On Monkeys On Keyboards
[Image generated by Aitubo.ai]
No chimpanzee will ever type the complete works of Shakespeare—no matter how much time they get in front of a keyboard.
Australian mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta recently conducted an academic analysis of a wacky Victorian thought experiment known as the "Infinite Monkey Theorem”—that, give enough monkeys on typewriters enough time, and they’ll eventually produce Shakespeare’s works.
After crunching the numbers, these mathematicians concluded that the amount of time required for one—or even all 200k+ living chimpanzees—to randomly reproduce all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, poems, and plays would exceed the expected (finite) lifespan of our universe.
Decidedly NOT to be.
As the two human primates who actually typed this study put it:
“It is not plausible that, even with improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, monkey labour will ever be a viable tool for developing non-trivial written work.”
While good news for professional authors, editors, and ghostwriters, this may have disappointed the Argentine writer, Jorge Borges.
In 1939, Borges mused that, given enough time, random monkey-generated typing would produce not just Shakespeare, but literally "everything," including:
📚 Aeschylus' The Egyptians
🏛️ "The secret and true name of Rome"
😴 Borges' own "dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934"
🧜♀️ Lyrics of a mythical siren song
... and on, through infinite possible literary gems...
Science now tells us otherwise, about the monkeys at least.
These days, people like to invoke the Infinite Monkey Theorem when pontificating about the capacity of generative AI to create “original” literary masterworks.
Unlike your average chimpanzee, ChatGPT has been programmed to computationally pattern-match among vast arrays of human words (words, words).
But they hold no more "meaning" to the bot than any other input of "tokens" processed through probabilistic models of linguistic associations and patterns.
I'll be honest.
I don't know anywhere near enough to speak about the statistical probabilities of AI fulfilling any of the romantic musings including in Borges' hypothetical "bibliotheca total."
But I know one thing:
This wacky notion about typing monkeys, passed through the filter of just one (single, solitary, and finite—if poetic and inspired) *human being* did produce an absolutely enchanting—and actually original—literary masterwork.
A hypothetical, utopian library made of pure, yet-untapped human imagination.
If you ask me, Borges, more than any mathematical calculation, proves what we already know.
If you want writing that moves readers to think and dream and feel and act, you need a damn writer.
A *human* one ...
... who, in turn, needs a human editor—and, sometimes, a human book coach or ghostwriter to help them bring these original ideas and connections to life.
You've Got a Book in You. Let's Get it Out.