There’s an old theory by 19th century scientist Thomas Huxley that states if you let an infinite number of monkeys type on an infinite number of typewriters, they’d eventually come up with a the works of Shakespeare. It’s a great experiment – and now someone has actually carried out a version of it.
Researchers at Plymouth University in England put a computer into the monkey enclosure at a local zoo for one month, and waited to see what would happen. The result? After thirty days, the macaques failed to produce even one legible word. Instead, they seemed fixated on the letter ‘s’, eventually producing five pages consisting mostly of that member of the alphabet, but also including the occasional A, J, L and M.
But far from language, the monkeys seemed to treat the computer as hostile. “At first, the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it,” recalls researcher Mike Phillips. “Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard.” (Which makes you wonder if they were running an operating system using Windows.) But the experiment wasn’t a complete dud. “They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened,” Phillips reflects. “There was a level of intention there.”
