3. Sir Arthur Eddington once stated that "If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were...

3. Sir Arthur Eddington once stated that "If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum." Yet the statement is tremendously misleading once one considers the very large numbers of possible combinations involved. Making reasonable assumptions, estimate the probability (expressed as a number of the form 10-4) that a single monkey will correctly type out every character in one book in the age of the universe. The resulting probability is extraordinarily small, so that the answer to whether a monkey could type out a single book, much less a whole library, should be "effectively never."