Your Friday Monkey Dacker Typists

The Works of Shakespeare, Produced by Millions of 'Amazonian Monkeys'

This weekend, a million monkeys will recreate a work of Shakespeare, claims programmer and technology enthusiast Jesse Anderson.

Virtual monkeys, that is.

Anderson, a development manager and senior software developer in Nevada, is on the cusp of proving the "infinite monkey" theorem — which loosely states that given an infinite amount of time, even a monkey tapping away at a typewriter could produce the works of Shakespeare.

It's a milestone Anderson hopes to reach in a little over a week.

"I think the monkeys will have completed their first work by this Sunday and the rest over the course of the week after that," he told FoxNews.com.

Without access to real monkeys on typewriters, Anderson instead turned to the virtual jungle, creating an army of computerized monkeys with Amazon’s EC2 cloud service. The e-monkeys are programmed to produce gibberish, mimicking a monkey mashing keys on a keyboard, whereby special software then compares these strings of keystrokes with a given bit of text, Anderson explained to FoxNews.com.

 That's a lot better than dealing with real monkeys.

In 2003, scientists at the Paignton Zoo and the University of Plymouth, in Devon, England, reportedly left six Sulawesi Crested Macaque monkeys with a computer keyboard for a month. Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, they began by attacking the keyboard with a stone, then proceeded to urinate and defecate on it.

That reminds me of a short story by the late great R. A. Lafferty, "Been a Long, Long Time", in which an angel, Boshel, who fails to take sides in the great battle between good and evil at the dawn of time is sentenced to exile until a team of six monkeys randomly types out the complete works of Shakespeare, perfectly.  To help keep track of time, he is given a cube of rock a parsec across.  A bird comes by every millennium and takes a swipe with its bill in an attempt to sharpen it.  When the rock is gone, another replaces it.  By the end of the story, the monkey's are sentient, and asking permission to simply type out the manuscripts.