Infinite Monkeys

[Antariksh Bothale]

I hope a few of you have heard of Jesse Anderson's recent project where he tries to see if millions of digital monkeys spewing out random strings can reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. The world's media has been going gaga over it since the past 10 days.

It sounds pretty fascinating, but on closer analysis, it is not, since he basically generates strings of length 9 characters and compares them with the works of Shakespeare to find a match. If he has, he considers that text as having been produced by the monkeys. Otherwise, he drops it. Geoff Pullum has some decent analysis here. Also, if you want to try it out yourself, try making a similar program, and run it for about a 100 word text as a start. You may not have the computational power to do it for k=9, but try it for k=5 to see how the patterns evolve. And if you do that, please post results here :D 

[Neel Shah]

Of course they can. You just need to wait long enough. And slightly longer than that.

[Scrabbler]

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Antariksh Bothale <antariks...@gmail.com> wrote:

I hope a few of you have heard of Jesse Anderson's recent project where he tries to see if millions of digital monkeys spewing out random strings can reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. The world's media has been going gaga over it since the past 10 days.

Well, sometimes I feel that the world's media already provides enough proof (or lack thereof) of the infinite monkey theorem. Especially when I'm watching channels like NDTV go gaga over some minor thing.

regards

lakesidey