[CarolinaGuitarman]

"A famous evolutionist once famously said that a monkey typing randomly would eventually pound out Macbeth."

If he is so famous, do tell us who *He* is.

"Someone with a bit more understanding of combinatorics did an actual calculation. I don't remember the details off hand, but it went something like the following. If you filled the entire known universe with one monkey per cubic yard and had them type randomly at a very high rate for the entire known age of the universe, chances are vanishingly small that they would ever get past the first page of Macbeth."

He's an idiot. You can't make a probability calculation on a process you have don't understand. It's impossible.

"By the way, I scored a 4.0 in Probability and Statistics as an undergrad -- not bad for someone with "NO clue about probability"! I believe I was in the top one or two of a class of around 60. That was a while ago, however."

You need to get your money back; you were swindled.

[PatrickHenry]

The monkeys could end up typing some really neat stuff, if they were programmed to keep English words intact once they typed them, and then clauses, sentences, etc. In other words, if their typing followed rules, like organic chemistry does, they'd soon be working with coherent sub-assemblies, then whole sentences, etc. It might not result in Shakespeare, but then, if the earth were started all over again, the biosphere probably wouldn't look much like ours. But it would really be hopping.