There's exciting news on the virtual monkey front.

A new book, "The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting" (yes, this is a real book), discusses, among other topics, the well-known million-monkey problem - namely, how many years would it take a million monkeys on a million typewriters to produce Shakespeare's "Hamlet"?

How about an episode of "Friends," one of the really dumb ones?

How about this column?

(And no, the answer is not: "One monkey typing aimlessly for about 15 minutes, assuming nine minutes of coffee slurping.")

Back in high school, our teachers often wondered how many students it would take to write one coherent essay. As far as I know, not one was produced during my four years of high school.

The first one to consider the million-monkey problem was, of course, Shakespeare, who grew tired of churning out hits year after year and longed to turn over his writing duties to monkeys so that he could become a director, which he felt would allow him first crack at the babes.

Solving the million-monkey problem has always revolved around one issue: keeping those darn monkeys on task in front of the keyboard.

But Dan Oliver of Scottsdale, Ariz. - this is true - has solved this problem by creating: virtual monkeys! (Shakespeare was considered pretty smart, but he never even considered virtual monkeys.)

And Oliver put these virtual monkeys to work.

According to the book, he had these virtual monkeys slaving away - you have to read this slowly - for 42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey years. (They weren't even paid overtime!)

I think we can agree we're talking serious monkey years here.

The virtual monkeys, however, were not particularly successful authors, although, to be fair, they never had their books hyped by Oprah.

The closest they came to reproducing Shakespeare was something similar to the first 19 characters of "The Two Gentlemen of Verona."

From this I think it's safe to conclude that Shakespeare's dreams of assembling a team of live monkey writers would have ended in failure.

The closest thing to a successful experiment involving live monkeys was conducted in 1998 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A million monkeys were interviewed and placed in front of a million typewriters. Monitors were placed around the classrooms to ensure that no cheating (or "monkeying" around - HA!) was allowed.

Scientists were at first pleased when the monkeys, in short order, produced "Hamlet," the "Brothers Karamazov" and the theme song from the "The Beverly Hillbillies."

Later investigation, however, turned up the embarrassing revelation that the monkeys had misspelled Jed's name as "Jeb," thereby ruining the rhyme to "barely kept his family fed."

Worse, three of the so-called monkeys were not monkeys at all, but apes - ringers who had been bribed with bananas.

A scandal erupted, and the experiment was quickly dubbed a "complete failure," especially by the custodians who had to clean up after the monkeys.

Editor's note: This column was written by virtual monkeys, but you probably knew that. The regular writer may or may not return next week.

Write to Don Flood in care of King Features Weekly Service, P.O. Box 536475, Orlando, FL 32853-6475, or send e-mails to dflood287@comcast.net.