A Few Million Virtual Monkeys Randomly Recreate Shakespeare

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday September 25, 2011 @03:19PM from the simpsons-did-it dept.

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.'"

1 of 312 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Frankly, that's cool by Oligonicella · 2011-09-25 18:46 · Score: 5, Informative

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.