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Could an army of monkeys write Hamlet by bashing away randomly on typewriters? Of course, we don’t mean this literally. We are asking whether knowledge can be created without understanding. Can a monkey, or perhaps some form of computerized random number generator, accidentally type out the script for Shakespeare’s Hamlet or write Tolstoy’s War and Peace? Is knowledge generation simply a numbers game?

Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is generally assumed to be the longest novel ever written. This is not quite true. Wikipedia reckons the longest novel is a French book, Artamène, with over 2.1 million words. Tolstoy comes in sixteenth, with a mere half million!

Written in 1869, War and Peace tells the story of five Russian families during the Napoleonic wars. Originally written in a mixture of Russian and French, and numbering over 500,000 words, it was quickly translated to other languages. The mistress of composer Franz Liszt translated it fully into French, where it expands to 550,000 words. Contrary to popular myth the length of the book drops slightly in German. If you really want to save paper Chinese is best. Because it uses a single symbol per word, the Chinese translation needs only 750,000 characters compared with the 3 million for English. It is wrong to assume this is necessarily more efficient than a phonetic language. Although it might save on paper, it is considerably more laborious to write. Three strokes are required to write ‘war’ in English whereas the Chinese pictogram requires ten.

War in Chinese

Computers work with numbers. It is a simple process to translate a book into numbers because books are composed of discrete symbols. All we need do is give each symbol a unique number and record those numbers in digital format. Artistic works involving pictures and sound are more difficult to represent because they are continuous in nature. We have to digitize them first. With music or painting this inevitably means some loss of information as we can’t cut a sound or image into an infinite number of pieces.

The modern standard for translating text to numbers is Unicode. Each character is represented by a five-digit number ranging from 1 to 64,000 – two bytes for those of you who know computing. This is

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