## Patience and Labor, or About Real Madness

Patience and labor will grind everything down, says the famous proverb. In contrast, Vaas Montenegro has repeatedly said that madness reduces to a series of repeated attempts that follow one after another. Well, if we take an infinite resource and infinite time, and stubbornly iterate probabilities, will something useful come out of it?

# Army of Monkeys and Infinite Typewriters

According to the infinite monkey theorem, if we had an army of monkeys typing endlessly, they would eventually create all of Shakespeare’s works, but they would do so by pure chance. This is a mathematical exercise about probabilities when infinity is involved. In fact, if there is a non-zero probability that an event will occur, it will almost certainly happen if we have infinite time.

Theoretically, this is true, but obviously, in our finite universe, it is impossible to have an infinite number of monkeys or infinite time. Mathematicians in Australia decided to tackle the counting, and they came up with interesting results.

# Approach to Calculations

We decided to estimate the probability that a given string of characters will be typed by a finite number of monkeys within a finite period of time corresponding to estimates of the lifespan of our universe.

Stephen Woodcock, one of the lead authors of the study.

For their calculations, the team assumed that the monkeys use a keyboard containing 30 keys—the 26 letters of the English alphabet, plus the most common punctuation marks. It is assumed that each chimpanzee presses one random key every second. Would this be cryptoanarchism if similar simulations were used for encryption?

Then they calculated the probability that certain texts would be typed by a single chimpanzee throughout its life, as well as the amount of work required for a population of 200,000 individuals—a rough estimate of the number of living chimpanzees in the world. In the experiment, the monkeys would have to work until the heat death of the universe. It is believed that this will occur approximately in 1 googol years from the present moment, which is 1 followed by 100 zeros. They have time.

# Ratio of Letters and Time

Of course, the simpler the phrase, the higher the chances that the monkeys will type it among their random keystrokes. We have a 5% probability that one chimpanzee will correctly type the word “bananas” during its 30-year lifetime, and 100% that the word “bananas” will be found among the nonsensical phrases of 200,000 such chimpanzees before the universe dies.

A slightly more complex phrase, “I am a chimpanzee, therefore, I exist,” will be typed with a probability of 0.0000000000000000000000001% by one chimpanzee in its lifetime. However, again, the probability of typing this phrase approaches 100% under the condition of working “until the death of the universe.” Sympathetic conditions for self-development.

But as the length of texts increases, the chances of their creation plummet rapidly. The children’s story about the monkey “Curious George” consists of 1,800 words. For this, if 200,000 monkeys work until the death of the universe, the probability of a successful outcome is 15,000 zeros after the decimal point.

For the original novel “Planet of the Apes,” consisting of approximately 83,000 words, the probability approaches 700,000 zeros after the decimal point. And for the complete works of Bard, consisting of approximately 885,000 words, 7.5 million zeros.

# Returning to the Experiment with Hypothetical Monkeys

In other words, it would take 200,000 monkeys four lifetimes of the universe before they would arrive at “Curious George,” six universes for “Planet of the Apes,” and seven universes before Shakespeare’s works would appear. It is interesting to consider how things would turn out if we add the factor of using nootropic drugs into the equation?

This discovery puts the theorem in the same line as other probabilistic puzzles and paradoxes, such as the St. Petersburg paradox, Zeno’s quantum paradox, and the Ross-Littlewood paradox, where the use of infinite resources yields results that do not match what we obtain when considering the limitations of our universe.

Stephen Woodcock, one of the lead authors of the study.

Of course, one could argue that the point of the original thought experiment is not to perceive it as a literal method for creating great works, but simply as one of the methods to illustrate the concept of infinity. After all, having 200,000 immortal or self-reproducing monkeys working continuously until the end of the universe is as unrealistic as possessing infinite time. But still, sometimes it’s useful to put things into perspective.

Thus, — concludes the article, — we must conclude that Shakespeare himself inadvertently answered the question of whether monkey labor can become a meaningful substitute for human labor as a source of science or creativity.

Quoting Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No.”

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