Ok, my newsfeeds are absolutely flooded this morning with news of infinite monkeys typing out the works of Shakespeare. Or, more specifically, not doing that.

The headlines all say basically the same thing — “Chimpanzees will never randomly type the complete works of Shakespeare.“

But if you click through to any (well, most) of these articles, you’ll see what they really mean. And it’s not even really news unless you’ve fundamentally misunderstood the concept of “infinite.”

Take this BBC version of the article:

Two Australian mathematicians have called into question an old adage, that if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare.
…

Which means that while mathematically true, the theorem is “misleading”, they say.

Once upon a time, when we were all small children and first tried to wrap our heads around the concept of infinity, I think we all did the same thing. We all imagined the biggest possible number we could and thought that infinity is kind of like that. That’s all that’s happening here. In this case, we’ve decided to replace “infinity” with “lifespan of the universe.” It’s the adult scientific equivalent of the first-grader who thought “a zillion zillion.”

But the “infinity is just the biggest number you can imagine” argument was wrong then, and it’s still wrong, and scientists know it. Infinity is not a number. This was never a statistical probability problem. You have to think “without limit,” so you can’t treat it as math.

But it’s not an entirely meaningless question. For example, if we say, “Is the monkey guaranteed to write Shakespeare, given infinite time?” the answer is no. There’s no guarantee that our monkey will create all possible sequences, no matter how much time he’s given.

You could also flip the question and ask, “What if I had infinite monkeys?” This changes the question a little bit, because what do we do with the time variable? Infinite monkeys with infinite time could indeed still generate garbage forever. But what if we fixed that other param? What if we said, “An infinite number of monkeys types 50,000 characters.” That number can be whatever you want, but it’s still going to be a fixed and finite number. Now let’s also throw out the trivial “what if they all type the same thing” edge case and say, no repeats. No monkey will type the same 50k characters as another monkey. In that case, yes, one of the monkeys would produce the first 50k characters of Shakespeare’s work. At least, I think so. There’s a reason why scientists still study this stuff.

The introduction of a finite parameter does bring the math back into the realm of interesting, though, and the Australian scientists of the article know this:

There would be a 5% chance that a single chimp would successfully type the word “bananas” in its own lifetime. And the probability of one chimp constructing a random sentence – such as “I chimp, therefore I am” – comes in at one in 10 million billion billion, the research indicates.

That, I think, is more interesting than the catchy headline everybody went with. This gets it back into the realm of actual statistics because we’ve got numbers, not infinities, to work with. In both those examples you have finite monkeys and a finite amount of time. But that’s not as fun, I guess.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/30038654/window-cleaner-portrait-william-shakespeare-worth-200m

This week, I spotted an article in The Sun about a “new” Shakespeare portrait that could be the “first ever”. So you know I’m clicking that.

And my first thought is, “I think I’ve seen that before?” But I can’t quite place it. I remind myself what the Flowers Portrait looks like — nope, that’s not the one.

So I do a reverse Google image search and quickly learn that this has been dubbed the Wadlow Portrait, and now it really rings a bell. I think I’ve corresponded with the owner, in fact. I go search my archives, and sure enough, June 2018, “What’s this about a Wadlow Portrait?“

I had to laugh at the opening disclaimer I wrote, even back then:

I had to double check my archives because sometimes what I think is new, I actually wrote about years ago. But so far the word “Wadlow” doesn’t appear in my archives.

Everything old is new again, it seems! Now I’m checking my archive because I did write about it years ago 🙂

Anyway, that was a nice thread because the owners (I think that’s the right word here. Representatives?) joined the conversation and offered plenty of resources for investigation.

A question dawns on me this time, though, that didn’t the first time. According to the new article, the painting is dated to 1595, when Shakespeare would have been 31. Where does that sit on the timeline? How wealthy was Shakespeare at that point? Would he be sitting for a portrait (and a fancy one at that) at this point in his life/career? I honestly don’t know, I’m asking. I assume that such portraits were expensive, and done only for people who (a) deserved and/or (b) could afford them.

According to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Shakespeare had produced Henry VI Part 1, Henry VI Part 2, Henry VI Part 3, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Titus Andronicus as well as his long poems. None of those plays, obviously are what we today think of as the most popular / famous. His poems at this time are dedicated to his patron, Henry Wriothesley. Would HW have paid for a portrait of Shakespeare at this stage of his career? Would Shakespeare have used his own money, and if he had his own money, would he still have had a patron? I’m honestly asking.

We know that at some point in his career Shakespeare was indeed a very wealthy man, purchasing New Place, one of the largest houses in Stratford. But this was in 1597, a few years after the Wadlow portrait is dated. Would a few extra years have made a significant change in his standing? Several of his most well-known plays (Richard III, Dream, Romeo and Juliet) date to this period.

There is a website Is This Shakespeare? dedicated to the Wadlow portrait. I honestly have no idea. I am neither academic nor historian, just a fascinated fan Whenever there’s a possibility that some new aspect of Shakespeare’s life has been discovered, I’m going to be curious.