History Main / MonkeysOnATypewriter

[[folder:Fanfic]]

* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain boltzmann brain]] concept is basically the same principle applied to atoms, wherein they bump into eachother in such a way as to form a sapient being. Assuming that A) [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay Proton decay]] isn't a thing, and B)the universe eventually dies by petering out rather than by collapsing back in on itself or ripping itself to shreds, the universe's long-dead corpse is expected to start churning these out.

* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain boltzmann brain]] concept is basically the same principle applied to atoms, wherein they bump into eachother in such a way as to form a sapient organism. Assuming that A) [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay Proton decay]] isn't a thing, and B)the universe eventually dies by petering out rather than by collapsing back in on itself or ripping itself to shreds, the universe's long-dead corpse is expected to start churning these out.

* Borges' short story [[Literature/TheLibraryOfBabel "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 pieces of literature possible (albeit divided into 410 page excerpts)--but they're scattered amongst books of complete gibberish, or books full of lies that look real.

* Borges' short story [[Literature/TheLibraryOfBabel "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 the world is in that Library, as is every pieces of literature ever published (albeit divided into 410 page excerpts)--but they're scattered amongst books of complete gibberish, or books full of lies that look real.

A standard thought experiment from probability theory states that a million monkeys hammering a million typewriters (or a hundred, or a thousand) will eventually write the entire works of Shakespeare (or Dickens, or all the books in the British Library). This is a vivid enough mental image that it gets referenced a ''lot'' in fiction.

* ''The Red Pyramid'',
Creator/RickRiordan's first installment of ''Literature/TheKaneChronicles'', uses ibises instead of monkeys. The birds incidentally appear in conjunction with Thoth, the Myth/{{Egyptian|Mythology}} god of knowledge, who was also associated with baboons along with ibises.

* ''Literature/TheKaneChronicles'': ''The Red Pyramid'' does it using ibises instead of monkeys.

->''"This is a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters. Soon, they'll have written the greatest novel known to mankind. Let's see... 'It was the best of times, it was the ''blurst'' of times'?! You stupid monkey!"''

-->'''Ian:''' If Mario Paint has 41,664 dots available and 15 different colors to choose from, then did you know that there are a total of 1,987,857,121,979,410,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different possible images to create on a single page? That's a lot, eh? Just thought I'd tell you.

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 ''Theatre/{{Hamlet}}'' (as well as the odds of any other specific text of the same length) within an [[SelfDemonstratingArticle dsafljcxzillion]] [[EleventyZillion ancjlaeladhaclaketlillion years]] are still incomprehensibly ''low''. However, such huge quantities of monkeys and time are no match for '''infinity''', which is where the magic happens.

->''"This is a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters. Soon, they'll have written the greatest novel known to mankind. Let's see... 'It was the best of times, it was the'' '''''blurst''''' ''of times'?! You stupid monkey!"''

-->''Well, assuming the demons are truly infinite in number (which I doubt) here’s one way of looking at it. You may have heard the old parable that if you let an infinite number of monkeys type at an infinite number of typewriters, one of them would eventually write Hamlet.''

-->''Well, I suppose that's true. But they’d also type billions upon billions of pages of gibberish, and if by some chance a complete work came out, it would have as much chance of being a Shakespearean play as it would of being the screenplay for'' Film/HowardTheDuck ''or some equally terrible movie.''

* ''Literature/PaperTowns''. 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.''"

* Alluded to in Creator/MattRuff's first novel, ''FoolOnTheHill'', which is otherwise chock full o' playing with trope.
* ''[[Literature/TheKaneChronicles The Red Pyramid]]'' does it using ibises instead of monkeys.
* Creator/RALafferty once wrote a story, "Been a Long, Long Time", referencing this idea. At the end of a vast span of time it seems that the monkeys have finally got it right, until someone notices a tiny error...
* Done by the Goliath Corporation in the ''Literature/ThursdayNext'' books, but they considerably improve the odds by using (imperfect) clones of Shakespeare instead of monkeys.
* In ''Literature/GulliversTravels'', one of the absurd inventions created by the [[CloudCuckoolander Laputan]] [[TVGenius 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".

* Brought up in ''{{Literature/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.
* Borges' short story [[Literature/TheLibraryOfBabel "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 the world is in that Library, as is every pieces of literature ever published (albeit divided into 410 page excerpts)--but they're scattered amongst books of complete gibberish, or books full of lies that look real.

