Infinite Monkey Theorem in Popular Culture - Literature

Literature

• 1940 — In "Inflexible Logic" by Russell Maloney, a short story that appeared in The New Yorker, the protagonist felt that his wealth put him under an obligation to support the sciences, and so he tested the theory. His monkeys immediately set to work typing, without error, classics of fiction and nonfiction. The rich man was amused to see unexpurgated versions of Samuel Pepys' diaries, of which he owned only a copy of a bowdlerised edition.
• 1941 — Jorge Luis Borges' "The Library of Babel" (1941) depicts a library which contains books consisting of every single possible permutation of characters. The narrator notes that every great work of literature is contained in the library; but these are outnumbered by the flawed works (which are themselves vastly outnumbered by works of pure gibberish). No monkeys are involved, though the monkey analogy is mentioned by Borges in his earlier 1939 essay 'The Total Library', and a scene from the story does involve the thought that inhabitants of the library could construct books at random:

  "…all men should juggle letters and symbols until they constructed, by an improbable gift of chance, these canonical books".

• 1967 - In the first act of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard, Guildenstern muses that "If six monkeys were thrown up in the air for long enough they would land on their tails about as often as they would land on their heads"
• 1970 — A humorous short story by R. A. Lafferty, "Been a Long, Long Time" (Fantastic, December), tells the story of an angel who is punished by having to supervise (for trillions of years) randomly-typing monkeys who are attempting to produce a perfect copy of the collected works of Shakespeare.
• 1979 — In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio broadcast in 1978), Arthur, while under the effects of the Infinite Improbability Drive, discovers an infinite number of monkeys and tells Ford of their intentions:

  ""Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.""

• 1979 — Michael Ende's The Neverending Story included a chapter in which madmen play a game with some dice with alphabetic characters carved on the faces. The dice are thrown and mostly form gibberish. Sometimes, however, a coherent word or sentence will be formed, and eventually all the stories of the world will appear in this game. This is essentially the Infinite Monkey Theorem in its purest form. The Neverending Story describes in another chapter the "Temple of a Thousand Doors", similar to Borges' "The Library of Babel".
• 1987 — In the one-act play Words, Words, Words by David Ives, three monkeys named Milton, Swift, and Kafka have been confined to a cage by a Dr Rosenbaum, who has the hypothesis:

  "Three monkeys hitting keys at random on typewriters for an infinite amount of time will almost surely produce Hamlet ".

  The play's humour mainly involves literary references, including moments when the random typing produces passages from great works of literature. The play premiered in January 1987, and is still being performed over 20 years later.
• 1996 — In Jim Cowan's short story "The Spade of Reason" (published in Century 4, 1996), the main character seeks to find meaning in the universe through text randomly generated through various means; the original program he uses to do so is something he dubs the "Motorola Monkey".
• 2003 — In J. M. Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello (2003) Elizabeth Costello's son John thinks:

  "Sleep, he thinks, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. What an extraordinary way of putting it! Not all the monkeys in the world picking away at typewriters all their lives would come up with those words in that arrangement."