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Monkeys on a Typewriter
- 225 statements
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- 36 referencing feature instances
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A standard thought experiment from probability theory states that a million monkeys hammering a million typewriters (or a hundred, or a thousand) will, given sufficient time, eventually bang out entire works of Shakespeare (or Dickens, or all the books in the British Library) by complete accident. This is a vivid enough mental image that it gets referenced a lot in fiction. One common joke is to assume that the quantity of monkeys and/or allotted time required to write something is proportional to its artistic merit, so Shakespeare might take a million monkeys a million years, but three monkeys could write Tommy Wiseau's The Room in half a day. This isn't actually true (in fact, all that matters is the length of the text that the monkeys are replicating), but it is funny. When we start throwing infinity in it (which is implied by the "eventually" in the first sentence of this page), then either one monkey is enough given an infinite time, or among infinite monkeys typing (for example) 400 pages each, one will type a particular 400-page text on the first try. While they are part of the most common descriptions of this idea, versions involving "thousands" or "millions" of monkeys may confuse someone into thinking there is some kind of practical possibility of producing Shakespeare with monkeys, if we could only wait for a few million years. Some paraphrases of the problem even forget to mention the "eventually" or "infinite" part and say that you just need "a million monkeys for a million years". In fact, even if you replaced every atom in the universe with a monkey and a typewriter, and they all typed a thousand characters per second, the odds of their producing Hamlet (as well as the odds of any other specific text of the same length) within an dsafljcxzillion ancjlaeladhaclaketlillion years are still incomprehensibly bad. However, such huge quantities of monkeys and time are no match for infinity, which is where the magic happens. The point is that the monkeys are flailing at the keys without actually understanding the point of the object they're interacting with. Given enough time or enough monkeys, or both, one of them will accidentally hit the keys in the order "[shift]T-o[space]b-e[comma][space]o-r[space]n-o-t[space]t-o[space]b-e..." There is also some non-infinite yet unimaginably large number of years within which typing Hamlet has a probability of 99%, but the chance still doesn't reach 100% until infinity. A lot of writers will absolutely jump on this as an opportunity for Word Salad Humour. See also Who Writes This Crap?!. Robert Wilensky complemented this with the statement that "Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." For further reading, see the Other Wiki. For comedic use of monkeys in general (as in lighthearted portrayals of this trope), see Silly Simian. If the monkeys actually succeed at typing coherent text, the monkeys could be an example of an Intelligent Primate. |
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Done by the Goliath Corporation in the Thursday Next books, but they considerably improve the odds by using (imperfect) clones of Shakespeare instead of monkeys. | |
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The band Chumbawamba has claimed they were named after a word typed by a monkey when somebody actually tried to do this in real life. This was cited on Nevermind The Buzzcocks, but it later turned out it was only one of several false explanations the band would say in interviews to troll the interviewers. | |
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In the That '70s Show episode "Battle of the Sexists", after Donna manages to score in a basketball game, Eric yells, "Pinciotti actually scores! Hell freezes over! A monkey types Hamlet!" | |
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The Simpsons: In "Last Exit to Springfield", Mr. Burns has a thousand monkeys at typewriters. Also from "Children of a Lesser Clod". |
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Whose Line Is It Anyway?: Colin started off a game of Weird Newscasters this way: | |
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The chances of a monkey on a typewriter perfectly typing out Hamlet on its first try is estimated to be 1 in 10^183,800. If one were to take in exact punctuation, capitalization, and spacing it would be more like 1 in 10^360,763. | |
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Twitch Plays Pokémon : The stream is described in its page quote on This Very Wiki as tens of thousands of monkeys fighting over one typewriter, half of them desperately trying to progress in the game and the other half throwing shit everywhere. They beat Pokemon Red in only sixteen days. | |
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In Dilbert: The title character writes a poem, and Dogbert says something along the lines of "You know, an infinite number of monkeys in an infinite amount of time could type out the complete works of Shakespeare. Your poem? Three monkeys, ten minutes." Another joke was "if you take an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters and give them an infinite amount of time, sooner or later you'll have a room full of dead monkeys. Turns out monkeys need feeding." |
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mezzacotta: Referenced in Comments on a Postcard strip #2287. | |
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The SCP Foundation has SCP-3149 ("Monkey Business"), a warehouse filled with 73 (originally 100) monkeys (designated SCP-3149-1) sitting at computers. These monkeys have an opening on their back which, when a document is placed within, imbues them with the personality of that document's author. 3149 also includes lampreys (designated SCP-3149-2) that feed on the monkeys if they fail to type one page every ten minutes. | |
