Slashdot Mirror
Six Monkeys And An Old Saw
Sayten241 writes "They say that an infinite amount of monkeys typing at an infinite amount of typewriters will produce literature greater than Shakespeare. Well, it has been proven that six monkeys and one computer will produce a computer that has been smashed with a rock, urinated upon, and four pages worth of the letter 's.' The end of the article states that scientifically this does prove that monkeys are more complex than random generators."
That sounds remarkably like a development team I worked with once.
(easy joke, but necessary)
Monkeys man the servers....
You don't even need 6 monkeys to get some of the comments that you get here on slashdot.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
produce a computer that has been smashed with a rock, urinated upon, and four pages worth of the letter 's.'
Still more intelligent than the average slashdot poster...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
'Nuff said.
"it was the best of times, it was the blurst of time"
You stupid Monkey!
p.s. FP?
Maybe they were just expressing their opinion?
Four pages of the letter s would probably be modern art if the right artist had done it... Still it won't take them too long to type /. will it
Oh yes, proves it wasssssssssn't random. I hope they got a grant for that.
pope is the antichrist. catholic pedophile priest scandal: http://home.fuse.net/gospel
...they just don't like Shakespeare.
That's pretty much how I generate content for my website. tcd004
ssssssss sssssssssss sss
Monkeys make me poop.... YAY
:)
This post brought to you by Crank Yankers
sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssaaaaacsssssdkksssssss sjjjjjjfffffsssssssssssssssskffjjjjjjjssssssssssss sk
Well it looks like it wasn't better writing then shakespeare's but I'm guessing it could qualify as code better then Microsoft's.
Check out my life
Anyone who's ever had to provide tech support for a large number of college students could have described most of this behavior. The only thing missing is beer spilled on the keyboard the night before a big essay is due.
"Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard," Isn't that how Microsoft developers work?
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
The monkeys could work for the guy who scored lowest on the SAT's (new VP in charge of Quality for Microsoft). Who knows, maybe the next Exchange service pack won't be bigger than the Exchange installer package...
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
This was research carried out by the University of Plymouth (that's Plymouth in the UK, not in the US) at the nearby Paignton Zoo.
And here's the original BBC News story.
I'm not sure I see any real value in their research, but I am concerned about their methodology - that's an awfully small data set (only six monkeys, and only over one month) from which to draw any concrete conclusions...
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The results of this experiment mean that the monkeys deserve one of those $20,000 federal arts grants. Looks like modern art!
(Remember the "artist" Serrano, who got paid $16,000 by Washington to drop a photo in a mayonnaise jar of his own urine).
How do you know I don't work on the project?
Didn't they learn anything from Terry Gilliam?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Oh well.
I often urinate on my keyboard...
They just didn't wait long enough... The theory is basically trying to say, if you wait long enough, everything MUST happen. How this "experiment" addresses that theory at all is beyond me. And yes, it WAS a waste of money.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
*reads something on slashdot*
Hey, that's pretty cool, I think I'll post it on slashdot!
Duplicate articles, server crashes, misspellings...
Educated monkeys.
It still isn't Shakespeare.
This reminds me of the 24 hour computer lab in my dorm a couple years ago.
And this was the Honors dorm!
It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired. - Robert Anson Heinlein
I've always wanted to see how many monkeys and computers it would take to get one to produce Duke Nukem Forever. My guess is that the old Shakespear Rule would get us farther than 3D Realms have.
It's always interesting to see how science proves what probably anyone could have told you would happen if you put monkeys in a room with computers.
Well, it has been proven that six monkeys and one computer will produce a computer that has been smashed with a rock, urinated upon, and four pages worth of the letter 's.'
Sounds like the computers I pulled out of service at a local, "special" public high school-- "special" as in, "if these kids fail out of here they go to jail."
We replaced three classrooms full of practically destroyed PII/300s with brand new Compaqs back around Thanksgiving. I think the best part was when we discovered that all the mouse balls were missing-- they apparently make great projectiles for throwing at your fellow incorrigibles.
Before we were even finished the multi-day project, one of the new machines had had the RAM stolen out of it, and several had had the Windows license code stickers torn off or were otherwise defaced.
Since the school didn't want to pay for optical mice, they decided to get around the mouse ball problem by giving the teachers control of the mice-- they waste time at the beginning and end of each class period distributing and collecting the mice. Honestly though, having been there and seeing how those fucking animals behaved, trying to educate them at all is a major waste of time. They should all just be executed, and my tax money should be put to better use.
"They pressed a lot of S's," researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. "Obviously, English isn't their first language."
Honestly, while it's all fun and games, did this bit of science learn us anything new?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
that it's possible to get research funds for just about anything.
I think I'm going to apply for a science grant. I'll investigate the global effects of a butterfly flapping it's wings in Syria. My hope is to finally prove Lorentz conjecture, while at the same time cash in on the imminent war in the region. I'll sell t-shirts with "I invaded Syria, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt with a butterfly on it".
