From the BBC: Monkeys will never type Shakespeare, study finds.
Not directly related to the Cipher Challenge, I grant you, but its news with the marvellous lede:
Two Australian mathematicians have called into question an old adage, that if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare.
If mathematicians call it into question then the adage really is in trouble! I am pretty sure it is an idea that only a mathematician would have come up with in the first place. Anyway it is a little bit related to cryptography as the calculations are related to the ones you would do to work out the time it would take to break a cipher by brute force, so unless you can come up with a really ingenious way to speed up the monkeys, I guess this says you will need to do something a little cleverer!
No-one ever turns this around and asks how many Shakespeare’s would it take to eat a banana, but then that is probably because he would never have seen one. He died almost exactly 17 years before they were first brought to the UK. The botanist and merchant Thomas Johnson displayed the first bunch in his Holborn shop on April 10th 1633. Strange to think how something so ordinary was once so exotic.
While we are waiting for Challenge 4 to start, why not start a thread over on the forum to discuss this article. How many monkeys do you think it would take?