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A Few Million Monkeys Finish Recreating Shakespeare's Works
eljefe6a writes "The Million Monkeys project has finished every work of Shakespeare. The last work was The Taming of the Shrew (insert shrewish joke here), which finished on October 6. I give my thoughts on going viral. If this article about going viral goes viral, it will create an infinite loop that will bring about the destruction of the world. The project source is released, too."
But could they direct better versions of planet of the Apes?
My internetting is no good.
Dupe
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/11/10/09/2252225/a-few-million-monkeys-finish-recreating-shakespeares-works
But could a million monkeys ever get a first post?
This doesn't come even remotely close to the real situation postulated in the Million Monkeys concept.
It proves nothing, and isn't even very good as a publicity stunt.
Fourth!
"The Million Monkeys project went viral starting on October 25, 2011 and went into full swing on October 26, 2011. On October 26, 2011, over 25,000 unique visitors viewed the Million Monkeys project, 300 sites referred traffic, and people viewed it from 119 countries."
Were the monkeys spanked if they made an error?
This is not newsworthy and it's not what you might think. It used small chunks of text and only kept ones that made sense. A better description of why this is complete bullshit can be found here.
Haven't we been through this?
The project doesn't really hold up to the ideals of the 'million monkey' experiment.
The program randomly creates words, compares them to a database (the works of William S.), and ticks them off when a correct one is found.
Dear Sir,
Poppycock!
Signed,
Anonymous
The Million Monkeys project went viral, but not in the cool, apocalyptic way. The Million Monkeys project went viral starting on October 25, 2011 and went into full swing on October 26, 2011
It's amazing what a few million time-traveling monkeys can do.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Original idea was for a million monkeys to come up with the entire play as a whole, not individual sentences from the play and piecing them together after the fact.
This is like calculating the odds of getting the winning lottery numbers from a random number generator, but doing it one number at a time as opposed to the number generator getting all 7 numbers at once.
The name of this project is completely wrong compared to what anyone who knows of the Million monkeys can recreate Shakespeares works' concept.
If a random sequence output from one of the 'virtual monkeys' matched some sequence of characters in a work, they counted it as if the monkey typed part of that work.
At no point did any one of their virtual monkeys ever turn out even a single coherent sentence, let alone one that could be found in a work of Shakespeare.
This guy seems to think that if you get enough output from /dev/urandom that you can account for all the characters in a book, then you've recreated the book. Doesn't matter than /dev/urandom didn't actually spell out the words in the book.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Would have gone faster had he settled for one character (and faster yet with just one bit).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
the set up for this is that it they just emit 9 character random strings and cross off anything that matches. Emit 8 character ones and it's 26 times easier. So why not just emit 1 character strings.
perl -e 'print "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" '
there done.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm sure there is something I'm missing from this, so what is the point in spending time doing something like this? Programming techniques? Or simply for insight in to random character generation?
To me it seems fairly arbitrary and pointless.
Now do it on a virtual machine written in Java that runs on a browser inside another virtual machine wirtten in batch file on top of about a million other layers of abtraction, obfuscation and lazines, with dozen of libraries, dlls, routines and APIs that you didn't write and will never get close to understanding, and do it all in Python, no, Metro because that's the latest thing, then blame the hardware for being too slow. Because, software!
This story was already posted and it wasn't random even then.
>If this article about going viral goes viral, it will create an infinite loop that will bring about the destruction of the world
What if, say, nobody gives a crap because what they did isn't even close to what the phrase they're trying to ape (huh-hah!) really means.
Million /. monkeys can repeat the same stories over and over, that's what happens when the keys are on a touchscreen instead of having the proper clickety click keyboard.
You can't handle the truth.
How does rewriting Shakespeare's works relate to time travel? I still can't wrap my mind around the number of times the article says that it will go viral on October 25th and 26th... Do the monkeys also tell him what will happen in the future? If so, I have a test next Friday, and need to get my hands on virtual monkeys to write out the questions and answers..
Of course we could all get a million computers to generate random output of strings and check if any of those matches any Shakespeares (fully, without a single mispelling, nor character missing). It's just that it makes no sense resource wise... On the other hand it would be legit.
I guess we all know what it means. The real question for me: would he be infringing copyright by producing the words that way? Or by the million (real) monkeys... would they?
My favorite version of this meme is Borges' story "The Library of Babel".
--
make install -not war
These monkeys need to learn to stop plagiarizing. We need to teach each and every one of them a lesson.
