Who said: "A million monkeys..."

'We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that it is not true.' - Robert Wilensky (from a speech in 1996).

Wilensky is a Professor at The University of California, Berkeley.

According to the Wikipedia Encyclopeadia, the concept of monkeys typing comes from a 1909 book on probability written by Émile Borel, which introduced the concept of dactylographic monkeys (i.e. monkeys that type). The monkeys in question were never intended to be real, instead the description was intended as a metaphor for an abstract machine that produces a random sequence of letters.

Trivia: A fun page that simulates monkeys typing Shakespeare!

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