Borel’s monkey, is one of the many names of the theorem stating that a monkey typing at random for an infinite amount of time will eventually type out the complete works of William Shakespeare, Hunter S. Thompson or any other collection of text which one might care to mention.
Now amazingly, a few researchers have actually carried out experiments studying the literary output of monkeys. In 2003 a group at the University of Plymouth left a computer keyboard in a Macaque enclosure at London Zoo. The monkeys only managed to produce five pages of text, consisting largely of the letter S, before they attacked the keyboard with a stone and began urinating and defecating on it. Mike Phillips, the team leader [of the researchers, not the monkeys] described the results as being “stimulating and fascinating.” However, readers should note that he is actually a media and arts lecturer rather than a real academic, and that the work was simply intended to get him on television.
But what about a real version of Borel’s monkey experiment? The brave researcher would face many challenges in setting up such a study. Even assuming that one could actually persuade the monkey or monkeys to type, getting then to do so for an infinite period of time would be no easy task. If the group of monkeys is of a finite number, then, they must type for an infinite period of time for us to be certain that they will produce the desired text. Some form of longevity treatment using stem cells might be possible to extend the life of the creature indefinitely, but what of the computer hardware? Even the old IBM office machines don’t last forever, and spares could become a problem. But there is another more serious difficulty, the possibility that the universe might end before the experiment is complete.
But what about many monkeys in parallel? Obviously to tackle an infinite problem in a finite time by conventional means one would need an infinite number of monkeys. But this approach is not without it’s problems either. An infinite number of monkeys would be particularly tricky to house and feed. One would still need infinite numbers of spare parts, and even though they would complete the task in a finite time, the monkeys would be infinitely dispersed and collecting the finished results would take, literally, forever.
But there is another worry here. Dealing with a small group of the creatures defecating on their keyboards is not a particularly serious problem, but what if an infinite number of monkeys turned bad? Clearly the prudent researcher would need to hold a large, possibly infinite number of Charlton Hestons’ in reserve to guard against their taking over the world. But considering the difficulty in obtaining even one functioning Charlton Heston, this is likely to be more difficult than it would appear.
Researchers at Cornell university have attempted to tackle this problem in a novel way. They constructed 26 quantum monkeys from super cooled Bose-Einstein condensate [ trust me, this is no easy task], and assigned each one a key. Whether or not the key was pressed was linked to the position of the monkey, and provided the system was not disturbed, each monkey exists as a wave function of two superimposed states.
Somehow [I’m getting bored and can’t be bothered to work out how], the system produced an infinite amount of information that ipso facto contained the complete works of Shakespeare. Now either this information vanished in a puff of smoke, spiralled off into other universes, or something, but whatever it did there was no Shakespeare for the researchers.
Interestingly though, in an attempt to guard against their being ravaged by a group of 26 super cooled quantum monkeys, a second research team was working on a quantum Super Heston. Having managed to secure his participation, they forced the veteran actor into a small box containing a Siamese cat and a vial of poison. Rather than being granted quantum super powers, Heston was heard shouting “You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God…damn you all to hell!” before mysteriously dying of pneumonia in his sleep.
