Creative Thought
C reativity is a fascinating thing. There’s a theory that says that if you put enough monkeys to work pounding on keyboards that one of them would eventually produce some great creative work, like one of Shakespeare’s plays or something. I very much doubt that. I tend to think that we would just have random garbage, though we might have the random garbage duplicated by many of them. But why worry about monkeys? If we wanted, we could put a bunch of computers to work generating every possible combination of words and given enough time, they would reproduce some great literary work. Having done that, we could then say that among the stuff they produced leading up to that event there are probably some fairly decent literary works that were produced that no human has written. We know they exist. The problem is that we don’t know which ones they are. We can thrust in our hand, pull out a manuscript and we will probably find nothing but garbage, a jumbled mess of words that don’t form senten...