Monkeys will not be able to type the complete works of William Shakespeare, or even a short book, before the death of the universe, a new study suggests.

Monkeys intent on recreating Shakespeare would also need editors, with a strict reinforcement training regimen that allowed for learning — and a lot of it, since Dr. Woodcock set each monkey’s ...

But the chances of a monkey succeeding in typing even a short phrase quickly become vanishingly small, with the phrase “I chimp, therefore I am” coming in at one in 10 million billion billion.