YOU'VE PROBABLY HEARD THAT if you were to unleash an infinite number of monkeys on an equal abundance of keyboards, they would eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. This famous thought experiment doesn't mean to suggest the Bard was no better than a busy baboon; it's designed to show a mathematical truism about the concept of infinity (and how it's, like, literally infinite). Once we stopped trying to wrap our heads around an ever-expanding universe crammed with endlessly replicating macaques and gibbons, we decided to crunch the numbers. What are the odds of mimicking acts of genius by totally random chance?
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