T his from our iYou Gotta Be Kiddingi department: According to a Wired News report, researchers in England put a PC in a cage with 6 macaque monkeys to test the theory that such a setup would (eventually) produce a work of Shakespeare. After a month the monkeys did a lot of things to the keyboard, but failed to pound out even a stanza, a plot outline, or even a single line in iambic pentameter. Indeed, the erstwhile Nobel Prize (literature) hopefuls eschewed selecting even a single vowel. From Wired:
"They pressed a lot of Sis," researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. "Obviously, English isnit their first language."
A group of faculty and students in the universityis media program left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques. Then, they waited.
At first, said Phillips, "the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.
"Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard," added Phillips, who runs the universityis Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.
The experiment wasnit a total loss, however. The researcher explains:
Phillips said the experiment showed that monkeys "are not random generators. Theyire more complex than that.
"They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there."
Read the full story at Wired News.