Who wants to join the million monkey spanking project?
It will be at least as important as this dumb ass project.
...it was the blurst of times. STUPID MONKEY!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcSUWP0QNeY
The foundation of the story was posted on the linked blog on September 23rd, and most blogs and news outlets covered it then (e.g. ars technica).
Good job being timely, slashdot. At one point I could come here for breaking information. Those days are long gone.
I can generate the entire works of Shakespeare using Morse Code in just a few nanoseconds.
The early 80's wants its program back.
The only thing this has demonstrated is computing power has increased. Whoop de doo.
Sensationalist crap. Not interesting in the least. A very misleading title to boot. Make it go away.
These monkeys need to learn to stop plagiarizing. We need to teach each and every one of them a lesson.
Who wants to join the million monkey spanking project?
It will be at least as important as this dumb ass project.
Well, here you go: the million monkey spanking project. Sign right up!
This site has gone downhill lately.
In 2003, scientists at Paignton Zoo and the University of Plymouth, in Devon in England reported that they had left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Sulawesi Crested Macaques for a month; not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, they started by attacking the keyboard with a stone, and continued by urinating and defecating on it.
(source)
Here's their output and a little more info/some pictures.
The next big question, how many monkeys will it take to reproduce wikipedia in it's entirety?
didnt think I would get to share this again so soon... http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/40000/0000/000/40020/40020.strip.gif
So, if this is a real test and success - then the filter can be reconfigured for chunks of lines from Star Wars - or the writings of jim butcher and those books should be there too right?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
The last work was The Taming of the Shrew (insert shrewish joke here)
She doesn't look Shrewish
Goddamn, this story again? It was bogus the first time it came around.
Man, the weekend staff around here needs a little supervision.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's not enough to say that the criticisms are invalid because he didn't have access to infinite resources. The fact is, he claimed that his program had randomly recreated the works of Shakespeare, and he didn't come even close.
It is a slow, very slow, slashdot day :(
"This is the first time every work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly reproduced."
Fixed: This is the first time every word contained in every work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly produced.
But even then it is still false, billions of humans have already randomly reproduced every word contained in every work of Shakespeare.
1) This Million Monkeys Project is dumb because it cheats to increases the probability so much that it is basically unrelated to the original million monkeys scenario.
2) From Wikipedia on the real million monkeys scenario:
"Even if the observable universe were filled with monkeys the size of atoms typing from now until the heat death of the universe, their total probability to produce a single instance of Hamlet would still be many orders of magnitude less than one in 10 to the 183,800 power. As Kittel and Kroemer put it, "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers." This is from their textbook on thermodynamics, the field whose statistical foundations motivated the first known expositions of typing monkeys.[2]"
Slashdot got scooped by Language Log days ago...
Now I challenge the monkeys to create a grand unified theory. You have 2 weeks. Go! What do you mean it only works backwards?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This reminds me of distributed.net and their pointless brute forcing of encryted string that they already know only contains A-Z ascii characters that form a message. I wonder how much CO2 emissions are pumped out of pointless activities like this.
http://www.statschat.org.nz/2011/10/06/infinite-monkeys-shakespeare-and-all-that/
If this counts as 'monkey analogs' writing Shakespeare, I should start keeping a list of words I say. Then when any new book comes out, if it can be written using only words I've previously generated, but not necessarily the same order, then I wrote the book. Only Dr. Seuss will be safe from my litigation.
if one assumes an infinite universe with an infinite number of beings utilizing an infinite number of lexicons utilizing an infinite number of exceptions to spelling and the rules of grammar (and mebbe a few other infinites) - ONE monkey could re-create the works of Shakespeare that would be intelligible to someone in the universe on the first try!
TFA mentions the project has "gone viral".
That's nice. You know what else is viral? Herpes.
too funny. i own a smoothie shop named million monkeys smoothies, named after the infinite monkey theorem. interesting to see headlines on an idea that no one ever seems to know about when they walk in. "is it called millions of monkeys?"
seriously i do. it's right here on maps.
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS239&q=million+monkeys+smoothies&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=16662l28033l0l29014l28l28l1l8l1l0l324l4027l0.8.10.1l19l0&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl&authuser=0
Is there maybe one minor difference in that Shakespeare, perhaps, didn't have the result already available before setting off, so that he could monitor his progress?
