In college, I was once forced to read some fictional short story related to Darwin. All I recall is that some scientist placed maybe 100 monkeys each before a typewriter. The hypothesis was that by sheer random typing at the keys, a monkey would eventually bang out a Shakespeare play, IIRC, by total randomness. Although the scientist running the experiment believed the odds were highly against it, one monkey DID! I think the scientist killed himself thinking he had gone mad.
Did anyone else had to read such a story in college, mostlikely? What was the name of this story. I want to say it was in some anthology that may have been entitled “The Descent of Man”?
I found the following post, which might describe your story…
>> Kyla’s signature said:
>>
>>> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
>>> Why do an infinite number of monkeys always want to type
>>> “Hamlet”? What’s wrong with “Macbeth”? Why not something
>>> by Dickens or Poe?
>>> --Tom Knapp
>>
>> There’s a skit by David Ives in “All in the Timing” which is about
>> three monkeys trying to type Hamlet. One of them comes up with “It
>> was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, but trashes it.
>
> There’s a short story I read once, where a statistician tells a friend
> about the monkeys-randomly-typing-Hamlet thing and the friend, in a
> fit of boredom, buys twenty monkeys and twenty typewriters and sticks
> them in his basement to see what happens.
>
> What happens is that each immediately starts typing a different work
> of classic literature, letter perfect.
Then there is this page, which talks about the works of R. A. Lafferty which contains a story about the monkeys, but likely not the one you mentioned: http://www.ansible.demon.co.uk/writing/sfx/sfx092.html
Aha! I think I might’ve found it at this page: http://www2.bc.edu/~boydmb/monkeys.htm
"These are some pieces of writing based on the typing monkeys: Russell Maloney. Inflexible Logic.'' Short story, originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine, 1940, and anthologized in James R. Newman, The World of Mathematics. A gentleman overhears a friend saying we know that if six chimpanzees were to set to work pounding six typewriters at random, they would, in a million years, write all the books in the British Musueum’’ and decides to put it to the test. His friend’s authority: “It may be nonsense, but Sir James Jeans believes it … Jeans or Lancelot Hogben.’’ The chimps type out works by Dickens, Pareto, Donne, Anatole France, Conan Doyle, Galen, Sumerset Maugham, Proust, and so forth. A mathematician from Yale, distraught at this violation of the laws of probability, assassinates the chimpanzees and their patron.”
Sorry, Kyla, that post had nothing to do with you and was at some other board for something or other… hell, I should’ve provided a link, but it was just some archived Usenet thing.