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Imagine a beowulf clust...oh god..no...stop...
s ss ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss ssssssssssssssssssssssssss
sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
NO CARRIER.
(Substitute "Slashdot" for "Internet" as desired.)
It worked for Google and their Pigeon rank (TM) system.
RESEARCHERS AT Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.
"They pressed a lot of S's," researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. "Obviously, English isn't their first language."
In a project intended more as performance art than scientific experiment, faculty and students in the university's media program left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques.
Then, they waited.
At first, said Phillips, "the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.
"Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard," added Phillips, who runs the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.
Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in.
The notion that monkeys typing at random will eventually produce literature is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, a 19th-century scientist who supported Charles Darwin's theories of evolution. Mathematicians have also used it to illustrate concepts of chance.
The Plymouth experiment was funded by England's Arts Council and part of the Vivaria Project, which plans to install computers in zoos across Europe to study differences between animal and artificial life.
Phillips said the results showed that monkeys "are not random generators. They're more complex than that.
"They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there."
they're obviously into post-modern literature...
-Bb
At first, said Phillips, "the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.
I think they are far beyond are level of intelligence.
What's next, putting a cat in a box to see if Schrodinger was right?
(and yeah, I probably spelt both "gedanken" and Schrodinger wrong. Sue me.)
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Who are we to judge poignant primates literature? They most certainly tried to write "Sleep dwell upon thy eyes, peace in thy breast.." but the "S" got stuck on the urine infested keyboard. I can only imagine their frustration.
--
We apologise for the inconvenience
Is here. It is a slow server and will get slashdotted quickly, so someone mirror the pdf of the monkey's output if you can.
The abc news article says that it was intended more as performance art then as a real experiment.
And how many times do we need to read this? I we got it already, Monkeys like to poop and hit the letter S. --dan
And let me guess... we evolved from monkeys... by chance.
Oh yes, and in other news, a tornado going through a junk yard (ok, "billions" of tornados over "millions of years") has assembled Air Force One, complete with George W. Bush inside. The probability of random forces creating human DNA are just too low...
Still no cure for cancer.
*You are not your fucking Khakis
[Just Shut Up and Do What I say]
If I'm not mistaken the original idea was:
An infinate number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards for an infinite amount of time will produce the complete works of Shakespeare in the correct order! It is used to help people to gain some concept of infinity. In a universe that is infinite in space and time, anything can and will happen. An amazing concept when you think about it!
I'd be pretty PO'd if Timothy took down my website.
Even then, he shouldn't be immature about it.
If they were anything like these monkeys, I wouldn't be surprised.
Code monkeys have feelings, too!
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
"that six monkeys and one computer will produce a computer that has been smashed with a rock, urinated upon, and four pages worth of the letter 's.'"
So, it took six monkeys an entire month to accomplish the above.
I've seen some users that could probably do all that in the space of a few minutes -- obviously we're the more advanced species.
I did this little experiment. A hundred million years ago I started with a couple of million monkeys, and I let them go to see what would happen. They got off to a slow start and didn't do much for a long time except have sex and eat and sleep. But then, after waiting long enough, one of these monkey's descendents had a kid named William Shakespeare and he sat down and produced the complete works of William Shakespeare. Thereby proving my theorem, an infinite number of monkeys, given an infinite amount a time, will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. And I didn't even need an infinite amount of either monkeys or time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The stupid researchers gave us a lousy computer, waaaaaaay outdated to do anything. For example, one of my concubine wants to play the game Quake3, but that damned thing does not even have a GUI! Pffft..
So what are we suppose to do? We did what any human would do : we shit on it. Because, adding pieces of shit to a piece of shit is not going to make it look any less bad than it already is.
Btw, I posted this using lynx and a stupid 14.4 modem that my resident science chimp had managed to hook together (Thanks Baba!). We tried for First Post, but some idiot beat us to it.
Yours,
Able,
Alpha Male Monkey,
Plymouth.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
But after a month, the Sulawesi crested macaques had only succeeded in partially destroying the machine, using it as a lavatory, and mostly typing the letter "s". ... And the RIAA is now investigating to see if the monkeys have traded any copyrighted music files.
What if they were given more simple tasks, like somthing for someone who can't see well, see if they can learn simple things, like using the mouse, clikcing buttons, etc, communicate them where they can understand things without reading it. In conclusion: I would have done a better experiment, and if they copy my idea and don't give me gobs of $$, They should contact me todo so :D preston at moderngeek dot com
Actually, it sounds like what the monkeys wrote is probably more intelligent than a lot of slashdot comments.
ssssaaaaallll llllllllssss ssssssssssss
sssssss ssssssssss sssssssssss sssssssssss
ssssssss ssssssssss sssssssssl llllljjjjjj aaaaa aammms
ss sssssss sssssss ssssssslllllll
lllllssss sssssssssssl lljjjjjjjmssssss
ssssssss ssssssssss ssssss ssssss
sssssssss ssssss sssss
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: That's an awful long string of letters there.
