Anderson created his virtual monkey experiment to prove the long-standing saying of how an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters and an infinite amount of time could write Shakespeare. Of course, it’s not all the monkey’s wit and typing dexterity in play here. Anderson had to lend a helping hand. Here’s how the virtual monkeys are designed:
Mr Anderson’s virtual monkeys are small computer programs uploaded to Amazon servers. These coded apes regularly pump out random sequences of text. Each sequence is nine characters long and each is checked to see if that string of characters appears anywhere in the works of Shakespeare. If not, it is discarded. If it does match then progress has been made towards re-creating the works of the Bard.
So by introducing these constraints to the experiment, monkeys have gotten 99.99 per cent of the way to Shakespeare. If the constraints didn’t exist though, mathematicians say it would take “far, far longer than the age of the Universe” for monkeys to write Shakespeare. If it’s any consolation, I think it’d take humans not named William Shakespeare that long too. [BBC]
Image: ChipPix / Shutterstock.com
Patrick
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 8:37 AM“An infinite number of monkeys”
An infinite number of monkeys would take literally no time at all to write shakespeare.
Mike
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:27 AMGive this man some new internets, he’s earned it
villainsoft
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:43 AMI think the point of the “infinite monkeys/infinite typewriters” statement, is that it generates the complete works in a single attempt. This is not an example of that.
This is an additive routine that picks “correctness” from randomness, and adds it to other correct information.
btw, there is no guarantee that an infinite of anything can do something. An infinite number of 6-sided dice could never roll a 7, for instance.
Karl Pilkingtons orange-shaped head would probably have something to say about this…
B3n
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:54 AMI think what we want to see is a single monkey write the whole thing. Then he can have a banana.
Luke
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 11:16 AMWell it wouldn’t necessarily take longer than the age of the universe, it could happen on the first go. Although the odds are so very, very slim.
Somehow the experiment isn’t as thrilling without real monkeys on real typewriters with real banana incentives though :(
Pattus
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 4:40 PMI still like Mr. Burns smoking monkey writers. “It was the best of times; it was the blurst of times? You stupid monkey!”