monkeys and shakespeare…?

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The SugarFrostedGoodness.com challenge this week is Ape, so I felt this illustration might be appropriate.

I did this a few years ago, as cover art of the Chico News & Review, an alternative weekly in Northern California. CNR was featuring an annual writing contest and wanted their cover image to play off the “Infinite Monkey Theorem.” This theorem states that a monkey (or in this case, apes) hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Sound far-fetched? It may be. However, there are folks that claim they’ve worked it out mathematically. Who am I to argue, I was never good at math.

I wondered why the folks at CNR wanted so many chimps in their illustration. Perhaps it was because of an offshoot of the theorem “An infinite amount of monkeys typing on an infinite amount of typewriters…” or perhaps they mixed the theorem with the “100 Monkey Story.” Another interesting idea.Well, at any rate, it made for a fun project and gave me something to post for the challenge.

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