Researchers at the University of Stratford in England, were surprised when an experiment that involved highly intelligent capuchin monkeys and a specially adapted typewriter delivered a passage of Shakespeare within its first year.
In the experiment, a typewriter containing 26 letter keys plus 10 numerical digits, was left in the capuchin enclosure at Oxford Zoo. Researchers checking the typed reels on 29th February this year discovered, typed in amongst a batch of typically nonsensical letters, the phrase “too b R n0t 2222 bee”, closely resembling Hamlet’s famous soliloquy.
The experiment is based on the Infinite Monkey Theorum, a concept first proposed in the 1920s by French mathematician Émile Borel by way of illustrating that even though something is technically possible, if it is so infinitesimally unlikely to actually happen then, for the sake of sense, we could dismiss it as impossible.
To illustrate his point, Borel put forward the idea of monkeys randomly hitting keys on a typewriter. Would they eventually type the entire works of Shakespeare, purely by accident? Mathematically, although hugely unlikely, over an infinite period of time – or with infinite moneys – it would happen.
And evidence from the experiment has left both scientists and mathematicians agog. “We used capuchins as they are known to be one of the cleverest primates,” explained Dr Frances Baykon, who led the research. “But even then, we never expected to see actual Shakespearean passages in the results.”
This isn’t the first time researchers have attempted to put the Infinite Monkey Theorum into practice. In in 2003, scientists tried it with six Celebes crested macaques in Devon’s Paignton Zoo. However, these monkeys preferred to bash the keyboard with a stone, or urinate on it.
In 2004, US computer programmer Dan Oliver ran a simulation of the experiment, and after a simulated time of 42 octillion years, his virtual monkeys typed the words “VALENTINE. Cease”, which occur in this order in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona.
But today’s announcement is the first time that real monkeys have typed anything resembling the words of the Bard.
Daniel Bennett, editor of BBC Science Focus, explains: “The thing with probability is that, just because something is incredibly unlikely, it still has a very real chance of happening. We’ve all experienced the thrill of throwing a run of sixes when playing a board game, and this is the same thing, albeit scaled up drastically. Just because the odds are heavily stacked against something, people still put huge bets on it happening.”
And as some scientists have pointed out, this is all nothing new. After all, it was a simian that created the complete works of Shakespeare in the first place.
We hope you enjoyed this feature, which was an April Fools joke from BBC Wildlife.
Main image: a white-headed Capuchin (Cebus Capucinus). © Kryssia Campos/Getty
