With Pavel Chichikov writing about Hamlet, I thought we needed to counterpoise the poetry with some hard-nosed science.  This is from a report I made a while back.

This just in:  As many of you know, eight billion years ago at the Big Bang, a highly sophisticated scientific experiment was begun in which an infinite number of monkeys were given an infinite number of typewriters to pluck away at, at random, to see if, in fact, given an infinite amount of time, they could produce the play “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare (or Francis Bacon, as some suggest; or a room full of monkeys, perhaps).

Anyway, the results are in and to no one’s surprise the infinite number of monkeys produced an infinite number of “Hamlets”, though some were more “Hamlet-y” than others. For example, one monkey was tooling along nicely with a perfect “Hamlet”, when, in the famous soliloquy, he had the following:”To be or not to beThat is the qwfxxrfrkknnn”and so this version didn’t count, though otherwise this monkey’s “Hamlet” matched Shakespeare’s word-for-word. We also didn’t count the near-Hamlet version that ended with Hamlet and Laertes going at one another with bananas instead of swords. And interestingly, some monkeys wrote “King Lear” and one wrote “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. In fact, there were many transitional plays, or intermediate stages, in which some monkeys produced plays with characters named Hamlet and Gertrude reciting the lines from “Lear”, while other monkeys just sat around scratching themselves, a clear proof of evolution.

But the experiment was not without its surprises, nor its more unnerving moments. The scientists were disturbed early on, in year seven, when entirely at random, one monkey wrote, “Get me out of this room, you sadistic moron. I’m sick and tired of this pointless experiment and I’ve had my fill of typewritters [sic].” Notice how monkeys misspell, (two Ts in “typewriters” – really!) and many of them type, “between you and I”, when they ought to type, “between you and me”, a form of “random affectation”, according to one researcher and grammarian.

The proof of all of this is clearly that anything can happen by chance. In fact, this report was typed entirely by chance, by one of the many many monkeys. It has, therefore, no meaning whatsoever, but is just as good as “Hamlet”, as is what my neighbor monkey typed, “xxd. e=0h0hhkdk vndkhgf[q0edhgnlnvhfhewuh”Oooo. Oooo. Oooo. (scratches self, screeches, exits. End of Act One. Enter Godot.)