It is a commonplace of elementary statistical expostion,
that if a million monkeys typed continuously for a million years, one of them
might wind up typing-out the complete works of Shakespeare, or at least Hamlet
(a simian favorite, to believe the expositors), or at least “To be or not to be”,
or “fretful porpentine”. Only,
nobody has ever actually run the experiment. Until now.
Using the vast wealth at our disposal (which we came clean
about here; the expense in
bananas alone would wreck a
typical European economy), we assembled a team of a billion chimps
(substituting them for monkeys, since monkeys -- bless their little hearts and
tails -- are lousy at touch-typing), and allowed them to type at random, for a
billion years (measured by the internal metric; we used a Poincaré transformation to depress that time into a supertask; viewed externally, the entire
experiment took place while we were out at our usual three-martini lunch).
What then was our surprise, that in the time generously
provided, not a single one of those flea-scratching hominidae managed to come up with so much as Two
Gentlemen of Verona, let alone Hamlet or Lear. In fact, those banana-nomming beggars
never even made it as far as “fretful porpentine” (one of them did type “fragrant porcupine”: close, but no cigar). As scientists, we must ask: How can this astonishing result be
explained?
The answer is surprising in itself: It turns out that chimps, like
all the Great Apes, simply do not appreciate Shakespeare. In fact, they are weak on the
Elizabethans across the board.
On the other hand, it turns out that, like most infrahuman
imbecillidae, they are avid readers of People magazine, and quickly
typed out (seemingly from memory) most of the back-issues of that noted
grocery-checkout periodical.
Indeed, sources suggest that most of the articles in that journal are simply written by chimps in the
first place. No wonder they could
type them from memory!
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