I’m sure you’re familiar with the old saw “put a thousand monkeys in a room with a typewriter and eventually come up with Shakespeare.” It’s basically the working model for hiring screenwriters in Hollywood (which explains how ABC came up with that Geico Caveman show idea)
Aaaaaanyway, it’s not working out quite as well as first thought. Some researchers in England got a grant to put a typewriter into a habitat of six macacques at the Devon Zoo for a month and monitor the results. The macacques did seem to like to press the letter “S” more than the others and did eventually type five pages of gibberish (which were immediately overnighted to Paramount), but nothing the remotest bit Shakesperean. They also flung the typewriter around and defecated on the keyboard, demonstrating advanced managerial skills.
The flaw in their experiment design, obviously, was not enough monkeys, but I suppose one must make do with the grant money one has.
There used to be a website called “The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator”, but it doesn’t exist anymore. As they say in academic circles, “more research is needed.”
Oh, and today, by the way, is the traditional day for celebrating the birthday of William Shakespeare himself, even though the date is now considered inaccurate. The day has been credited due to an Elizabethan tradition (now discounted by historians) of baptizing infants three days after birth and documented proof that Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564. It also aligns tidily with the date of his death, which DID occur on April 23, 1616.
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