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

Australian mathematicians call into question the ‘infinite monkey theorem’ in new research on old adage

Mathematicians have called into question the old adage that a monkey typing randomly at a keyboard for long enough would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. And even if many more chimps who typed much quicker were added to the equation, it was still not plausible “that monkey labour will ever be a viable tool for developing written works of anything beyond the trivial”, the authors wrote in the study. A previous trial into the thought experiment, which gave six Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys four weeks with a computer, produced just five pages of text, primarily filled with the letter S.

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