[NicknamedBob]

"... lecturing an attentive Flew on matters like the unlikelihood that an infinite number of monkeys typing randomly would ever produce a Shakespearean sonnet."

However unlikely it may seem, isn't this simply a matter of calculation?

How many monkeys would you have to have before the words "feed me" might appear? Or just "Help!"

Fewer, I'm sure. But if one has an infinite number of typists, the results must surely come about.

It could be Dan Brown's punishment in Hell to read through all that typing in order to find the Shakespearean Sonnet.

[jwalsh07]

However unlikely it may seem, isn't this simply a matter of calculation?

Yup.

Fewer, I'm sure. But if one has an infinite number of typists, the results must surely come about.

Nope, there are time and space constraints in the universe. Fill it with typing monkeys since t=0+ till now and the probability of their typing a Shakespearean Sonnet is still operationally zero.

[jwalsh07]

And that's without the monkeys paying a survival price for hitting to many wrong keys. I can see it now, monkey heads exploding all over the universe creating new universes with typing monkeys trying to recreate a Shakespearean Sonnett.

In the beginning there were monkeys...

and then they exploded.

[joebuck]

"But if one has an infinite number of typists, the results must surely come about."

Probability says it's impossible they would even come up with two paragraphs. They would bang out gibberish in eternity.