Why the infinite monkeys with the infinite typewriters wouldnt end up writing a Shakespeare play.

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Why the infinite monkeys with the infinite typewriters wouldnt end up writing a Shakespeare play.

In: Mathematics

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Anonymous 0 Comments

In fact, you don’t even need an infinite amount of monkeys, just a sufficiently large amount. Based on numbers that others have given, (44 keys on the keyboard, 30,000 words in Hamlet), you would only need around 10^296,000 monkeys.

**Math!**

30,000 words -> 180,000 characters (say, an average of 5 letters per word + a space. Occasional punctuation doesn’t increase this number very much)

Since each monkey has 1/44 odds of hitting the right key per stroke, (1/44)^(180,000) equals about 1 : 10^296,000 odds for a monkey to actually do it. Thus 10^296,000 monkeys make a pretty good chance of one randomly doing it after 180,000 keystrokes.

You can fiddle with the numbers to get a more accurate number (or allow more keystrokes to use fewer monkeys), but it’s already so spectacularly huge that it’s probably not going to move it much.

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