(must have been an anti-page-widen filter)
Not producting the works of Shakespeare?
Perhaps the researchers are unaware of Shakespeare's 14th sonnet, which begins:
"sss sssssss ss s sss"
I got the pdf of the results. It's even got faux-leather first and last pages with Shakespeare's sig on the front. Obviously this didn't cost anything. Those people griping about taxpayers' dollars (or pounds) should sniff some nitrous.
Danke tres mucho, tovarishch.
let me be the first to congratulate you on your success ;)
Mr. Burns:
"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?! You stupid monkey!"
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
It'll take for that computer to show up on ebay....
Why are projects like this even funded? Instead of trying to find the cure for cancer, these people are wasting money and time on pointless dribble. It makes me sick.
Performance science? Art experiment?
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
RFC2795
Also, bad redneck joke:
If you took an infinite number of rednecks and an infinite number of STOP signs and had them shoot at them with an infinite number of shotguns, would you eventually get a work of Shakespeare in Braille?
It proves that an infinite number of /.ers with an infinite number of computers will /. any site.
Heck, you didn't even need a finite number of monkeys. That "William Shakespeare" primate of yours was actually an ape, not a monkey.
And what does this prove? Why, your whole experiment's cocked up! There's a chance these "works of Shakespeare" are accurate, but it's much more likely that they're subtly off. Just blindfold one of your test subjects and have 'em pull letters out of a Scrabble bag. That'll show you. If they come up with something about the "Tagic trale of Jomeo and Ruliet, those two children of harring wouses" you'll know I was right.
In related news, one of the monkeys has been offered a job as a slashdot editor - Slashdot editor Timothy is quoted as saying: "He can already repeat the letter 'S', it shouldn't take long to train him to post duplicates on slashdot"
Well, it has been proven that six monkeys and one computer will produce a computer that has been smashed with a rock, urinated upon, and four pages worth of the letter 's.'
The computer was never actually hacked... hmm cracked... err broken into... was not taken over by a human remote attacker with their own computer trying to gain unauthorized privaleges on the machine! So we have conclusivly proven that six monkeys are more effective than MSCAs at keeping a computer intact^H^H^Hsecure!
I stole this Sig
To post duplicate stories at a prodigious rate
I don't think the "monkeys" saying was a real scientific hypothesis, but rather a literary illustration.
In any truly random numeric sequence with a uniform distribution, it can be mathematically proven (among other things) this implies that any finite length string must eventually appear (so, the works of Shakespeare would eventually pop up). But, it's quite difficult to prove that anything is random by a strict mathematical definition, btw, although there are quite a few randomness conjectures that seem to be true at this point, such as that the digits of pi are "random".
Living things and biological or even mechanical processes in general are notoriously non-random -- even though they may not be completely deterministic (I'll leave that one up to the philosophers and theologians to debate). For instance, if you asked a human to generate a random sequence, he/she would have a bias against generating repeated ("11111111111...") or seemingly orderly sequences ("123456..."), so this bias would cause the human sequence to be inherently non-random.
The best random sequence generators have been natural background noise or radioactive decay, and you can actually get hardware that uses such natural processes to generate what seems to be random... so perhaps the monkeys should be replaced with radioisotopes, and maybe you will get that Shakespeare!
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
Primates aren't all the same crop. I'm not shure why they chose sulawesi crested macaques but I'd like to see how bonobo would have performed. Their behaviour is often described as particularly elaborate and are able to learn languages and make use of tools. Especially intriguing is that they require a lot of parental care before becoming independent individuals. Similarly to humans, these primates require long training to have a successful adult life and therefore maintain 'infant' traits for quite a time much like us, naked apes.
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Well, the difference is in probability. If the probability of something is zero, then the chance is still zero... but if it's anything above that then that chance approaches 100%.
With back orifice installed on the machine. Would have to have timed it right, when no one would notice, but something like this...
Day 1: That stupid zookeeper really pisses me off, giving us a machine running windows. Sure, we're a few million years slow in evolving, but goddammed, we're not *that* stupid. And on a Packerd Bell, no less.
Day 2: From our cage, I could just barely see the zookeeper molesting the goats in the petting zoo again. Sick.
Day 3: Was afraid that they might catch on to me, but seems they are illiterate. The animal feeder must have pissed on the keyboard again, and you know damn well we'll get blamed for that one. Oh well, I managed to pick his pocket and grab the Visa card. Won't his wife be shocked when she sees the 12,000UKP bill for www.hotmansex.co.uk.
Day 4: Managed to scrounge up some weapons grade plutonium, but this machine isn't fast enough to simulate the H compression in the elliptical chamber. May have to do the math in the dirt with a piece of twig. Next on list: Think of a way to frame some arabs for the detonation.
I did this little experiment.
Lord? Is that you?
But, you forgot about the typewriters. Back to square one for you!
