There's some monkey business in the news. A blogger, hoping to prove the old adage that an infinite number of monkeys banging away at typewriters would eventually reproduce the works off Shakespeare, is using an array of servers processing millions of bits of information to "randomly" accomplish the same end. The experiment has already yielded "A Lover's Complaint."
So why did I put the word "randomly" in quotes? Because, as even the (above-linked) news story points out, the program works by identifying the desired words and checking them off the list. So while each single word is indeed produced randomly, the accumulation of words into coherent strings of text is actually guided by the design of the program.
It is not surprising that a random process can yield individual words, but that's a far cry from establishing that randomness can generate really complex systems. This point is neatly made in a comment by "Alina.Bolero" appended to the linked article:
"I know infinite probability is awfully hard to grasp, but when you start multiplying infinite improbabilities, things really do become that [much] more improbable.
"While I get the feeling that the intent of this experiment was to show that complex order can come from chaos, if you wait long enough, it has actually done a much better job of showing that the best way to create order from randomness is to apply intelligence to the system in order to create the desired outcome."