Why is this crap even discussed here? Next thing you know we'll get some marketing goon reselling us Google search through a flimsy add on and we'll be jeering for 2 consecutive weeks.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Practically speaking, though, Shakespeare wrote those first - or, as far as we can tell, his name is on 'em, and my point is that they were written by someone who put those words together in some manner that - more than making sense - is rather eloquent. I suppose that I fail to see the scientific contribution of the achievement.
Now, if they'd chosen Harry Potter, well I'm sure that would have been quite an achievement in marketing. Shakespeare is so old-hat, it's as if the English language evolved from nowhere...
Uh, whatever the folks behind this might have planned for the next project, I suggest we ask them to not turn these monkeys loose on typing up all the names of God. OK?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I wonder why this non-story gets so much slashdot attention?
Essentialy this guy has executed a hoax to test how much media attention he can get. And he's proud of it. Well maybe he wasn't aware of it being a hoax but his claim vs. actual "outcome" certainly seem like one.
The project is completely, utterly useless. Proves nothing, demonstrates nothing, it just does nothing. I tried very hard but can't find any value in it whatsoever.
I would be ashamed to advertise myself with something like this unless I were 14 and just started programming.
what about the works Shakespeare would have written if he had time (and those which have been lost)? how could one tell if they are genuine
All this retard has done is proven that it's possible to non-deterministically enumerate all of the words found at least once in the complete works of Shakespeare.
No shit, Sherlock. If this hadn't worked, then we'd know for a fact that something's wrong with his PRNG, or that the guy can't handle a 7th grade programming assignment.
This is NOT news for nerds. It's news for mentally retarded hipsters.
Is they're able to re-write Shakespeare from scratch, imagine what else is possible. I say get them to work on designing a working flux capacitor or TARDIS... GERONIMO!!!
UpYours - http://www.upyoursnetwork.com
Identifying some characters in a random stream has no meaning.
Statistics can show how much time this algorithm needs in average, without spending huge resources on computing power.
So it's absolutely useless. Perhaps some could pretend it's art.
aaaaaaa
It seems almost every commenter here has missed the point. TFA is not about infinite monkeys. It is about "going viral".
On the programming side, this guy has managed to randomly recreate 9 consecutive characters of Shakespeare's texts (several times over). Not a great achivement. - Not even a mediocre one. Still he has managed to get a lot of publicity, including being featured on /. twice.
I am sure many of the readers here have projects of their own that are far more interesting than his, but which are getting very little attention. Why not read TFA, and learn from somebody who succeded?
When I read the headline I thought the guy was trying through genetic algorithms or similar to demonstrate that something as complex as the works of Shakespeare could be "bred" through randomness (as Dawkins suggested in one of his books). Turns out the guy was just generating random numbers and every time a random number matched a part of the works he crossed it off the list and went onto the next part. I'm struggling to understand why. To me it ranks right up there with the bible code on the pointlessness scale.
To me it seems fairly arbitrary and pointless.
I suspect it's run by the shipping interests who are eager to use the Northwest Passage to get goods from Europe to China. Or perhaps a money laundering operation using Amazon somehow. What else makes any sense?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
But could a million monkeys ever get a first post?
Yes.
The way I heard it was that the 500,000th monkey typed "first" and the millionth monkey typed "post" and the researcher claimed that it only took a million monkeys to get to first post.
To his credit, the researcher did not count the words "frost" or "piss".
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It was found that the monkeys did outperform Congress is every test so far except one, picking their ass.
And did it with one monkey.
I do get one piece of insight from this near-repost of the previous article. Now that everyone has had a couple of weeks to stew on the subject, the comments are much better--both funnier and more insightful--this time around.
Wow this project will change everything.. NOT!!!
This whole project was a waste of time and resources. This isn't even a clever project, and I want the time back I lost reading about this.
The director of this experiment has the premise of the theory all wrong. All he is doing is generating random text and every time a 9-character string "matches" something in the Shakespeare predetermined archive of text, it is added and cumulatively, over time you will have "recreated Shakespeare with a million monkeys...blah blah blah...."
That's nothing but a random character generator and a pattern matching algorithm running ad infinitum. No big deal *yawn* for any modern computer.
The real challenge, is out of your "million monkeys" or one monkey working for eternity (same difference), for ONE MONKEY to eventually create a single, contiguous block of text, matched perfectly, character, for character with the complete works of Shakespeare. When you can do that, then I'll pay attention.
You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to swim on his back, then you've got something!