All the time of the Universe is not enough for a chimp to write Shakespeare’s work: The “sophical ape” paradox was shot down.

The “paradox of the wise ape” i.e. the scientific theorem that wants one to manage to write all of Shakespeare’s work, in case he had unlimited time in his life, they shot down two mathematicians. This particular theorem starring the ape was formulated almost a century ago, expressing that something unlikely but technically feasible could come true if sufficient time was given. Australian mathematicians estimated that if all the chimps in the world had time equal to the life of the Universe, they would almost certainly not be able to write the shocking works of the English playwright and poet. To prove this, researchers calculated what an ape could write by accidentally hitting the keyboard keys of a keyboard with 30 characters, with a rate of one stroke per second, for 30 years. To accomplish this, they assumed that the Universe has a gogoll duration, that is, 10 thirty million years or the number 1 followed by 100 zeros although in its study published this week they did not take into account parameters unrelated to the experiment such as what the monkeys would feed or how they would live while the Sun went out. Based on these calculations, only a monkey will 5% chance of accidentally writing the word “banana”, since it devotes its entire existence to typing. The word “banana” however does not appear among the 884,647 words that constitute the whole of Shakespeare’s work. The mathematicians, to give the monkeys a chance, enlisted the chimp experiment, the species most related to humans. Today it is estimated that some 200,000 chimpanzees live around the world and the study considered as “given” that their population would remain stable until the end of the world. The conclusion is that even such a workforce would be inadequate. Their chances of success would not be “not even one in a million”, co-author of the Stephen Woodcock study, Sydney Tech University, told New Scientist. If the number of chimps or the speed at which they type increased, it would change nothing. With enough irony, the study concludes that Shakespeare himself had answered the question whether “the work of a monkey could really replace human effort as a source of knowledge and creativity”, citing “Amlet, 3rd Act, Scene 3, Line 87: No”.