Monkeys on Typewriters!

You probably have all heard once or another the statement that an large number of monkeys typing randomly would eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare. Yesterday for some reason I started wondering about the origin of this statement; I had a vague idea that it was Arthur Stanley Eddington. Looking into Wikipedia, however, I found out that the original quote is from Emile Borel. Eddington repeated the image a few years later and probably contributed to its popularity, although he used "all the books in the British Museum" instead of the works of Shakespeare.

But I wouldn't be writing this post if I hadn't found something more interesting at the Wikipedia article -the experiment has been actually tried! In 2003, at the Paignton Zoo in England. The results after one month of leaving a computer inside the monkeys' cage were not encouraging:

At first, said Phillips, "the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.

"Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard," added Phillips, who runs the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.

Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S.

If anything, this proves that 1 Month is much less than Infinity. Perhaps with some more time they would have reached the level of It was the blurst of times....".

You can read the PDF for the full text created by the monkeys here. Photos of the authors are included