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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)
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
"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?
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.
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
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
Duplicate articles, server crashes, misspellings...
Educated monkeys.
It still isn't Shakespeare.
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.
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
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!
"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.
The National Endowment for the Arts gave $75,000 (matched two-to-one with private money) to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Act. The Center selected a panel. The panel selected Andre Serrano. The Center gave Serrano $15,000 of Endowment money based on the quality of his work.
- "Fact Sheet on American Family Association Fundraising Advertisement," National Endowment for the Arts, February 1990 (as cited in Culture Wars, 1992, p. 152.
Serrano did Piss Christ in 1987. It is a photograph of a crucifix immersed in an amber liquid. In 1988 he won the fellowship from Awards in the Visual Arts, a program administered by SECCA. In that same year, Piss Christ was one of the works included in an SECCA traveling exhibition by AVA award winners.
So: $5,000 of Washington's money was matched with $10,000 in private donations and given to SECCA. That money, along with other sources of funding for SECCA, funds the AVA program. Serrano was given an award for his work which obviously included works besides just Piss Christ.
Just FYI :)
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
It'll take for that computer to show up on ebay....
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?
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
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.
http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/05/09/monkey_typis
My favorite lines:
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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.
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!
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
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
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
Shame Microsoft clippy wasn't there to help them. "It looks like your writing the complete works of shakespeare"
Less is more !