The Four Branches of the Mabinogi or Pedair Cainc Y Mabinogi are the earliest prose stories in the literature of Britain. Originally written in Wales in Middle Welsh, but widely available in translations, the Mabinogi is generally agreed to be a single work in four parts, or “Branches.” The interrelated tales can be read as mythology, political themes, romances, or magical fantasies. They appeal to a wide range of readers, from young children to the most sophisticated adult. The tales are popular today in book format, as storytelling or theatre performances; they appear in recordings and on film, and continue to inspire many reinterpretations in artwork and modern fiction.
(The Mabinogi needs to be disentangled from The Mabinogion which is the modern name for a larger collection of British / Welsh mediaeval tales. Published versions of The Mabinogion[1] typically include the Mabinogi. The name The Mabinogion first appears in print 1795,[2] based on a single medieval mistake, but the name then became firmly established in modern usage for the larger collection.)
Don’t you just love it; how to write without writing: then it gets even sillier by making allowances for such comic insertions such as “if you pay peanuts, all you get monkeys” or “how many monkeys are needed to type a Shakespearean sonnet or “he’s a clever boy; he wrote Hamletin just one morning: yes, it’ll be produced with Derek Jacobi in the lead role. They say it will be up at the Drama Studio starting this June”.
WTF? Well, okay, here goes … from Wikipedia:
“The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times. However, the probability that monkeys filling the observable universe would type a complete work such as Shakespeare’s Hamletis so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time hundreds of thousands of orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe is extremely low (but technically not zero).
In this context, “almost surely” is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the “monkey” is not an actual monkey, but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces an endless random sequence of letters and symbols. One of the earliest instances of the use of the “monkey metaphor” is that of French mathematician Émile Borel in 1913, but the first instance may have been even earlier.
Variants of the theorem include multiple and even infinitely many typists, and the target
text varies between an entire library and a single sentence. Jorge Luis Borges traced the history of this idea from Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption and Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, through Blaise Pascal and Jonathan Swift, up to modern statements with their iconic simians and typewriters. In the early 20th century, Borel and Arthur Eddington [not the star of Yes Minister, you understand] used the theorem to illustrate the timescales implicit in the foundations of statistical mechanics.“
So what have we learned ? It seems a monkey with a banana, typing on a keyboard with his other paw is a metaphor of … well, dammed if I know … what do you think?
You must be logged in to post a comment.