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/05/09/monkey_typis
My favorite lines:
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
four pages worth of the letter 's.'
The problem with truly random data is that you can't really be sure. That four pages of the letter 's' could very well be what starts out the "monkey at a computer" random stream.
NO CARRIER
I wonder if the result would have been the same if they had used that Verizon monkey. That is one smart monkey...or one dumb comercial.
Any human would do the same thing if they were not taught how to write and how to fire up an FPE (First Person Eater).
I really wonder how a monkey would react to a videogame. Not a very complex one, of course...
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Is Slashdot becoming another Fark? This doesn't seem to really be much "News for Nerds." Nor is it "Stuff that matters." Fark, to me, is just a casual, low level, "crazy people doing crazy things" story forum. Slashdot should be more refined, or at least relate to more technical things. Anyways, thats my flame.
That "William Shakespeare" primate of yours was actually an ape
and we all know that monkeys and apes have no common ancestors...
no wait they were all monkeys at one point.
also I believe the monkeys would produce "what do you get when you multiply six by nine" if they were to randomly pull tiles from the scrabble bag.
Actually, this "William Shakespeare" is a hominid, not an ape, although they have a common ancestor. You want apes, you need to look at a random NFL team, or my managers. And I haven't seen _any_ of them near a typewriter.
Use the spatula, Luke
The other day at work, I tried to defecate on my workstation, but I couldn't figure out how to undo my belt buckle. I wound up with an unpleasant package to tote home. My project manager was so displeased that she threw her feces at me, screamed, and beat at her chest before jumping into a tree and vanishing.
Then the president of our company came, shot us all with tranqulizer darts, and when I awoke, I found that had been neutered.
Oh the pitiful life of a software developer.
I think it rather proves that they are really bad at generating random numbers.
a world in progress...
ROFL
"Light is faster than sound." - "Is that why people tend to look bright until you hear them speak?"
The best part about this topic was the ad from Microsoft talking about thier Testing Licensing and Management Plan.
:D
(yeah, i know.. it's a cheap shot, but there aren't any SCO references or Mac weenies to poke fun at here)
Perhaps the monkeys were communicating by varying the speed of typing the 'S' key sort of a monkey Morse code.
Or perhaps repeating the same letter 'S' is the hiss of a poet who exposes the soul-crushing monotony and conformity of having your freedom stolen and forced to live your life in a cage.
One news paper report I did see about this was that some of the keepers were very tempted to sneak in and type "To be or not to be" on the keyboard when no one was looking. But, alas, discretion prevailed. It would have been really funny though :)
Low, BUT NOT ZERO.
Try to get this through your head: BILLIONS OF YEARS. That's THOUSANDS of MILLIONS of years. That's 126144000000000000 seconds, each second of which TRILLIONS OF BILLIONS OF MOLECULES ARE CONSTANTLY ARRANGING AND RE-ARRANGING THEMSELVES.
Your mind is just too small to comprehend that, OK? I can barely grasp it myself.
Shakespeare? William managed but "honorificabilitudinitatibus"
n nt uonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk
obviously they typed e e cummings
No! No! It's James Joyce!
bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerro
Now we know who the Man in the Mac is in "Ulysses": monkeys.
SSaSS SSfaSss SSS
sfssSa SfSSa SsSssSsSSS
SSs SSSSfS sSSSs sssSs aSSsf
SsaSs sSsgSSsrs SSreS aSSssSShS S
SSsSSsS
first monkey post!
slksssssnsssssssbsbssssssnnsnssssssssssdfsssbsbbss bssbskhskjsssklsklj skssssss ksjsjk skj ssbjksbjksjkbssbj skjsjk skskjsssssssssssssssssssssjshyshysssssysstyssrssrs sssss4sds4s4s45sssssssjkssmjs,sns s ss s ssshn sss sbshssjm,sbsms,sbm ss s ss
And you have the beginings of the Longhorn development project.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The name is Lloyd... Trust in the Lloyd
It been a few years, and I still think this is the funniest story I've ever read. To this day, I cannot read this, or even think about it, without laughing out loud in a really embarrassing way.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
is available here (warning: 2.82 MB pdf)
So they beat this thing with a rock, then pissed on it, and it still worked well enough to run a word processor? I want one of those. I looked an mine funny once and the hard drive exploded.
--I don't want the world, I just want your half.
And the first thing a monkey will type....
A Unix command.
...the last requirements meeting I had with the users, when I told them how much Phase II of the system was going to cost.
No wait, they didn't urinate, they did something else...
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
The dominant monkey obviously saw the threat of technology, they saw what it'd done to the more advanced "hairless" apes, they just didnt want to expose themeselves to Itnernet sweepstakes, deals on sharp kitchen knives, penis growth shams etc..
We can learn something from this Monkey.. only problem is a basic rock would do little damage to the IBM Model M keyboard im using..
Damnit IBM, damnit all to hell!!
