TLS: On Typing Monkeys

From Haunted technology
by Phil Baker
a review of THE IRON WHIM. A fragmented history of typewriting. By Darren Wershler-Henry. 344pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. $29.95;

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 "dactylographic monkey" to illustrate a mathematical proposition named Kolmogorov's Zero-One Law. According to 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 books 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 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", but there was method in its madness. It was intended to underline the difference between machines and non-metaphorical animals, demonstrating the perils of analogy, the gap between the ideal and the real, and the irreducible otherness of other species. In the words of its designer, Geoff Cox, "monkeys aren't reducible to a random process".