“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times… you stupid monkey!”

What happens if they write the communist manifesto before any works of Shakespeare?

This raises an interesting question: Do other primates even have the same anatomy to get carpal tunnel? It’s just an inflammation of tissue in a very narrow part of the wrist that puts pressure on a nerve. Do monkies even have the same kind of tissues in the same narrow passage to get inflamed enough that it causes pressure on a nerve that gives mobility issues to their hands?

Even if you weren’t working in infinites, I bet the monkeys would eventually figure out that they can hold out for more banannas if we want them to keep typing.

The average person in this situation though I’d have less faith in. Instead, they’ll rally around their master and beat the other humans for not typing at the same pace as them.

A finite number of monkeys would almost certainly just destroy their finite number of typewriters long before they randomly bashed out anything coherent, let alone Shakespeare. Infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters don’t have that problem though. As long as it doesnt break the laws of physics it would eventually happen, no matter how unlikely it is. That’s the whole point.

You don’t actually need infinite time if you have infinite monkeys with typewriters. If the typing is truly random, one of the moneys will type the complete works of Shakespeare on the first try. Or maybe infinitely many will, but then you start having to reason about different sizes of infinity.

I always interpreted it as, eventually they’ll evolve, and will birth their equivalent of Shakespeare. Paralleling our own evolution.

Reddit is basically prove that this theory is bullshit anyway.

It’s a thought exercise and a metaphor, not literal