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
With a counter the width of my computers memory and hard drive, I can reproduce every program and dvd ever run. Of course it would take an almost infinite number of universes to create all combinations and just as long to figure out which ones worked!
Fortunately a lot of bad combinations could be eliminated by just ignoring anything with the word Microsoft in it.
In many ways we are like the chimps we have been given the earth somthing too complex for us to fully appreciate so we beat the living hell out of it
One thing's for sure - an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually produce Strunk and White's The Elements of Style
The Plymouth experiment was funded by England's Arts Council and part of the Vivaria Project, which plans to install computers in zoos across Europe to study differences between animal and artificial life.
How are they going to compare the two? "Well the GameOfLife program mainly just mates whereas the racoons chew on things a lot." Or "The tropical fish in the screen-saver aquarium don't tend to stay in the little castle during the sunny afternoons as much as the living fish."
CLIT!
what part of ûinfinite amount of monkeys typing at an infinite amount of typewritersû did they not understand?
From the BBC article:
Paignton Zoo scientific officer Dr Amy Plowman said: "The work was interesting but had little scientific value, except to show that the 'infinite monkey' theory is flawed."
No, it doesn't because even though you didn't get Shakespeare you didn't have infinite number of monkeys further you didn't provide any other form of proof.
All you had were six monkeys and one computer and when Shakespeare's words didn't appear you could conclude: In the given month with the given six monkeys (Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan) and the given computer only five different characters were recoreded from the keys being pressed.
Also:
He also denied it had been a waste of money.
He said the £2,000 was spent on purchasing the hardware to set up a radio link so the activities in the enclosure could be watched live on a website.
"Compared to the cost of reality TV, this was a tiny pinch of money," he said.
And it sounds as if it would be more interesting too.
You're confusing "monkeys" with "apes." For example, most humans don't have tails, prehensile or otherwise.
They mentioned that the lead monkey started bashing the computer with a rock as the monkey's first action with this computer. It's amazing how survial is encoded in everything like that...something foreign comes into a domain and fear is the first instinct brought upon it. You can expect that from a monkey, but humans have this reaction as well often. In a way it depresses me that we are not far from monkeys in this respect.
It should be noted I liked how the leader monkey was first to approach the computer...if only the worlds leaders would be the first in combat I'm sure we would have a lot less fighting.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Gold.
And if anyone doesn't like it i'll punch you in the genitals.
They were using windows, I would bash the computer with a rock and deficate on the keyboard too
When I found over 20 gigs of pr0n on his computer, I was able to diagnose what was going on. And then I threw up.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
- MbM
Do you actually think people who do performance art could be bothered to actually know what the hell they're talking about? I mean seriously...
In any case, it's literally impossible to empirically disprove the infinite monkey hypothesis; it's an a priori truth. In an infinite amount of time, it would be impossible for even one monkey not to replicate every work of literature, past, present, or future, even if he spent the vast majority of his time defecating on the keyboard.
There still needs to be work done on proving that
when 6 monkeys are thrown up into the air, they
will come down on their tails not as often as they
land on their...heads.
"A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself."
We wantssssssssss it.....it's oursssssssss.....our precioussssssssss......
talk about crapflooding! LOL!
In one of the infinite number of universes those monkeys actually did produce the works of Shakespeare, and every other posible combination of characters. Recent SciAm article on parallel universes I bet people were pretty damn surprised in those universes where the monkeys produced the next release of Windows before Microsoft (response: no they weren't, because Microsoft sucks so much!).
No, no, this isn't proof. We need to at least take another six monkeys and another computer and see if this happens again.
Although, I've always had the nagging suspicion that an infinite number of monkeys typing at an infinite number of typewriters would produce an infinite number of broken typewriters...
philcrissman.com.
Anyway, out of curiosity, has anyone ever hooked up a computer to a random background noise monitor with a tie to an ascii set for representation and turned it loose to see what happend ?
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
The answer to which, or course, is fourty-two.
Brilliant.
Well, two... Congrats!
Clearly the author has no concept of infinity.
Heck, give six Elizabethans quills and ink and they'll probably make a mess too. The point is that if one of the six managed to type even two characters, then an infinite number could probably write shakespeare.
More to the point, when dealing with infinities, even probabilistic modifiers like 'probably' are meaningless. If it's at all feasable, then one of an infinite number would do it, even if they had to evolve out of the trees, invent tragedy and comedy, conquer England, and live in London to do so.
Kevin Fox
15 seconds
buy the way meatbag..it's "number of monkeys",
not "amount of monkeys", we're still alive-
so don't measure us by weight -and learn some bloody english- if we can learn sign language surely you can pass a grade 3 literacy test..
... but it's Saturday night, I'm tired, and had too much beer... so I'll type these random keypresses and hope I'm saying something intelligent. After I post this I think I will bang on the keyboard with a rock and then piss on it.
Greetings from typing monkeys everywhere.
