"The Bible is a remarkable fountain: the more one draws and drinks of it, the more it stimulates thirst."
- Martin Luther
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
There is a discussion of the typewriting monkey issue at Cafe Hayek, citing a wikipedia article on the subject:
In 2003, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Sulawesi Crested Macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon in England for a month, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website. One researcher, Mike Phillips, defended the expenditure as being cheaper than reality TV and still "very stimulating and fascinating viewing".[24]
Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages[25] consisting largely of the letter S, the lead male began by "bashing the hell out of" the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it. The zoo's scientific officer remarked that the experiment had "little scientific value, except to show that the 'infinite monkey' theory is flawed".
On a totally unrelated subject-- how is that novel coming along, Jared?
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Comments on "Monkeys at the Typewriter":
2. Alan
- 05/09/2007 3:59 pm CDT
Well, if that's the problem, just come back to Texas for a few days and we'll get it taken care of.
3. roy
- 05/09/2007 7:32 pm CDT
'bout time somebody spent some real moola on that theory. What we got is data. I think it's gonna take a lot more typewriters (and a bit of cleaning), but even then I don't expect folks to give up on the idea those monks will eventually produce one of Shakespere's plays.
Constipation comes to mind.