"We've all heard that a million monkeys
banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of
Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know that it's not true."
--Robert Silensky
You know, the thing that folks don’t realize with this little quote is all the
“near misses”. Sure eventually they’ll create the entire works of
Shakespeare, but in the mean time, they will also produce them several times
over with minor and major typos. Sometimes they will even produce them with
text missing. Occasionally they will even produce them with brand new
scenes – better than those that Shakespeare wrote.
Those marvelous monkeys will even produce them in various languages, Latin,
German, Olde English, Dutch, Pennsylvania Dutch, Swahili, maybe even French.
And another benefit is that the monkeys aren’t trying to produce Shakespeare.
They’re not trying to produce anything. So as a result, they’ll
probably produce a number of other useful and entertaining documents. For
instance they could write any or all of the following, just remember now, they
might need some additional minor editing:
Greeting cards for Hallmark
A sequel that is better than the original
Telemarketing scripts that don’t sound canned
An episode of Three’s Company worth watching
If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit
The Absolute Final Installment of the Halloween Series
Al Gore’s concession speech
A Billo-Rant worthy or your fine mind
An intelligent Oscar acceptance speech
I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinski
A non-racist Spike Lee film
They could write a Middle East peace accord that everyone is happy with
A better Operating System than Windows, Unix or MAC (and they said it couldn’t be done)
I don’t know about you, but it sounds to me like the world would be a better
place if we got these monkeys working. Even if they just got us to the rough
draft phase. Sure every now and then they would produce a
“Waterworld” but I
think that the benefits outweigh the risks on this one.
And if the animal rights people don’t like the idea, then maybe the first
project the monkeys work on is writing a Virtual Monkey computer program,
which would simulate
Millions of Monkeys all at once. Of course that
could put government workers out of jobs, but as I mentioned, that is one of
the risks.