Obviously they were playing nethack. "repeated s s s sssssss..." just means they were searching for a long time, waiting for monsters to come.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Yeah, but only in base 13
It lives up to it's name: http://www.sanspoint.com
Monkeys Can't Write Shakespeare, But May Blog Well
(2003-05-09) -- Researchers in Britain claim to have disproven the old theory that if you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room with typewriters they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.
However, the experiment did demonstrate that if you put six Sulawesi crested macaques in a cage with a computer, they can produce a weblog that gets about 3,000 visitors per day.
Lecturers and students at the University of Plymouth gave the macaques -- Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan -- a PC with wireless internet access and the Moveable Type weblog application. At first the apes typed little but the letter "s," however, once their site traffic got up to 400 visitors per day, they diversified with the letters "a, j, l and m."
Researchers shut down the experiment when the simians began adding pop-up ads to their collaborative blog.
"This disproves any theory about intelligence in apes," said one unnamed researcher. "If they think anyone wants to see those pop-ups, they're obviously irretrievable idiots."
- as reported by www.scrappleface.com
You just described 99.9999999% of all Blogs!!!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
What it REALLY shows us is that 6 monkeys make for an impressive security-audit team. After all, they determined how to secure a Windows machine: urine, and a rock.
NPR: "That is a weird research lab. What is next, unmanned recording of a tree falling in the forest, and the sound of one hand clapping?"
Table-ized A.I.
Shame Microsoft clippy wasn't there to help them. "It looks like your writing the complete works of shakespeare"
I like this version better:
,,, in brail on the back of road signs.
Give 1,000 Southerners each a shotgun, and provide infinite ammo. As t-> intinity, they will produce the entire works of shakespear
6 monkeys using visual studio for a month, most likely would now be employed in by some IT firm.
Is this why there are so many computer viruses?
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
well maybe the monkeys are smart maybe the just dont like technology I know of a few people that would smash a computer and defecate all over the keys. :D
hippies
6 monkeys using visual studio for a month, most likely would now be employed in house by some IT firm.
Is this why there are so many computer viruses?
Flame me guys I love it!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
They say that an infinite amount of monkeys typing at an infinite amount of typewriters will produce literature greater than Shakespeare.
Thanks to the internet, we now know that this is not true.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
did they use vi or emacs?
given a finite number of monkeys at a finite number of typewriters, and an infinite ammount of time, they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. We have evidence of this having happened at least once.
Given an inifinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters, they will instantaneously produce the complete works of shakespeare, along with every other potential written work of the universe.
Don't disrespect Infinity!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
(BTW I'm drunk so excuse the misspellings)
In the beginning there was much defecication...
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
I always wondered how they came up with that stuff.
I found Infinity and the mind by Rudy Rucker an interesting book about the mathematical concept of 'infinity', written for a non-specialized audience.
JP
Actually no you stupid uneducated media journalist, that is "pop psychology", he established that primates have a hippocampus, a part of the brain to which memory and emotions are closely related. He theorized that they are CAPABLE of producing literature, not that they WILL produce literature. If that were the case, they would scribble on walls much like ancient man. For all humans know, primates very well may produce literature, but we don't understand the medium they use to do so. It has been proven that primates can communicate emotions, but they need to be taught how to use a communication medium, such as sign language.
Furthermore, primates are not random letter generators, they're an incredibly complex species who's brain is about 99.9% genetically comparable to a humans (a chimps brain), therefore the variables involved are insane.
The Plymouth experiment was funded by England's Arts Council and part of the Vivaria Project, which plans to install computers in zoos across Europe to study differences between animal and artificial life.
Wasn't it Weizenbaum that theorized human intellegence could be replicated through a series of complex algorythems? This idea is excellent, and studying less complex primate brains from an AI perspective could shed much insight into our own. So why are they wasting their money on "performance art"?
I suppose the author is now going to tell us these monkeys are "right brained", "intra-personal intuitive judgmental", and on the top of the "food chain".
"In a Democracy, people get the kind of government they deserve." -Winston Churchill
Here's the interesting part - I think this was probably what happened the first time they were produced as well (although in a roundabout way).
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
I've always wondered about the apparent contradiction between an irrational number and the idea that you can find any finite length string in a truly random infinite sequence.
If pi is irrational, then it's decimal expansion is infinite (if it were not, then it could be expressed as a fraction and would not be irrational). This infinite expansion must be either random or non-random (because there ain't no third direction!).
If its non-random, then its a pattern, and can be expressed as a fraction, which means that pi is rational. But we've already said that its irrational. Contradiction.
If it is random, then somewhere inside the expansion, pi must repeat itself (because the sequence of numbers *must* be included in the infinite expansion). This means that pi is a pattern, and therefore rational. But we've already said that its irrational. Also a contradiction.
Did I miss something here? It looks like I've just proven that pi is rational. This conflicts with my 3rd-grade brainwashing. Help!
NS!
This is the best comment I have ever seen in my life. This bring perception to reality. I am blown away! REALLY!
