Expected time for the whole troop
—
The troop
One cell per monkey — every one of them is really being simulated. Dark means nothing doing. The brighter a cell, the more of your phrase that monkey has just typed by accident. The bright flickers are near misses.
Best anyone has managed
—
The front row
Eight of them up close, live. Drop the speed back to 1× if you want to read along.
Where that number comes from
This phrase
- Length
- —
- Probability at any one spot
- —
- Expected characters, one monkey
- —
- Expected key strikes
- —
- Overlap set
- —
- Overlap penalty
- —
- Median time
- —
- 90% certain by
- —
Where the difficulty is
Each character's probability on this keyboard. Taller is rarer.
What a bigger troop buys you
The keyboard they are bashing
- Strikes that emit a character
- —
- Strikes that hit Shift
- —
- Strikes on a dead key
- —
- Strikes that miss entirely
- —
So is QWERTY any good?
The monkeys are the excuse. This is the actual question. Same keyboard, same key sizes, same everything — just the letters moved around. Each arrangement gets judged twice: how easily a monkey blunders into your phrase, and how a person would fare typing English on it. Green is the winner in each column.
| Layout | Monkey difficulty | Home row | Travel | Alternation | Same finger | Effort |
|---|
The paper
The whole thing written up properly: how the model works, the proofs, two
independent checks that the maths is right, and a straight account of what
it gets wrong. It starts gently and gets progressively more serious —
read as far as you like. Rendered live from
paper/monkeys-typing.md, so there is no second copy to drift.