Past the infinite of thought

I would have thought, had I been asked, that you couldn’t go wrong with a news story that starts as follows:

Lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth wanted to test the claim that an infinite number of monkeys given typewriters would create the works of The Bard.

As usual, I would have been wrong.

The story (from last year, but somehow it passed me by) ran with the curious idea that a month-long experiment involving six monkeys being left alone with a computer somehow proves that the famous (and idle) gedankenexperiment is wrong.

Six monkeys. For a month. The news item rather charmingly suggests that in the course of the month, the monkeys moved on from their basic keyboard repertoire (the letter S) to more daring flights of prose (mainly involving A, J, L and M). Nearly there already, I’d say.

I do like the idea that after a month the researchers threw up their hands in the air and exlaimed “Pah! They’ll never do it!”

I suppose that nobody these days has the patience to conduct an infinitely long experiment, although recently I’ve been feeling that projects can go on forever (hence incidentally the quietness in these here parts).

At least one good thing has come out of this; in order to get the right title for this post, I had to track down a good Shakespeare concordance. All’s well that ends well, eh?