This happened already around the year 1600. The only thing is that he used handwriting instead of a typewritter.
Some links could be very interesting >)
(code = pronounced Kot = german for excrement )
Sorry, classic german joke for computer beginners...
This is to fix a security exploit in 6 monkey visual studio 1.0 Regarding a bug in the file "Flame me guys"
to apply the patch just shut of vb scripting
and run the file fixmyfn'.exe
It is a self extracting file so you cannot see what the hell is wrong if it screws up (just trust us we know about these things). It has worked for us and it will work for you. If not please try to contact us. After installing, the patch cannot be removed.
When using functions that can be dangerous now
you will be prompted for approval.
If you click OK then the exe will run, but you will have the option to not run suspicious executables by clicking CANCEL. WE STRONGLY SUGGEST YOU CLICK CANCEL UNLESS YOU ARE CERTAIN THE EXECUTABLE IS FROM A TRUSTED SOURCE!
Thank you for using 6 monkeys software!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I know it's already at plus 5 but please mod this even higher. This needs fucking mega mod. Everybody and their barber should read this.
Less is more !
My pr0n collection is getting kind of old; do you still have his contact info?
This article has been brought to you by a Squadron of Uber Stealth Urinating Monkeys.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Hmm, from what I hear bonobos have a very interesting social hierarchy, female based, and a lot of social norms and actions are sexual. A typical greeting is masturbation. Conflict resolution - an orgy.
They'd be too busy checking out porn on the net to write. "ooog oog ooh, Bubbles, where zoo pr0n site? oog goo goo..."
is that you CANNOT say "the set of all sets." this leads to great paradoxes such as "the set of all sets that do not include itself." if it includes it self, then it itself is not in it. but if it includes itself, it must NOT include itself. you get the idea... any universe in set theory is well defined and not just "all possible values."
so, i think i agree with grandparent that in order for monkeys to type the works of shakespeare, they would need to type randomly (assuming they don't evolve into humans by that time), which they don't (necessarily)
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
Well this does sound typical of a media arts project, ie: just do a bunch of stuff without any understanding of the underlying premises.
What did they expect really? I mean, that old saying was meant as a thought experiment to demonstrate a principle of probabilities. Namely that even highly unlikely eventualities will occur given enough repetitions. With an infinite number of monkeys & computers, you should expect to see the complete works of William Shakespeare appear infinitely fast. In fact, you could even remove the monkeys all together and get the same result, because at least one computer in an infinite number would undergo enough of the exactly correct quantum fluctuations to have the works of W.S. appear instantly. In fact you would have an infinite number of such computers, following a statistical distribution for the probability of this happening.
The idea that you would see anything even remotelly resembling this in such a small sample is absurd. It represents what Statistician's refer to as the fallacious "law of small numbers". The law of large numbers is that with enough repetitions, the trend in random events will tend towards the probabilistic norms of the underlying events. That is, if you flip a coin enough, than the number of heads will become roughly 50%. It is a fallacy, however, to assume that any subsample of these tosses will also tend towards that same deviation.
There are lots of monkeys and apes who have been trained to type and use computers - but to just introduce one to untrained monkeys and expect anything other than destruction is absurd. So all I can think is either these media arts students really have nothing better to do, or they are just really ignorant; most likely both.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
My cat has actually used my computer keyboard to write poetry:
http://www.dougshaw.com/anakin/anakinpoems.html
God is real unless declared integer
They have managed to prove one thing:
infinity != 6
Does anyone else see the potential here for one of these ads? 'Course, Apple would have to come out with a line of membrane keyboards...
why is everyone missing the obvious. is it not interesting that given a full month, six different monkeys hit the letter "s" and no other letter at all. what are the chances of that happening randomly.
surely, even monkey pissing into typewriter proves something, right?
Actually, the monkeys weren't the same. Therefore this is not a proof of the statement.
I was going to make a joke about this material now being available online at www.monkeyblog.com, but it looks like that domain actually exists and is in regular use.
The Internet is stranger than fiction, sometimes.
Chip H.
My, they certainly ARE random! Shame I don't have a monkey program to supply shit and urine when I ask for random integers!
If the computer was on, and the monkeys were beating it and urinating over it, wouldn't that put them at a good risk of getting electricuted?
I certainly wouldn't splash liquid and/or beat the crap out of my computer, if only because it has 240v coming into it.
asdd/k l/kvzx;lz kgzxk; lrjxz spb50[v,qw3[wi] po,qwv9j; caeorjqoiu bahubeafjahpOMK;O3A aER; OIAJSE; LIASEN KLUASAL K NAD; LIKLN ASLKF AM/ALD JXADL; IJASLDKNA.LIZL; IAjlkN.LN; LSDF; ALKMK; LKSDFL; O';; lst';'[pf-[ekvsd; oxdil; xdrbmilx ctyijjymbl xcinlkxc METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
...and there was life. And never mind the extreme teleology.
