“Alas, poor ape, how thou sweat’st!”
Colin Waters/Alamy
If every chimpanzee on Earth were given a typewriter, they wouldn’t reproduce the works of William Shakespeare even if they kept on typing until the heat death of the universe, researchers have calculated.
The so-called infinite monkey theorem states that if you had an infinite number of primates, or one primate had infinite time, they would almost certainly type out any given text an infinite number of times.
The origins of the theorem are obscure, but it is commonly attributed…