Dealing with the monkeys
As promised, from “Haunted Technology,” a review by Phil Baker of The Iron Whim: A fragmented history of typewriting, in the June 1, 2007 issue of the Times Literary Supplement (not online):
Sooner or later, Wershler-Henry observes, “anyone writing about typewriting has to deal with the monkeys”: the monkeys, that is, who will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. They appear to derive from a 1909 book on probability by the French mathematician Emile Borel, who invented the image of the “datylographic monkey” to illustrate a mathematical proposition named Kolmogorov’s Zero-One Law. According to the zero-one law, Borel explained, a typewriting monkey would eventually reproduce every single book in the Bibliotheque nationale. Typing monkeys have had their niche in the mathematical imagination ever since. Sometimes they reproduce the Library of Congress, and in a 1940 short story by Russell Maloney, “Inflexible Logic,” the British Library. Overhearing a man explain that six chimpanzees would eventually write all the works in the British Museum, a Mr. Bainbridge sets out to experiment. The experiment works almost too well, with the monkeys producing John Donne’s prose, the memoirs of Queen Marie of Romania, and a monograph on marsh grasses. It remains for his sobering mathematical friend, Mallard, to bring him back to earth: “These chimpanzees will begin to compose gibberish quite soon,” he predicts. “It is bound to happen. Science tells us so.”
More soberingly still, a physics professor at Yale, William R. Bennett, has calculated that if a trillion monkeys typed ten random characters a second, it would still take a trillion times longer than the universe has been in existence just to produce the sentence, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Moving from calculation to experiment, The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, in existence since 2003 with a hundred monkeys typing at a vastly accelerated speed, has produced just nineteen letters from The Two Gentlemen of Verona after 42,162,500,000 billion monkey years: “Valentine. Cease to 1dor:eFLPoFRjWK78aXz …”
An enterprising experiment that involved real monkeys produced even more confounding results, not least because “they get bored and they shit on the keyboard rather than type …”
July 24th, 2007 12:02
I’d actually thought of writing a blog post on just this subject, ie the monkeys Shakespeare hyppothesis, witht he conclusion that, there would not be much in the way of great literature produced. I spose I’ve now some extra ammo if I do still go ahead with the notion.
July 24th, 2007 15:51
[...] Rather poignant, I think. The detail comes from a TLS review of Darren Wershler-Henry’s The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting. More at Golden Rule Jones. Filed under: typewriters, shakespeare, monkeys | [...]
August 29th, 2007 13:38
I have indeed gone ahead with the notion here.
August 29th, 2007 13:39
The I who has indeed gone ahead with it being me.
September 24th, 2007 14:21
Speaking of monkeys at keyboards,(I am one), may I send you a comp review copy of my novel, The Gook Lover?
A glance at my website will explain.
If you are interested, email a P.O.Box address.
Thanks.