Let’s say an infinite number of monkeys could sit in front of keyboards and type for an infinite amount of time. Would they eventually produce, by pure chance, all of William Shakespeare’s works? That’s the question at the heart of the infinite monkey theorem, introduced in 1913 by a French mathematician. Since then, researchers have put the idea to the test in various ways. In 2003, for example, an experiment with typing monkeys found they mostly produced a string of the letter S. Now a new paper by Australian mathematicians argues that even with billions of monkeys typing for billions of years, they’d never come close. The odds of randomly typing “bananas” are just 1 in 22 billion, they say, concluding that the universe would expire before the monkeys could type a faithful reproduction of Curious George, let alone Hamlet. “It is not plausible that, even with possible improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations,” the authors explain, “. . . that monkey labor will ever be a viable tool for developing written works of anything beyond the trivial.”