In order to reproduce Shakespeare, what has to happen first? Ready? Gather your monkeys and sit them in front of a keyboard. There are 26 letters, 10 numbers, 1 space, and 8 (that I could see) punctuation marks. That’s 6 million characters, consisting of letters, numbers, the space, and punctuation. Which is close enough to 6 million for anybody. And let’s not forget punctuation, which is roughly 10% of his published work (scientifically estimated by glancing at Act IV of The Tempest). Instead we’ll use the average word length in English (in Shakespeare’s day): it was 5 letters. We could count all the letters in those 884,647 words, but that would take too long (I don’t have the files at hand). Each word consists of letters, there being in English 26 of them: to make less work for our monkeys, we’ll assume case insensitivity: capitals, lower case, all the same to us. There are no spaces in Chinese and Japanese, for example. Now, each, or nearly each, word Shakespeare wrote was accompanied by a space, this being a peculiarity of English. If Will wrote columns, 884,647 words would fill about 1,100 columns.Īnd if he wrote one column per day, then it would only take three years to have an oeuvre. A standard newspaper-style column, of the kind you read at websites such as this, is 800 words. Separating the words are headings, themselves comprised of words and numbers.Īccording to Bennett, Briggs (no relation), and Triola, Shakespeare penned 884,647 words, which isn’t as many as you would think. In experiments conducted by your author, I can tell you the answer is eleven, but you have to press hard.Ī typewritten work is composed, of course, of words, and in between those words are spaces and the occasional punctuation. If that is, we knew how many monkeys would fit in a standard barrel. Once we know that, we can answer how long it would take a barrelful. How long would it take a monkey typing randomly to reproduce the completes works of William (great name, incidentally) Shakespeare? At the bottom of Fred’s piece, there appears a rough calculation, which I expand here. This article, which originally appeared, was inspired by reading Fredwin On Evolution, as wisely suggested by reader Bob Ludwick.
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