When Émile Borel first wrote about his singes dactylographes as a thought experiment about thermodynamics for his article in 1913 titled “Mécanique Statistique et Irréversibilité“, little did he know he’d keep a lot of people busy, let alone his infinite number of typing monkeys.
Here are some of my further thoughts on the matter after my recent post on overcoming resource constraints, it won’t take an infinite amount of time.
How long will it take to produce ‘Hamlet’?
While there may be an infinite number of monkeys, each is only able to type as fast as it can. Since Hamlet has 30,557 words, and the average monkey types at the same speed as the average human (41 random words per minute), it would take 745 minutes (12 hours and 25 minutes) to produce Hamlet. (Remember, there are other monkeys producing the versions with mistakes, so this monkey doesn’t need to factor accuracy)
Will other works be produced?
Along with the monkey ‘tasked’ with producing an error-free Hamlet, other monkeys are producing all the other works (and the various versions of these with their random mistakes), including some of the most extended works of literature known to man. Artamène is 1,954,300 words long and would take its monkey “author” nearly 794 hours and 26 minutes of typing to produce.
Can the monkeys write code?
Yes, as part of all written works, the monkeys will also develop all coded programs, no matter what language (Ada, C, C+, C#, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, Java, Ruby, Python and all others).
They have will also write all the versions of these programs that won’t work as a by-product. Some testing might be necessary to derive future versions of Microsoft or Google products from their output (or perhaps they are already being shipped?)
Do the monkeys have a preferred language?
No, the monkeys do not have a preferred language, as they type randomly. They are, however, limited to producing works for which their typewriters are configured (so since they started in 1913, they have been mainly producing texts based on the Latin alphabet, but recently have been starting to use the multiple keypress input methods for generating pictographic languages.)
They also need a reference work to compare against, so more matches are likely to occur in the language in which most documents are written.
Since the previous question about coding sparked this question, C is the preferred coding language that is output by the monkeys.
While this currently might be English, there are a higher number of writers of Chinese in the world, so at some point in the future, as they contribute more to the Internet, the preferred language of the monkeys would appear to change, even though they are still randomly typing.
How long would validation of the produced documents take?
Hum.. depends on how many monkeys you assign to the task, but see answer one.?
Are the monkeys contributing to Wikipedia and Reddit?
Despite appearances to the contrary, the infinite monkey team do not formally write for either these or any other august literate repositories on the internet.
It is possible, however, that every single monkey might contribute a document each at some point in their spare time, please check authorship and profile information carefully!