Apes together strong? ✅
Apes together write good? Jury’s still out.
I’m an ape, damn it!
While sure it’s a funny joke, it also kind of misses the point of the original analogy. The monkeys are intended to be stand ins for entirely random inputs, which Shakespeare, and the human species as a whole, is not.
But to get Shakespeare it was random, all the wars and plagues and volcanic eruptions and his ancestors moving around the country and him being born in a time where writing plays was a viable career
Those won’t random acts though. They were decisions and actions from outside inputs. If you had enough data you could recreate the events from the big bang onwards in theory. Assuming human decision making is deterministic.
Random in this case means random as in if a particle decays or not. Not simply harder to predict as in human behaviour.
Somebody might have misunderstood the thought experiment.