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Taken to utterly ludicrous extremes in an issue of Nintendo Power when Ian Stocker of Carpinteria, CA calculated you could generate just shy of 2 x 10⁶⁹ different images in Mario Paint if you systematically colored every pixel every available color one after the other. To give you an idea of how many images that is, if you started generating one billion images a second at the Big Bang you'd still have a long ways to go. | |
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Brought up in Dinoverse when characters start wondering how Bertram accidentally made a time machine - he brings up this trope and says he must have stumbled on the right combination by pure chance. | |
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Schlock Mercenary, in the Big Haunted Battleship Arc, eventually leads to Kevin citing this trope, but with the "Great works of Howard Tayler." The narrator claims this can actually be done with 3 monkeys in 15 minutes. | |
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The Infinite Monkey Cage is named after this. If you have an infinite numbers of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters in the hope that they'll eventually give you Shakespeare's works, you do need to keep them in a cage big enough for all of the monkeys: an infinite monkey cage. The metaphor is occasionally analysed on the show itself: One listener once wrote in to ask what the ACTUAL dimensions of the hypothetical cage were, since it'd still be an infinitely sized cage if two dimensions were fixed but smaller than a monkey and the final dimension infinitely big. The full lyrics to Eric Idle's theme tune also wonders about it: |
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One MAD article has a similar premise, saying that with an infinite number of people doing things under certain circumstances will produce one improbable result. For example, it suggests that with an infinite number of studies and Congressional hearings, the tobacco industry might admit that cigarettes aren't as good for babies as their mother's milk. | |
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User Friendly: "These Terrans are sharp." | |
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In Gulliver's Travels, one of the absurd inventions created by the Laputan intellectuals is a device for randomly combining words so that "the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study". | |
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The Colbert Report has a segment about how many different monkeys it takes to produce different authors' works. Apparently it's a million monkeys typing for all eternity to get Shakespeare, ten thousand drunk monkeys typing for ten thousand years to get Hemingway, and ten monkeys for three days to get Dan Brown. | |
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Phineas and Ferb: "Cliptastic Countdown" combines this with Who Writes This Crap?!. Major Monogram demands who wrote the lines, to which Carl the intern replies, "Agent M, sir." We then see a monkey in a fedora at a typewriter, causing Dr. Doofenshmirtz to complain how none of the kids watching will know what a typewriter is. Monogram tries to excuse it by say it was cheaper that way, but Doof just continues ranting on the point that they would have to find a typewriter from an antiques dealer. | |
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The Ricky Gervais Show has a segment in which Karl refuses to believe that the monkeys can ever actually write anything, so stubbornly that Ricky ends up storming out on him. The problem is that Karl believes that the monkeys are trying to write something of meaning, and that Shakespeare is just too complicated for them to grasp. | |
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At the conclusion of Jack Horner's story in Fables, the various scams he's pulled on devils finally catches up with him. Unable to decide who has rightful claim to his soul, they compromise by giving him his own private Hell at the end of existence where he has nothing but himself, a typewriter, and an endless supply of paper to write out what he learns from his absolute isolation. This backfires as it instead allows him to focus his low level reality warping powers to resurrect Gary, the anthropomorphic personification of the Pathetic Fallacy, who has much greater reality warping powers of his own. Together, with his endless time to contemplate the fate of literally every particle, they implement his blueprints for a utopic universe where he rules as God-king for the rest of eternity. | |
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Paper Towns. Q to Ben: "Getting you a date to prom is so hard that a thousand monkeys typing at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years would never once type I will go to prom with Ben." | |
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I Am Weasel: "A Troo Storee" has a scene where several monkeys with typewriters are trying to write a novel. Weasel manages to insult them by offering to pay them in bananas, and only I.R. Baboon is left to finish the book. | |
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Borges' short story "The Library of Babel" doesn't directly reference monkeys or typewriters, but does examine the underlying idea of meaningful language emerging from chaos. The story is set in a finite-but-still-unmeasurably-vast library, stocked with 410-page books containing every possible arrangement of letters, spaces, and punctuation that will fit. All the information in any possible world is in that Library, as is every piece of literature possible (albeit divided into 410 page excerpts)—but the books aren't arranged in any particular order, so everything worthwhile is scattered amongst books of complete gibberish, or books full of lies that look real. | |
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Mock the Week - Unlikely Things to hear on a History Documentary | |
