A monkey with an infinite amount of time and a typewriter..

[bruzAduz]

..would write the entire works of Shakespeare.

Is the answer that it DEFINITELY would occur due to an infinite amount of time or that it is PROBABLE but NOT definite as hypothetically the derp ass monkey could write drivel for an infinite amount of time?

[nick187]

That's an asinine assumption.

Time is not infinite and monkeys only live on average depending on the breed up to 50 years.

There you go.

[TurtleGains]

Probability of it happening will be extremely small, but given indefinite time, it will DEFINITELY happen.

Could take one day, one month, one year, one century, one millennium, a million years, a billion years, etc. but it WILL happen.

[C-Winger]

Probability of course.

[Pudlem]

The complete works of Shakespeare can be written using only 26 letters of the alphabet!

[nezian]

..would write the entire works of Shakespeare.

Is the answer that it DEFINITELY would occur due to an infinite amount of time or that it is PROBABLE but NOT definite as hypothetically the derp ass monkey could write drivel for an infinite amount of time?

If the monkey had an infinite lifecycle than it would definitely happen.

[Sapporo]

Inb4 Karl Pilkington

[amenccm]

Isn't this what non-creationists think of the universe?

Infinite time + oscillating model of the universe.

[JaFoolE]

Inb4 Karl Pilkington

lol seen this b4 and loled sooo hard

[PopWarLock]

monkeys don't type bro

[Torpeda]

What if it runs out of ink?

[iBundy]

Theoretically it would definitely happen because there are a limited amount of outcomes and an infinite amount of trials. It's basically the same as given an infinite amount of tries to crack a code - you should get the right outcome eventually because you will literally end up trying every possible combination. That's actually how a lot of code-cracking software works. So as long as the amount of trials are infinite and the outcomes aren't, it should happen. Even if takes billions of years.

[MHannibal]

Well considering humans evolved from monkeys then yes, he would.

[roushrsh]

Yes, if a monkey had eternity and was writing dribble, eventually, by eventually I mean longer than the universe has existed probably, he'd write the entire work of Shakespeare without a letter mistake. Its just probability. Say there's only 1 word in a book, that word has 4 letters. The first letter has a 1/26 chance (or if you want every symbol and letter, space etc on keyboard so like what 40ish? So 1 in 40?) The next letter has the same and so forth. So for 2 letters it'd be 1/40 x 1/40 chance. 3 letters 1/40 x 1/40 x 1/40.
So for the whole word it'd be 1/40 x 1/40 x 1/40 x1/40.
Now do the same but for every letter in shake spears works. Millions upon millions of letters. So the probability is very low. 1/40 x 1/40 x... Etc
But its there and with infinite amount of time it will happen.
Flipping a coin is 1/2. Eventually you will get heads. Its possible you will never get heads, but given infinite time heads should by probability occur at least once.

[5hogun]

It would take a few Centillion years.

[Occy]

Same probability as a monkey evolving into a human and that human eventually creating an offspring that will create the line to bear the actual Shakespeare

[shesprints]

He'd probably write Harry Potter fanfiction first.



ETA: Those trying to estimate the time it would take do not know very much about how probability works.

[Mightymuddy]

It's definite cause if time is infinite then all possibilities happen infinite times. So he would write infinite copies of Shakespeare.

[Quinn7]

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

In this context, "almost surely" is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the "monkey" is not an actual monkey, but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces an endless random sequence of letters and symbols. The relevance of the theorem is questionable—the probability of a monkey exactly typing a complete work such as Shakespeare's Hamlet is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time even a hundred thousand orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe is extremely low (but not zero).

