I don’t know who it was that first talked about the possibility of monkeys typing randomly on typewriters producing Hamlet entirely by chance, but it is an argument that I have often heard. “Sure it’s unlikely,” I’m told, “but given enough time and enough monkeys, it would happen.”

This argument is actually quite sound — given enough time and enough monkeys, one could eventually produce “Hamlet” by accident. The fact that it is intuitively sound is the argument’s greatest problem, because it means that people generally don’t bother checking the exact figures. This is a shame, because it is one of those rare areas of speculation where the exact figures can be calculated.

The Mathematics of Monkeys and Shakespeare,
 by The Famous Brett Watson

A fascinating explanation of why you might get the word “Ook” from an thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters, but getting “To be or not to be, that is the question”, much less the entirety of Hamlet, just ain’t going to happen.

Go read it, it makes the mathematics of unimaginably large numbers fun.

RodeoClown: is aware of the study with orangutans and computers.