Of course, remember in all this we a dealing with ideal monkeys, not real monkeys. An experimental test of the idea did not turn out too well:
Given an infinite number of monkeys typing at an infinite number of keyboards, will we reproduce Shakespeare?
The World Wide Web has been around since 1993 and ARPAnet predating even this. In that time we seen the advent had instant messaging, message boards, chat rooms, profiles, dating sites, and personal blogs. We’ve all read through most of these.
So yeah…my vote is no.
Randomness can be accomplished by a peripheral most of us likely don’t have at home - a hardware random number generator.
I would think the supercomputers of the world are busy enough trying to predict the weather, and other more useful problems.
Besides, if they did prove or disprove the monkey-shakespeare conjecture, what good would it do? About all they could garner from the study is, “Hmm, that’s cool”.
I’m concerned about all of these monkeys in a corporate or academic setting. Will they be using the employee or student washrooms?
I was aware of these, every now and then ERNIE sends me £50 (I’ve not won any more than that, yet) National Savings (who run ERNIE) make the point that ERNIE is not a computer.
OK. But if your resources are limited to a single Universe full of monkeys typing for the entire age of the Universe I’m guessing (I don’t know where to start on the sums) that you’ll still have a few typos in the sonnets.
I don’t know what ERNIE is but I said that it was a peripheral. Some of them, however, do preprocessing byte conversions - which is a computation. Aside from that, you wouldn’t call your mouse a computer, but it is part of your computer (as it is known in the common sense - not sure where your point came from). But if you demand a hardware RNG be on a cpu, then I should point out that some intel chipsents have them onboard, so in your sense they can be computers. (Although they are perhaps not truly random, they could be).
It’s not a peripheral. It’s a standalone unit which generates random numbers using the thermal noise which exists in semiconductor devices. It’s not a cimputer in the sense that it’s a nondeterministic device (the outcome of its output is not decided in advance by an algorithm), and it is not capable of being programmed to do anything else. It’s as much a computer or a peripheral as a vacuum cleaner is.
alterego ERNIE gets a mention in your link. It’s the device that generates the winning premium-bond numbers. I was dimly aware that some chips did (or would soon have) hardware random number generators, so maybe computers can do random. They still can’t do infinity.
Certainly the time available for the monkeys to type in the real Universe is not infinite, due to the build up of entropy.
Just checking in because I’ve found that textbook I referred to earlier in the thread. It talks about ‘claude shannon’ doing work on computerizing the monkeys and trying to make random output more english-like without specifically copying huge swaths of input text ‘in the late 1940s’
The name given to the problem, which was what I was really looking for, is ‘travesty’ 
But, really, isn’t that a primary motivator of science?
And, just for laughs, here’s my favorite statement on the issue. From Steve Goodman:
“The law of averages says anything will happen that can.
But the last time the Cubs won the National League pennant
Was the year we dropped the bomb on Japan.”
Sure they can, if they’re programmed for it. Computer algebra systems like Maple will quite happily process computations involving infinity. I can take an integral from 0 to infinity, for example, or a limit as x goes to infinity, and I can even get infinity as a result of some of these calculations. Anything that humans can do according to a set of logical rules, computers can be programmed to do using those same logical rules. And humans can logically work with infinity, and so can computers.
It’s as much of a peripheral as your keyboard, your mouse, or an external hard drive. Let’s check the common wisdom:
Yep, that’s a fit.
What about some of the definitions from a google search for define peripheral?
Fit.
Fit.
Fit.
Fit.
Fit.
Fit.
Fit.
Fit.
Fit.
Fit.
Fit.
Fit.
Yes, that’s nice. And, you’d be absulutely right if ERNIE were connected to a computer. It is not.
If ERNIE is not connected to a computer, how do you suppose they get numbers out of it. Hmm.
Yes, there’s absolutely no way to get data out of a device without attaching it to a computer. It’s a real pain in the ass when I want to program my VCR, since I have to lug my desktop PC and monitor over to the entertainment center. Too bad it can’t display menus and stored programs, I dunno, right on the TV screen or something.
Oh, wait…
You are putting your foot in your mouth.
Let’s see if your VCR is a computer (google define:computer)
Yep.
Most definitely.
Yuppers.
Yop.
Now you’re just being silly.
In that case, lets all retire to our mp3 players, and listen about what can be done with a large, but finite number of monkeys (~1/2 way down).