A Few Million Virtual Monkeys Randomly Recreate Shakespeare

First time accepted submitter eljefe6a writes "On September 23 at 2:30 PST the A Million Amazonian Monkeys project successfully recreated A Lover's Complaint. This is the first time a work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere. From the article: 'For this project, I used Hadoop, Amazon EC2, and Ubuntu Linux. Since I don’t have real monkeys, I have to create fake Amazonian Map Monkeys. The Map Monkeys create random data in ASCII between a and z. It uses Sean Luke’s Mersenne Twister to make sure I have fast, random, well behaved monkeys. Once the monkey’s output is mapped, it is passed to the reducer which runs the characters through a Bloom Field membership test. If the monkey output passes the membership test, the Shakespearean works are checked using a string comparison. If that passes, a genius monkey has written 9 characters of Shakespeare. The source material is all of Shakespeare’s works as taken from Project Gutenberg.'"

Comments

Re:Huh?

[517714]

This project has generated better illustrative proof than ever before that randomness will eventually produce everything.

This project proves no such thing. It has shown only that randomness can reproduce (duplicate) something that already existed. This project can never reproduce War and Peace in the original Russian, as the Cyrillic alphabet is not included. It demonstrates effectively that some people will see what they want to see.

Re:Frankly, that's cool

[Oligonicella]

Beyond that, it didn't even accomplish it's goal. The idea is not that a hundred or more monkeys can hammer out nine character chunks that could be assembled *by man* into the complete work, it is that a hundred monkeys could hammer at typewriters for some undetermined length of time and one of them would randomly produce the complete work *alone*.

That didn't happen.

Re:It is in fact virtually impossible

[TheRaven64]

But that defeats the point. Why 9-character segments? Why not 1-character segments? Then, when each letter has been generated once by your random number generator, you say 'done' and move on. The point of the gedankenexperiment is to show that a true random number generator will eventually produce any sequence, irrespective of whether you ascribe some meaning to that phrase or not. For example, it is just as probable that a monkey would type 'the original submitter is an idiot who misses the point of probability' as it is that they would type 'mfdag gfnaif pwrg kflgsq hmthwrhdga adsfjn fadfm asdfned qemangasd asv'. They are both 70-character strings of lowercase ASCII characters and spaces, and if you have a random number generator set up to produce these with no bias towards letter frequencies then either combination is equally probable. This 'experiment' added an extra step of determinism, which means that it is not an unbiased random number generator, it's a very badly designed program for generating a Shakespeare play.