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:I did think of it.

[Paul Fernhout]

What a great post.

To keep thing going well, I hope you and your family are also getting the right amount of vitamin D and eating lots of vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, whole grains, and omega-3s and a multi-vitamin with iodine).
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/vitamin_D_recommendations.aspx
http://drfuhrman.com/disease/ChildrensHealth.aspx

Our indoor-oriented junk-food-promoting society is not that family friendly in those ways.

As Paul Graham writes:
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
"Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."

Also related:
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Other resources:
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
"As codirector of the Albany Free School, Chris Mercogliano has had remarkable success in helping a diverse population of youngsters find their way in the world. He regrets, however, that most kids' lives are subject to some form of control from dawn until dusk. Lamenting risk-averse parents, overstructured school days, and a lack of playtime and solitude, Mercogliano argues that we are robbing our young people of "that precious, irreplaceable period in their lives that nature has set aside for exploration and innocent discovery," leaving them ill-equipped to face adulthood. The "domestication of childhood" squeezes the adventure out of kids' lives and threatens to smother the spark that animates each child with talents, dreams, and inclinations."

All the best in navigating through our family-unfriendly and child-unfriendly society. At least there are now tons of helpful resource on the internet, but it can take a lot of trouble to wade through them.