Sit down one day and figure out how many monkeys you can fit into the known universe, and how long they need to hit keys at random for (to say nothing of how you set about detecting and preserving the correct sequence when it arrives), to type out as much as the `The Two Gentlemen from Verona', the title of one of The Bard's works.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Monkeys are apes, just not great apes. From the report it sounds as if there was one author among the monkeys. The rest were apparently editorial types.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Funny. I submitted this story on the 9th and it was rejected. VERY amused to see it appear on slashdot on the 10th. Seems the monkeys aren't the only ones with unpredictable results at a computer. :)
Be well
-UF
Courtesy of the Internet Wayback Machine, at:
n key.com/y2k.html
http://web.archive.org/web/19991012061147/sock-mo
What is the Y2K problem? Well, It's a metaphorical timebomb pre-programmed into hundreds of millions of the world's computer chips. Years ago, to conserve memory space, programmers used two numbers to record the year. For example, 87 would mean 1987. The problem is that on January 1, 2000, computers that still use a two-number year will interpret the 00 to mean the year 1900. This will cause most of the computers in the world to either shut down or generate incorrect data.
Utter chaos is what would occur if our information-dependent society lost its computers. There would be hot air balloons floating out of the storm drains, peanut butter all over the roads, Abraham Lincoln doing calisthenics on your roof, mannequins rummaging through your CD collection....quite simply, an entire culture gone higgledypiggledy.
The government's solution has been to procrastinate for ten years and then in 1999, they decided to have a few programmers begin fixing the program code. Unfortunately, it would require all the programmers in the world to work 24 hours a day for five years to rewrite all the code. And we haven't that kind of time.
But don't panic! In dire times like these, most people would run for the hills like a yak in drag. But not me. Using my superior education, a PHD in Stuffed Animal Psychology from Austin Community College, I have devised a plan that, if implemented, could avert this horrible disaster.
My solution has its roots in the old adage that says that a million monkeys working at a million typewriters would eventually write a Shakespearean play. It is my hypothesis that if a hundred million sock monkeys worked on a hundred million computers, all the faulty code could be re-written before the onset of Y2K.
I have already tested my hypothesis at a small scale. On November 11, 1998, I brought five sock monkeys to the eighth floor of the Trensi Computing building. I then set each monkey in front of a computer and waited for seven hours.
The results were limited, but I would certainly not call them negative. Three of the monkeys; Bruce, Red, and Andy sat motionless in front of their computer screens for the entire seven hours as if they were inanimate. Pete, the small monkey, was lost and turned up three days later in the coffee cup of a Trensi employee. And the remaining monkey, Mr. Bowels, went crazy from staring at his computer screen and attacked my colleague. My colleague, the poor delusional fool, claims that he was not attacked and that I simply threw the monkey at him out of boredom, but that's a lie.
Some people might see my experiment as a failure, but I am still highly optimistic. I feel the experiment did not produce the expected results because of my limited number of test subjects. Surely it would work if millions of sock monkeys were involved, but a man of my meager means could never afford that many monkeys.
Therefore, I am making a formal plea to the government to bankroll my project. I will need no more than eight billion dollars, and maybe a few female androids if NASA's got any lying around. That should be enough funding for me to effectively save our society. But time is running out, so please lobby your senator or congressman to support my solution before it's too late.
Liberty uber alles.
sssssss asdjkfjs dfk dsjfk as;dlfasdifas dfka sdjfkasd fsssssss ssss aslkfdjasdk fjjkdfl sssss
OK. So we were actually just discussing the whole "10000000 monkeys + 1000000 typewriters = shakespeare (given enough time)" thing, and I was thinking - now, if we just set up a random number generator, and then it constantly generated random numbers, or went from 1 to like 10000000000000000, and then took that number, converted it to binary, and then made that printed out that binary using ascii codes, would we eventually get to Shakespeare, and other works?
I think it's a possibility. Bat man... those would be some *big* numbers... thing 2^(number of characters in Hamlet*8).....
--Jason
http://www.virtualvillagesquare.com/ Online Communities: The Next Generation
Six monkeys using there own proprietary sssssssoftware have sssssuccessfully bid for and received shareholder approval to restructure AOL. the ownership of SSAOL (the new name of the company) have asssured ssshare holders that ssssstablity and expansion into the trees is their most important corporate goal.
"Now there is a horizon for the firm and subscibers will have no reason to switch to MSN regardless of the pretty butterfly"
Said a long time AOL subscriber.
Certainly now millions more monkeys world wide will soon be able to use SSAOL because of the revolutionary Six Monkeys Banana Flavoured Dessssktop!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
The monkeys did prove they're smarter than most of us IT professionals:
The first thing they did was to bring a large stone and try to smash up the computer
I feel like such an idiot now.
-JDF
1. Six monkeys
2. One Computer
3. Rock
4. Urine
5. ???
6. Profit!
- Crusadio