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 No one has, as far as I know, yet claimed that if you take an infinite number of wise monkeys and divide them into three groups they will eventually neither see a production of Hamlet, nor hear a production of Hamlet nor, for that matter, even talk loudly about a production of Hamlet during the quieter bits.
Someone has, however, recently achieved the other end of the process: yes, researchers at Plymouth University in England just the other week reported on the results of an experiment in which they actually managed to get an infinite, and statistically representative, sample of monkeys to type on an infinite number of computers for an infinite number of years having, presumably got themselves an infinite research grant, and now these researchers just have the relatively trivial task of wading through the infinite amount of output to find Bacon's signature at the end of.....
Oh sorry I've just been handed a note....
[rustle, rustle] ....
Oh!.... and now I'd like to read that last paragraph again.
Researchers at Plymouth University in England just the other week reported on the results of an experiment in which they gave six monkeys one computer for one month. I have no information on the size of their grant, but surprisingly its source seems to have been Britain's Arts Council rather than a more reputable scientific body, which probably explains the fact that the result was total gibberish (and isn't it a sad indictment of the state of the Arts in Britain, that it didn't even get the Turner Prize), however the fascination generated by the concept of the multiple monkeys typing more than makes up for the mild disappointment of their not, in this case, exactly existing.
The famous 'monkey argument' seems to go back to a debate on the theory of evolution between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in the year 1860---now I use the word 'seems' with good reason because the typing monkeys have this overwhelming tendency to get more elusive the closer you get to them. Even the number of the monkeys is in dispute--popular imagination putting them as high as an infinite number, which seems a bit extreme, and then there is the vexed question of just what it is that they are typing--Shakespeare, everything in the British Museum Library, absolutely everything there is: in fact about the only thing that seems constant is the time, which also tends towards the infinite. I mean it's so bad that the author is sometimes even put as Aldous Huxley---only missing Thomas by a couple of generations, which I suppose, if you think about it, is nothing when you are dealing with all those infinities.
Well.
As far as I can make out the most compelling claim for being the original version of the argument, is that Thomas Huxley put forward as a parable of the creative potential of long periods of time, that six eternal apes typing on six eternal typewriters with unlimited amounts of paper and ink could, given enough time, produce a Psalm, a Shakespearean sonnet, or even a whole book, purely by chance that is, by random striking of the keys. He also may well have specified the 23rd Psalm as a monkey-product, or rather ape-product, because that's another interesting point that Huxley almost certainly spoke of randomly typing APES rather than the received version's somewhat less anthropoid monkeys.
So now it seems straightforward enough, doesn't it---we have a place (which turns out to be Oxford), we have the persons involved; the reason; and a precise date of June 30th 1860---and it's all reported in letters that are pretty well contemporary---however, and this may or may not be a big however (depending on just how reliable the Oxford English Dictionary is at this point), but according to the OED, the first attestation of the word 'type-writer' isn't until 18751
Cheerio for now
from Richard Howland-Bolton
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Notes:
Here's a Beeb bit on it! And I should point out that the Beeb has a pull quote attributed to 'Dr Amy Plowman, Paignton Zoo scientific officer' that claims she said
"The work was interesting but had little scientific value, except to show that the 'infinite monkey' theory is flawed".
I do hope that the unfortunate Dr Amy was misquoted because if that really represented her thoughts then science in Paignton Zoo can't be doing too well. Of course the work did no such thing. If anything it merely demonstrated that infinity is a hell of a lot bigger than one month. 1 a later edition (on-line) of the OED brings it a bit closer, but cigarlessly though:
"1868 C. L. SHOLES et al. U.S. Patent 79,265 23 June 4 Thus made, the type-writer is the simplest, most perfectly adapted to its work.
1875 KNIGHT Dict. Mech. s.v., The Sholes type-writer..is about the size of the sewing-machine, and is worked with keys arranged in four banks or rows."
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