It's a question that has plagued mankind ever since the typewriter was invented. Could a million monkeys at a million typewriters produce the complete works of Shakespeare? Well, the answer is possibly. Although, of course, not really.

For you see, an industrious computer chap called Jesse Anderson has managed to replicate what he believes would be the output of monkeys screaming, squawking and bashing on a keyboard, using a piece of code written with the Hadoop programming tool.

Hosting this on the Amazon EC2 platform allowed Anderson to replicate, in part, the great thought experiment of many a monkey-mad scientist. His simian friends have so far replicated 5.5 trillion possible combinations of letters.

And lo! The 'monkeys' have now written some Shakespeare, a poem entitled A Lover's Complaint (Sneak's heard those a few times), and are still munching their way through the rest of his works.

"This is the largest work ever randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere," Anderson said on his blog.

Perhaps we'll end up with new versions of Shakespeare's classic plays with a tech theme: The eBay Merchant of Venice, Spamlet, Apple Macbeth, Much Adobe About Nothing. Any more, let us know below.

26 Sep 2011