Star Trek and The Infinite Monkey Theorem

Last night my roommate Jake and I watched an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Hide and Q, in which Captain Picard quotes Hamlet to illustrate his faith in the promise of mankind:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in
faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an
angel! in apprehension how like a god!
(Ham.II.2.312-315)

While Picard acknowledged that Hamlet may have used the words with cynicism, Picard used them with reverence. It was a good Patrick Stewart moment.

You’re probably wondering what this has to do with infinite monkeys.

A monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Heard this before? It’s Wikipedia’s restatement of the classic Infinite Monkey Theorem. Last night Jake recited it to me, using Hamlet as the “chosen text.” He said he’d had a revelation:

“Apparently,” he said, “that theory is true. Because if you think about it, someone (God; evolution) did put a bunch of monkeys together (on Earth) and one of them (William Shakespeare) did eventually write Hamlet.”

Ha. He’s right. Look at humans as monkeys and one of them did write Hamlet. Brilliant. Although the Theorem is really supposed to illustrate a statistical concept that random keystrokes will eventually re-create Hamlet, the allegory itself has become so independent of its original point that Jake’s observation gives it new meaning:

If you leave a bunch of intelligent creatures together for long enough, at least one of them will produce something wonderful.

Looking at it that way, I get a good feeling about the future of mankind. Don’t you? I guess Picard wasn’t the only one.

Photo by law_keven.