Recent talk of memes and original sources reminds me that, just the other day, I was reading John Venn's book on logic (published 5 years before he wrote the paper which gave the name "Venn diagrams" to the familiar diagrams that had been around much longer), and discovered that he spends about 3 pages discussing the probability of producing the plays of Shakespeare (he doesn't mention the sonnets...) by random-drawing-with-replacement from a bag (not an urn) with the latin letters in it (he doesn't mention whitespace, either). The typewriter had only been invented about 5 years before *that*, and no monkeys are involved (though an idiot shows up shortly thereafter, when he points out that by a *systematic* "mechanism" (essentially, a recursive enumeration of all finite strings of letters) that "even an idiot" (viz., Turing's "idealized human computing agent") could do, the plays would *surely* be produced eventually. (Venn further points out that, in either case, to actually separate the wheat from the chaff you would more or less have to have a Shakespeare on hand to read the output and give it a thumbs up or thumbs down.)
A cursory search with Google found no indication either of an earlier instance of this (proto-)meme, or of anyone before me ever having left a written (and Google-ized) record of noticing it for what it was. In particular, the Wikipedia article on what they call "the infinite monkey theorem" doesn't mention Venn (or anyone earlier, for that matter). Anyone know anything? Lee Rudolph P.S. No monkeys were harmed in the preparation of this message. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