More info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

[Quinn7]

Ignoring punctuation, spacing, and capitalization, a monkey typing letters uniformly at random has a chance of one in 26 of correctly typing the first letter of Hamlet. It has a chance of one in 676 (26 × 26) of typing the first two letters. Because the probability shrinks exponentially, at 20 letters it already has only a chance of one in 26^20 = 19,928,148,895,209,409,152,340,197,376 (almost 2 × 10^28). In the case of the entire text of Hamlet, the probabilities are so vanishingly small they can barely be conceived in human terms. The text of Hamlet contains approximately 130,000 letters. Thus there is a probability of one in 3.4 × 10^183,946 to get the text right at the first trial. The average number of letters that needs to be typed until the text appears is also 3.4 × 10^183,946, or including punctuation, 4.4 × 10^360,783.

[Hammersia]

Yes, if a monkey had eternity and was writing dribble, eventually, by eventually I mean longer than the universe has existed probably, he'd write the entire work of Shakespeare without a letter mistake. Its just probability. Say there's only 1 word in a book, that word has 4 letters. The first letter has a 1/26 chance (or if you want every symbol and letter, space etc on keyboard so like what 40ish? So 1 in 40?) The next letter has the same and so forth. So for 2 letters it'd be 1/40 x 1/40 chance. 3 letters 1/40 x 1/40 x 1/40.
So for the whole word it'd be 1/40 x 1/40 x 1/40 x1/40.
Now do the same but for every letter in shake spears works. Millions upon millions of letters. So the probability is very low. 1/40 x 1/40 x... Etc
But its there and with infinite amount of time it will happen.
Flipping a coin is 1/2. Eventually you will get heads. Its possible you will never get heads, but given infinite time heads should by probability occur at least once.

HAHAHAHAHAH Americans are you all so dumb....?????

Can't be bothered to pick this drivel apart but just the last sentence.... Heads will occur an infinite number of times. So will tails. So will the coin landing on its edge.
The monkeys (or just one monkey) in infinite time will produce an infinite number of copies of perfect Shakespeare. Infinity is absolute. That is what it means.

[wulpurgis]

..would write the entire works of Shakespeare.

Is the answer that it DEFINITELY would occur due to an infinite amount of time or that it is PROBABLE but NOT definite as hypothetically the derp ass monkey could write drivel for an infinite amount of time?

Shakespeare's entire works are just a string of letters in a certain combination.

think simpler.

"1 2 3 4 5 6 bucket" would eventually be typed out if you had a machine that randomly types out six numbers and one word, if you had enough time. that's because it's possible, so, on a long enough timeline you'd expect that possibility to happen at least once.

[DSTEE]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPBlOdYZCic





good luck with your monkey writing shakespear goals of ever happening

[Divall213]

Infinite number of tries vs not an infinite amount of possibilities.

U do the math OP.

[sourcecode123]

Statistically speak yea it would eventually happen. But it would assume that the monkey wouldn't keep repeating the same letters. In a real life situation, it might never happen

[MetalliNattyCa]

A monkey with an infinite amount of time and a typewriter...





























Sounds like your typical miscer lol

[DatFeelGuy]

Typewriter would break or run out of ink long before. Stupid question.

[dunners99]

ITT OP and many other miscers fail to understand the idea of infinity.

[Achilles1994]

Inb4 Karl Pilkington

Lol he makes me feel like Einstein.

[MullahNero]

You can represent this problem as a matrix of zeros and ones where 1 indicates the presence of a letter in a word, with an additional column that decides the ordering of the letters. If you apply a random permutation to the matrix a new string of letters is generated. If you apply the random permutation an infinite amount of times the resulting set will contain ALL possible sequences of ALL possible matrices. In this way it is easy to see why it's true, but it's no different than saying everything is contained in pi. In the monkey example, you must make many assumptions:

The monkey must be eternal
The monkey may not lose function
The typewriter would not break down
Etc.

The "monkey" is just a theoretical permutation operator which is not restricted by the laws of nature.. but a monkey would be, so the allegory is flawed. If those natural laws are assumed to not exist, typewriters and monkeys wouldn't exist eiter. So, no monkey will write Shakespear, ever.