New Delhi, Feb. 9 -- There are two ways to produce a line of Shakespeare. The first and obvious is for old William to write it. The second is to give a monkey a typewriter and an infinite amount of time. The infinite monkey theorem argues that a monkey independently and randomly punching keys on a typewriter will almost surely produce any piece of text, including a Shakespearean play, if given infinite time.

If you don't have that kind of patience, you can hurry things along by increasing the number of monkeys, giving them faster typewriters and somehow introducing a literary bias in their mind. Something like this happens in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when the protagonists find "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside wh...