Following up on our earlier report on Borges’ Library of Babel, we have a rather more discouraging note from the Dept. of Combinatorics. It is a well-known truism, often attributed to T.H. Huxley (and, for that reason, often attacked by creationists as if it meant something) that a sufficiently large number of monkeys, given sufficient time and sufficient typewriter ribbon, would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

Various probabilistic approaches have been made in an attempt to determine the required quantities of monkeys, time, and ribbon, but a recent small-scale experiment with nine monkeys suggests that the analysis may be less straightforward: the subjects of the experiment did not, in fact, type randomly, and their longest typed “utterances” consisted largely of the letter S. (It is worth noting, however, that the monkeys in question were provided not with a typewriter but with a word processor.)