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In one episode of Muppets Tonight, we learn that the show's scripters are actual Muppet monkeys, mindlessly pounding at typewriters going "Ook-ack-ook!" Once they come up with a satisfactory script, Kermit lets them go touch the monolith. | |
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In Monster Roadtrip (the third game in the Monster Prom series), one event has Polly and Scott arrive at a farm where a pumpkin farmer grows human heads. The player can attempt to infuse intelligence into the human heads and try to make money off them by getting them to pen the "next Great American Novel", but the attempt fails miserably. | |
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Civilization V: Peace Walker has a Stealth Pun to this effect, when Snake staffs his Writer's Guild with a pair of MSF soldiers codenamed Lemur and Marmoset. | |
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In Shadowchasers: Ascension, Jeb uses this as part of an analogy in his book to explain populations of Hell. (This reality has a Hell Is War afterlife, where one side has an overwhelming advantage in numbers, but a Chaotic Stupid attitude that keeps them from prevailing): | |
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From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy: After Arthur and Ford are rescued from virtually certain death from asphyxiation in interstellar space, there is a sequence of bizarrely improbable events on board the ship that rescued them— because the ship is powered by the Infinite Improbability Generator. One of these events is Arthur and Ford being approached by "an infinite number of monkeys who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out." | |
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The "Infinite Monkeys" arc of Goats. | |
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Referenced in a FoxTrot strip where Peter gets a program to assemble random letters, his logic being that if you put enough monkeys on typewriters to produce Hamlet, then you can surely use a random letter generator to create a Hamlet book report. Paige then asks about one page which is even more nonsensical that turns out to have been Peter's attempt. | |
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Sort of inverted in The Neverending Story, where Bastian gets to see several mindless humans setting up heavy stones with letters on them repeatedly, as an entertainment for an intelligent monkey. | |
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Doctor Who: In "Mawdryn Undead", the Doctor and Tegan discuss this trope as it applies to "a treeful of monkeys". "The Doctor Dances" features this trope, or rather, an illiterate small boy (Jim) on a typewriter. Leads to an Oh, Crap! moment a minute later when Jim stops typing, the typewriter starts typing on its own, and the only thing typed is "Are you my mummy?" |
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Monkeys on a Typewriter | |
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Qi: In the 17th season episode "Quills", Sandy Toksvig played the sound of someone typing and asked the panelists if they could recite what was being written by the sound of the typing. Lou Sanders' answer: "We don't know any Shakespeare, we're only monkeys!" | |
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The monkeys in the May 7th, 2010 Bizarro strip end up producing The Great Gatsby rather than a work of Shakespeare, much to their supervisor's frustration. | |
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| Monkeys on a Typewriter / int_da861da1 | comment |
In Veronica Mars, Veronica gets hauled into the police station for questioning about the death of "Curly" Moran, who she thinks she's never heard of. When she realizes that she actually does know him — in a seemingly totally different context — she thinks: | |
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Monkeys on a Typewriter | |
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In Graveyard Keeper, you can build a "Random Text Generator" and train a zombie to write for you, which results in them producing random stories and skill books. | |
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| Monkeys on a Typewriter / int_e03940f | comment |
The Mickey Mouse comic "Monkey in the Middle" begins with this: a statistician, for whatever reason, is trying to disprove the claim that a million monkeys could produce Shakespeare in a million years, so he buys a ten or so monkeys to have them pound on typewriters for a few months (not that it makes any sense). Almost immediately, one of the monkeys actually does type out a legible Shakespearean drama. Later it turns out they were actually super-intelligent monkeys that escaped from a lab. | |
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Family Guy: In "The King Is Dead", Peter uses a monkeys-on-typewriters reference to belittle the importance of art. This is followed by a scene in which several monkeys argue over which flower would best fit in the "rose by any other name" line from Romeo and Juliet. | |
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Histeria!: The episode "Super Writers" has a short sketch about this. | |
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Monkeys on a Typewriter | |
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In The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy 1978, the Infinite Improbability Drive throws Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect into a highly improbable but not impossible situation: | |
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He also directly talks about the trope when playing Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, since instead of getting a partner for the game, he instead opted to leave the job to the Twitch chat (with obligatory reference to Twitch Plays Pokémon, of course). | |
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