Infinite monkey theorem debunked, so a monkey typed my column

The old adage says that if you give typewriters to an infinite number of monkeys and give them enough time, they will eventually re-create the complete works of William Shakespeare.

It's not true – and not just because the monkeys would be outraged that you made them use typewriters. No, the "infinite monkey theorem" – used to describe randomness, probability, Shakespeare and why "The Monkees" was such a popular TV show – is not true because of something more fundamental.

Two mathematicians from Australia (I don't think they're the two guys in Air Supply, but I'm not 100% sure) seemingly disproved the idea. Not because monkeys aren't good at 1500s English or because they would get carpel tunnel syndrome or because Shakespeare's plays are copyrighted. They wouldn't do it because of time.

Maybe "an infinite amount of time" would work. Maybe. But Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta (now I'm pretty sure they're not the Air Supply guys) concluded that the time it would take is longer than the lifespan of our universe. So it wouldn't work.

The mathematicians made their calculations based on the idea that the universe will end sometime in the distant future in a way I don't understand but in a way that isn't similar to how life is mentioned in the song "In the Year 2525."

They concluded that if you took every living chimpanzee (about 200,000) and each typed one key per second for the rest of their lives (and their descendants did the same thing), they wouldn't come close to typing Shakespeare's full works.

In fact, it's worse: According to the research, there is only a 5% chance that any monkey would successfully type the word "bananas" in its lifetime. And the chance that one chimp would write a random sentence (such as "Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz weren't really monkeys") is one in 10 million billion billion, which is a lot of zeroes.

So it's very, very unlikely that even if they were given enough time, any monkeys could duplicate the Bard's work. But could they duplicate . . . the Brad's work? (GET IT?)

Seeking to answer whether a monkey could complete even a portion of what I write each week, I went through the website Upwork and hired a chimp named Stanley for one hour (just $25!), gave him a laptop and challenged him to type like me.

He was finished in 45 minutes (Stanley was efficient. I still paid him the entire fee). Here's what he wrote:

mmZZK mmba. Slow ride take it easy. dIIIddk sks. Bananarama. !!@ Everybodywaskungfufighting skjlkdfdd snap crackle pop. dkdkdkdkd tONywaderaidersbAd dds WeTakeOverIn2026.

I didn't see anything close to words there, although you could make the case that "on" is in the middle somewhere.

I've spent much of my life believing the "infinite monkey theorem," although I would mock it by saying there isn't a market for Shakespeare's works and that the monkeys would probably focus more on teen vampire novels. It turns out that monkeys aren't good writers and the real threat to writers is artificial intelligence.

That's too bad. I liked working with Stanley. In fact, as a final treat, I'll let him have the last word in this column.

YouWillBeOurSlavesIn2026.

Hah hah hah. It's sweet that he can't type real words. Just gibberish.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.