Shakespear and the Monkeys

[comeng]

Suppose most of you have heard the story. Given enough monkeys in a room with enough typewriters(for those too young to remember a mechanical device for putting ink on paper) then eventually you will get the complete works of Shakespear. Now being the perverse sort of type I had always wondered what had happened to the reject material. Today unfortunately I found some of it masquerading as a PLC program. Maybe there is a PLC law in there somewhere TGIF

[TConnolly]

The people in our factory in France used to call one of our former programmers "le especiallist du spaghetti."

[pseudoquas]

In May 2003, some researchers at England's Plymouth University announced they had put the old chimpanzee-typewriter adage to the test. At the Paignton Zoo, they gave a computer to six Sulawesi crested macaques for a month, to see how they would use it. Most of the time the monkeys ignored it, preferring to play with each other and the other toys in the cage, except to sit on the keyboard, urinate and defecate on it; finally one smashed the keyboard with a rock. Only one used it properly, producing five pages of unintelligible text by repeatedly typing the letter "S." -Reuters