Cicero’s challenge was pounced on by generations to follow, leading to the most famous version of the thought experiment, in which a “half-dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum.”[19] It was Lewis Carroll who pointed out that because the number of combinations, while enormous, is finite, there must be an upper limit to the number of possible books that can be written. Given enough time, the question would ultimately become not what book shall I write, but which of the infinite books already written shall I repeat. (As the
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