Why A Monkey Will Never Write Shakespeare

Written by a human, for humans, always.

What is required to create a masterpiece?

It is an interesting question that people have wondered about throughout time.

With this...

Is something that is considered a masterpiece "really" all that special?

Could it be "recreated" with less-than-exceptional means?

There is a classic thought experiment that looks at this through the lens of "Probabilities".

Now, I'm not going to throw any math at you for this article...

So if you were worried about that, you can now relax.

But the specific idea states...

That if you take something that is generally recognized as a masterpiece...

Say, something written by Shakespeare...

No, you do not need to have read or understand Shakespeare for this article either; it is simply a generic "masterpiece" that has been picked by individuals for ease in explaining how to do the probabilistic math (which, again, we're not doing here)...

And you took a generic keyboard with enough keys to write every word, space, and grammar mark from one of Shakespeare's plays...

And you gave that board to a random monkey...

Or a group of monkeys with keyboards...

And then allowed the monkeys to type...

Would they eventually recreate Shakespeare?

Well...

The theory says that, eventually, by random chance...

A monkey could eventually accomplish it.

There is even a number that has been found for Shakespeare's play Hamlet...

The monkey has a 1 in 4.4 × 10^360,783 chance of writing all of Hamlet correctly, with punctuation marks.

This has been used by individuals to say...

"Hey! It is possible! If a monkey could do it, then masterpieces cannot be all that great!"

Here is the problem...

This is a "probability"...

Not an eventuality.

It is a "theory"...

Not necessarily what you would see or experience in reality.

See...

Probabilities are just chances...

Chances that are usually determined by specific rules within specific contexts...

That also fails to account for a vast array of factors that would occur in reality.

It is like someone saying...

"Hey, I have this poison that has killed just under one hundred thousand people... But there was one person who survived and then was no longer sick..."

And replying...

"Hey, maybe this poison could be used to cure people because that 'one' person ended up no longer being sick!"

Except...

According to this hypothetical probability I just made up...

That poison being a cure is leagues of magnitude more likely to occur than the monkey typing Shakespeare.

This is the truth of probabilities...

They are not statements of truth or falsehood...

They are likelihoods.

But there is a point where, practically speaking...

Something is so completely unlikely...

That it really is just impossible in any real circumstances.

Just take the monkeys, for instance.

The probability assumes a few things that, practically, are never going to happen.

You need a monkey...

Or really a gigantic troop of monkeys...

To all have access to a keyboard...

And sit at a computer long enough...

Without getting frustrated, irritated, bored, going to get food, or anything else...

To actually write "enough" to even generate one "potential" piece of Shakespeare...

Which, in the Hamlet case, requires at least 130,000 letters, before punctuation marks and proper upper and lower case.

What this means...

Is that you would have to train the monkeys to sit at a keyboard...

Then teach them to use the Shift key, because they are going to need to use that frequently...

Plus get them to sometimes hold that Shift key while other times let it go...

Without any direct pattern that they can conceive of in their mind...

Before they even attempt to start randomly chugging away at the rest of the letters...

All to reach a goal that they really do not care about.

Even "if" you were able to get all of the monkeys to jump through these loops without turning on you for what they perceive to be mixed signals...

And you had enough monkeys to match every known atom in existence (which is impossible)...

And all of those monkeys were able to live from the estimated beginning of the universe to the estimated end of the universe (which is impossible)...

You would still need 10^360,641 universes of these hypothetical monkeys...

To even accomplish this once.

This means in reality...

It just is not going to happen.

This is the ultimate challenge of working with Probabilities.

Probabilities do not end up actually representing reality.

They are just chances based on a limited set of known circumstances...

Put into equations to get a likelihood...

While often ignoring other, potentially very relevant, data, inputs, circumstances, contexts, and more.

If you take a coin and flip it 1,000 times...

Probability says that you will get about 500 of each side of the coin...

But reality shows it rarely works out like that.

For the monkey...

We have to ignore animal behavioral psychology, time, effort...

Basically reality...

To create the answer that the question is trying to answer...

That, given enough "exceptions" to reality...

That even a monkey could write Shakespeare!

But here is the problem with this when we look at probabilities in our world...

Many people "treat" probabilities like they are truth.

The reality is that they give us insights into things...

That "might" be true...

If...

We assume a few things.

We have to assume that what the probabilities find can be accomplished in reality.

There is also the problem that if we change a few factors, we can get different types of probabilities...

Which means that we can cherry-pick which probabilities are seen and which are "lost" or "discarded"...

So we have to assume that the probabilities being presented are not just being cherry-picked to tell a specific story.

We also have to assume that the original question being asked is actually valid...

And that the design of the question is fair.

For instance...

I have seen research papers in the world of health, wellness, and medicine that ask questions about modalities...

Which those modalities never claimed to be able to accomplish.

It would be like looking at your keyboard and asking if you press the right button, whether a bird would fly out of your screen...

And determining that the probabilities say it won't happen...

Then using that research to say that the keyboard doesn't work at all.

The question does not tell us whether or not the keyboard works in reality...

It just tells us that the design of the question starts with a question that was never going to work, regardless of whether the keyboard does or does not work.

The point here...

Is that a probability should not necessarily be used as evidence for or against something without understanding the context of the probability...

Without looking at the probability through the lens of reality.

A masterpiece is considered a masterpiece for a reason.

Recreation is extremely difficult or impossible.

A monkey is not going to recreate Shakespeare...

And the hypothetical conditions that would be required to get a monkey to recreate any work of Shakespeare...

Let alone multiple works...

Is just not going to occur in anything that resembles reality.

We have to look at probabilities as they are...

Chances of something...

Under very specific contexts, situations, resources, etc...

Guiding us toward a specific end...

Which may or may not make any real sense in reality.

And...

We have to be wary that people can and do use probabilities in specific ways...

Sometimes to tell a specific story...

Sometimes to cover up the truth...

Sometimes to distract us or confuse us...

And these may not necessarily be to our real-life benefit.

Be wary of probabilities and seek out what they actually mean...

Not in the theoretical world in which they are being presented...

But in the real world in which we live.

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