1000 Monkeys

We've all heard that saying that sit 1000 monkeys in front of 1000 typewriters and eventually they will write the full works of Shakespeare.

Well.....I think it's a load of rubbish.  For starters I don't think they would know what to do when they come to the end of a piece of paper.  However, what is possible the following:

'Give a man XXXX bags of alphabites and he will be able to reproduce the full works of Shakespeare'

The key is working out the number of bags required.

This is not just made up rubbish, there is substance to this theory.  I have dedicated years of my life (well, about a week and a half) to find that magic number.

Firstly, you need to find how many words make up the full works of Shakespeare.  From extensive research I found two very different answers to the question.  One was from a website: http://www.opensourceshakespeare.com/ which told me the answer was 884429.  To check this was true I asked 1000 monkeys to confirm.  They told me the answer was 12 so I went with the website. 

Next step, was to work out how many letters this was.  As I could not find an answer for this I decided to use all my years of mathematical training to calculate the answer.  I used a method know as 'guessing' in which I decided the average word length in Shakespeare is about 5.2 letters long. So:

884429x5.2=4599030.8  We'll round it to 4599031

The next shocked me.  I went to buy some alphabites to further my research to find that they no longer exist.  Oh well, I'll use alphabetti spaghetti.  So, I bought 10 tins of alphabetti spaghetti and headed home to count the letters.

From these tins of alphabetti spaghetti it is possible to say your average tin has about 60 letters, with a decent mix of characters.  If we do simple maths we can see that the minimum number of tins required would be:

4599031/60 = 76650.5167 or 76651.

Obviously this can not be the correct number as this I relying on the fact that a) my guess at the average word length is correct and b) the letters you get are the exact ones needed.  So more excellent maths (guessing) suggests that to account for these errors it may be a good idea to double the number.....so lets say 150000 and then maybe a few more to be safe.....200000

So.....after much research, my theory is ready.

'Give a man 200000 tins of alphabetti spaghetti and he will be able to reproduce the full works of Shakespeare'