[[folder: Live Action TV ]]

* In the ''Series/DoctorWho'' episode "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS20E3MawdrynUndead Mawdryn Undead]]", the Doctor and Tegan discuss this trope as it applies to "a treeful of monkeys".
-->'''Doctor''': You and I both know, at the end of a millennium they'd still be tapping out gibberish.\\
'''Tegan''': And you'd be right there tapping it out with them.

--> "On Time Team tonight, we're in Stratford on Avon, where we've uncovered loads of monkey skeletons and some typewriters."

[[folder: Newspaper Comics ]]

* In ''ComicStrip/{{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."
* Referenced in a ''ComicStrip/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.
* The monkeys in the May 7th, 2010 comic of ''ComicStrip/{{Bizarro}}'' end up producing ''Literature/TheGreatGatsby'' rather than a work of Shakespeare, much to their supervisor's frustration.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Theater]]

[[folder: Web Comics ]]

* The "Infinite Monkeys" arc of ''Webcomic/{{Goats}}''.
* ''Webcomic/UserFriendly'': "[[http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20051201 These Terrans are sharp.]]"
* ''Webcomic/SchlockMercenary'', in the [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Big Haunted Battleship]] Arc, eventually leads to Kevin citing this trope, but with the "Great works of Howard Tayler." [[TakeThatMe The narrator claims this can actually be done with 3 monkeys in 15 minutes]].
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Western Animation ]]

[[folder: Real Life ]]

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 [[SelfDemonstratingArticle dsafljcxzillion]] [[EleventyZillion ancjlaeladhaclaketlillion years]] are still incomprehensibly ''low''. 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 understanding the point of the machine. 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.

--> Ford? There are an nifinite number of monkeys out here who want to talk to us about this script for ''Theatre/{{Hamlet}}'' that they've just worked out.

* BobNewhart had a comedy routine where this experiment was actually being run, and he was one of the monkey handlers. It ended with, "To be, or not to be? That is the [[WordSaladHumour gzornnplat]]."

* In ''Radio/TheHitchHikersguideToTheGalaxy'', the Infinite Improbability Drive throws Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect into a highly improbable but not impossible situation:

* In ''Radio/TheHitchHikersguideToTheGalaxy'', thre Infinite Improbability Drive throws Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect into a highly improbable but not impossible situation:

* Borges' short story [[Literature/TheLibraryOfBabel "The Library of Babel"]] doesn't directly reference monkeys or typewriters, but does examine the underlying idea of meaningful language evolving 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 the world is in that Library, as is every pieces of literature ever published (albeit divided into 410 page excerpts)--but they're scattered amongst books of complete gibberish, or books full of lies that look real.

* ''LetsPlay/TwitchPlaysPokemon'' is described in its page quote on ThisVeryWiki as tens of thousands of monkeys fighting over ''one'' typewriter, [[{{Metaphorgotten}} 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.

* {{Netflix}} had an April Fool's gag called ''Netflix Live,'' with Creator/WillArnett narrating various boring scenes around the office. At one point, while watching somebody play a computer game:

* ''[[TheKaneChronicles The Red Pyramid]]'' does it using ibises instead of monkeys.

* Brought up in ''{{Literature/Dinoverse}}'' when characters start wondering how Betram ''accidentally'' made a time machine - he brings up this trope and says he must have stumbled on the right combination by pure chance.

* Creator/TeamFourStar explicitly described their LetsPlay of ''VideoGame/{{Bloodborne}}'' like this. On top of the fact that they made it a DrinkingGame, they tended to make decisions based more off of RuleOfFunny than actual game logic (like spending most of the game with their character wearing nothing but a top hat and womens' shoes) and just had fun with it. That said, they still beat the game (with DLC but not the Chalice Dungeons) in about 65 hours[[note]]twenty livestream sessions, each 2 to 2 1/2 hours long, plus a little off-screen grinding for healing items[[/note]], got the GoldenEnding[[note]]they almost missed out on it by arbitrarily killing Arianna and pissing off the Fake Iosefka, but ran away from the latter rather than fighting her, which meant she stayed alive until the proper EventFlag triggered[[/note]], pulled off a few feats that legitimately impressed their ''Bloodborne''-loving friend Grant, and, again, did most of it while absolutely stinking drunk.

* There's a post on tumblr circulating that theorizes that, since the number π is an irrational number and thus has no end, ''somewhere'' in π's random and endless stream of numbers is the computer code for a video game or movie.