34 points

Two Australian mathematicians have deemed it misleading, working out that even if all the chimpanzees in the world were given the entire lifespan of the universe, they would “almost certainly” never pen the works of the bard.

all the chimpanzees in the world

infinite monkeys

I’m glad they had fun doing some math, but this is not news, nor is the original saying misleading. With an infinite number of monkeys, a smaller-yet-still-infinite number of them would produce the works of Shakespeare. The reason this saying works is because of the concept of infinity, not some random finite number.

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16 points

Your argument sounds convincing, but given an infinite number of monkeys I could refute it

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9 points

You can write down an infinite amount of numbers without ever leaving [0, 1]

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5 points

No they couldn’t. They’d die before they finished.

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4 points

We already had a monkey write Shakespeare. His name was William Shakespeare.

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2 points

An ape *

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3 points

All apes are monkeys but not all monkeys are apes. Perchance.

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2 points

Really? Til.

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6 points

Kind of selfish of that monkey really.

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5 points
*

Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds

Maybe the monkey can be a little less of a dick, for science?!

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2 points

It could make a decent blockbuster though, hear me out:

Trailervoiceguy: In a world on the brink of annihilation, one monkey holds the key to survival.

Typewriter clicketyclacks and monkey ooh-ooh-aahs

Editor (played by award-winning method actor Daniel Day-Lewis): This a garbage, monkey, we can’t publish this! Earth is doomed!

*More clicketyclacks *

Trailervoiceguy: This summer, the question is…

Trailer horns

Trailervoiceguy: To be…

Louder trailer horns

Trailervoiceguy: … or not…

Very loud trailer horns

Trailervoiceguy: TO MONKEY!

Silence, then slowmotion monkey noises somehow

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9 points

If you actually had infinite monkeys it would be the first thing a very large (infinite) amount would type.

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5 points

i think that milestone has already been achieved – at least in terms of the expected quality of the final manuscript.

have you read the da vinci code?

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