Wednesday, July 09, 2008

A million monkeys at a million typewriters

Five years ago, researchers at Paignton Zoo in England gave six Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys a computer for four weeks to see what they would do.

Mathematicians assure us that given time, those monkeys eventually would produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. They even have a name for this. It's called the Infinite Monkey Theorem.

These monkeys didn't deliver the goods. Shakespeare remains unduplicated.

Instead, you will note that they produced a copy of "Jane Eyre" in just under 10 minutes. (Well, not really. They produced pages of the letter S, which is still an improvement over Bronte's book.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Silly researchers.

If they want to see what happens when an infinite number of monkeys have an infinite number of keyboards and an infinite amount of spare time, all they need to do is go to any blog search engine and start clicking.