For some reason I want to attribute this reasoning to Douglas Hofstadter, though I couldn't tell you which of his books it's from. Here goes:

If you could get sufficient randomness from an infinite number of monkeys (this is trivial if you assume that by mere chance, a infinite subset will fit the bill – or you could follow Arjang's approach and aggregate across monkeys for more entropy, which has the benefit of getting results much faster), you already have every variation of every story ever told. You'll even have every story that ever could be told. Just get an infinite number of monkeys (or a slightly smaller number of computers) and opening a publishing business. Make a million bucks and retire.

But this rings false, especially since modern computing power (relative to the difficulty of the task) is practically infinite, putting the practice of this philosophy within reach. Just imagine trying it yourself. It's not the monkeys or the computers or the printers doing all of the work. Suddenly, you are wading through millions of pages of gibberish text looking for the book that will make you rich. Good luck. (It is the fact that the filtering process is much slower than the production process that makes me say that computer power is practically infinite.)

It's not the characters on the page that make Hamlet. Hamlet is a synthesis of information, a composition that can only be guided by intelligence. In a sea of random characters, the sequence that maps isomorphically to Hamlet is just more noise.

This may sound like a qualified "yes" in response to the question, but in reality it is an empathic "no." It is not the act of producing the character sequence of Hamlet in a random string that writes Hamlet – it is the act of finding Hamlet in a random string that writes Hamlet. The distinction may sound subtle, but the two tasks are profoundly different.

For some reason I want to attribute this reasoning to Douglas Hofstadter, though I couldn't tell you which of his books it's from. Here goes:

If you could get sufficient randomness from an infinite number of monkeys (this is trivial if you assume that by mere chance, a infinite subset will fit the bill – or you could follow Arjang's approach and aggregate across monkeys for more entropy, which has the benefit of getting results much faster), you already have every variation of every story ever told. You'll even have every story that ever could be told. Just get an infinite number of monkeys (or a slightly smaller number of computers) and opening a publishing business. Make a million bucks and retire.

But this rings false, especially since modern computing power (relative to the difficulty of the task) is practically infinite, putting the practice of this philosophy within reach. Just imagine trying it yourself. It's not the monkeys or the computers or the printers doing all of the work. Suddenly, you are wading through millions of pages of gibberish text looking for the book that will make you rich. Good luck. (It is the fact that the filtering process is much slower than the production process that makes me say that computer power is practically infinite.)

It's not the characters on the page that make Hamlet. Hamlet is a synthesis of information, a composition that can only be guided by intelligence. In a sea of random characters, the sequence that maps isomorphically to Hamlet is just more noise.

This may sound like a qualified "yes" in response to the question, but in reality it is an empathic "no." It is not the act of producing the character sequence of Hamlet in a random string that writes Hamlet – it is the act of finding Hamlet in a random string that writes Hamlet. The distinction may sound subtle, but the two tasks are profoundly different.