STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep. An old idea says, if you put enough monkeys in front of keyboards, one of them may write Shakespeare. Now an artist is testing a similar hypothesis. It's that a computer can write new episodes of the 1990s sitcom, "Friends." Andy Herd wants to explore how machines learn. So far, his computer-generated episodes are gibberish, but Mr. Herd is optimistic. He thinks that with just a bit of editing, he could sell that gibberish to a network. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.