be tired, you have to feed him etc.
To resume, in theory it will work, but it will be very hard to put in practice.
I also don't think it is really interesting to realize this experiment, if you know what I'm saying...

If it is a truly infinite time, and we take the monkey's typing to be completely random, then yes, there is no reason why it wouldn't type out every possible work of literature that ever existed, eventually. But it would take a very, very long time, as the chances are tiny. But in an infinite time, everything will happen at some point because it never stops.

You hear this saying in different versions. The correct one is that a monkey typing for an infinite time will type out the complete works of Shakespeare or whatever. Sometimes I hear it as 'if a monkey typed on a typewriter for X million years would he eventually type out Shakespeare's works?' That one is wrong. The chances for it happening are unbelievably tiny for it to happen in any sort of number of years our language can express elegantly. Only in an infinite time would it become certain.