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From: ray@bcsaic.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: looking for reference for "British Museum" quote
Message-ID: <210@bcsaic.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 22-Jan-87 17:25:28 EST
Article-I.D.: bcsaic.210
Posted: Thu Jan 22 17:25:28 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Jan-87 06:09:43 EST
References: <355@unc.unc.UUCP> <3800001@nucsrl.UUCP> <1171@whuts.UUCP> <1281@lifia.UUCP> <5278@pur-ee.UUCP>
Organization: Boeing Computer Services AI Center, Seattle
Lines: 20

> In article <1281@lifia.UUCP> csma@lifia.UUCP (Christian de Sainte Marie) writes:
> >>In article <3800001@nucsrl.UUCP>, ram@nucsrl.UUCP (raman renukanthan) writes:
> >>> >>"If a hundred chimpanzees were to be set before a hundred typewriters   
> >>> >>typing for thousands of years at random.  They would eventually         
> >>> >>duplicate all of the works contained in the British Museum."

I just yesterday stumbled over a reference which may indicate you"re 
not looking far enough back.  In a paper arguing for "creationism" 
the writer says "In the Huxley-Wilberforce debate over Darwinism,
Huxley claimed that given "enough" time, an Earth full of monkeys 
could type the works of Shakespeare."

This would be T. H. Huxley, in the 1860's, I believe, and the context 
was an argument whether life could have come to exist on this planet 
"by chance".  People (as evidenced by the existence of this paper) 
are still arguing four generations later.

Happy hunting!

Ray