“Let us imagine that a million monkeys have been trained to strike the keys of a typewriter at random, and that... these typist monkeys work eagerly ten hours a day on a million typewriters of various kinds.... And at the end of a year, these volumes turn out to contain the exact texts of the books of every sort and every language found in the world's richest libraries.”
Émile Borel (1871 - 1956)
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.
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