Monkeys Writing Shakespeare

I'm sure you've heard the old theory about setting a hundred monkeys in front of typewriters, letting them peck away indefinitely, and eventually getting the complete works of Shakespeare. Well, somebody is finally doing something about it, and from the much-maligned "Old Europe," no less.

Searching for Signs of Shakespeare
By Kevin Canfield
Poets & Writers, May/June 2005

Most writers have heard the old saying about the Bard and the chimps: Gather 100 monkeys (or similarly hirsute primates) in a room, give them typewriters, and sooner or (more likely) later, they’ll deliver the complete works of Shakespeare. Nick Hoggard, a British computer programmer living in Sweden, has decided to put the theory—often attributed to Thomas Huxley, a 19th-century disciple of Charles Darwin—to the test.

Hoggard designed “The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator,” which can be found online at www.aardasnails.com, to find out how many lines of Shakespeare a group of hypothetical simians could come up with if given a limitless amount of time.

“I got the idea from the SETI@home software, which examines radio waves for signs of extraterrestrial life,” Hoggard says. “I thought I would apply the same idea to examine random rubbish that monkeys type for signs of Shakespeare.”

Hoggard explains on the Web site that the simulation “is based on a random number generator to generate random keystrokes.” In other words, it’s a computer program based entirely on chance.

So, how much Shakespeare can monkeys write? The answer, it turns out, is not much. Over the course of billions of cyber-years—the simulator runs at a highly accelerated rate in the hopes that it “creates interesting results in our lifetimes”—the cyber-monkeys’ best showing is a match of 23 words from Timon of Athens.

Yes, but if you use a particularly literate set of monkeys, they'll eventually produce Pamela Anderson's Star.