> the million monkeys hammering randomly on typewriters that eventually produce the full works of Shakespeare, did so not through pure randomness, but by actually understanding the plight of Romeo and Juliet and the motivation behind Hamlet

The funny thing 'yes'. Million monkeys cannot do it by randomly typing. They cannot even randomly type at all. Each monkey is intelligent creature, they will follow some patterns. If they did manage to produce Shakspeare they definitely understood something.

Today it's easy to programmatically simulate 1m monkeys typing randomly 10 keys per second. Try it ;)