Most writers know about the idea that an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters could turn our the works of Shakespeare if given enough time. Douglas Adams riffed on the idea in a passage in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. My first web publishing projects — an ezine I started in 1997 — went under the name of Infinite Monkeys Press. As it turns out, Jesse Anderson is using random text generation to simulate those monkeys. As of last Saturday, at 2:30 Pacific Standard Time, the virtual monkeys successfully turned out Shakespeares A Lover’s Complaint.  

It was nonsequential — the project tracked each Shakespeare-congruent sentence and collated them. So don’t worry. They won’t be able to replace competent writers with monkeys just yet. Thanks for listenening.