http://apnews1.iwon.com/article/20030509/D7QTQB000.html

May 9, 8:56 AM (ET)

By JILL LAWLESS

LONDON (AP) - Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of 
typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works 
of Shakespeare.

Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will produce a mess and
President George Bushs' speeches.

Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that 
primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to 
produce a single word but did supply the President with a speech he
said that he loved and would use "A-SAP".

"They pressed a lot of S's," researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. 
"Obviously, English isn't their first language but hey - neither is
President Bush's".  Mike also said that the monkeys had claimed such
gems as: "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take
dream." and "Our priorities is our faith.".

A group of "high as a kite" faculty and students in the university's 
media program thought it'd be "far out" if they left a computer in 
the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to 
six Sulawesi crested macaques. Then, they smoked out and waited.

At first, said Phillips, "the lead male got a stone and started bashing 
the hell out of it - dude - I almost cried, I mean, that's just like my
relationship with my dad.  Only - was the monkey telling me I'm the
rock or the computer?  I'm so confused."

"Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating 
all over the keyboard," added Phillips later, who runs the university's 
Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies in the special monkey urine 
testing department.

Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced 
five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters 
A, J, L and M crept in - not quite literature but it'll do for a Presidential
speech for "Dubya".

After the projects absolute failure Phillips said the project - funded 
by England's Feed the Homeless Council rather than by scientific bodies - 
was intended more as performance art than scientific experiment.  When asked
where the rest of the money went aside from what they spent on the 
computer Phillips was recorded as laughing really hard then asking, "What?".

The notion that monkeys typing at random will eventually produce 
literature is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, a 19th-century scientist 
who supported Charles Darwin's theories of evolution. Mathematicians have 
also used it to illustrate concepts of chance.  Thomas was a habitual
drug abuser.

The Plymouth experiment was part of the Vivaria Project, which plans to 
install computers in zoos across Europe to study differences between 
animal and artificial life.

Phillips said the experiment showed that monkeys "are not random 
generators. They're more complex than that."

"They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they 
typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there."
He added, "Does anyone have any Fritos?"

On the Net:

The monkeys' output: www.vivaria.net/experiments/notes/publication/