[wordup] Typing monkeys, but no Shakespeare

[Adam Shand]

From: http://www.msnbc.com/news/911508.asp?0si=-&cp1=1

Typing monkeys, but no Shakespeare
Associated Press

Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, 
the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of 
Shakespeare. Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will 
make a mess.

RESEARCHERS AT Plymouth University in England reported this week that 
primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to 
produce a single word.

"They pressed a lot of S's," researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. 
"Obviously, English isn't their first language."

In a project intended more as performance art than scientific 
experiment, faculty and students in the university's media program left 
a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, 
home to six Sulawesi crested macaques.

Then, they waited.

At first, said Phillips, "the lead male got a stone and started bashing 
the hell out of it.

"Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating 
all over the keyboard," added Phillips, who runs the university's 
Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.

Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan 
produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, 
the letters A, J, L and M crept in.

The notion that monkeys typing at random will eventually produce 
literature is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, a 19th-century 
scientist who supported Charles Darwin's theories of evolution. 
Mathematicians have also used it to illustrate concepts of chance.

The Plymouth experiment was funded by England's Arts Council and part of 
the Vivaria Project, which plans to install computers in zoos across 
Europe to study differences between animal and artificial life.

Phillips said the results showed that monkeys "are not random 
generators. They're more complex than that.

"They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they 
typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there."

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