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."

Comments

A million monkeys can complete Shakespeare...

[unreadepitaph]

But could they direct better versions of planet of the Apes?

Re:A million monkeys can complete Shakespeare...

[Coolhand2120]

If given enough time.

Re:A million monkeys can complete Shakespeare...

[BitZtream]

No, these couldn't.

By any normal persons definition, these monkeys also never actually produced any of Shakespeare's works either. They basically produced the right number of As, Bs, Cs, ect ... and then the guy running the project rearranged them into the right order and says the monkeys wrote shakespeare!

I guess if you count the guy who is reassembling the letters as a monkey, then its probably true that 1 million virtual monkeys and 1 human monkey could do it, though I'm guessing he probably fucked up the reassembly as well considering everything else about this 'project'.

Re:A million monkeys can complete Shakespeare...

[Darinbob]

Yes. 10 monkeys, 4 days.

Re:A million monkeys can complete Shakespeare...

[mwvdlee]

It's the same guy that pretended to have a work of shakespear a few weeks ago, simply by selectively combining overlapping strings of 9 random characters together?

What I find most amazing about this project is that his random character generator is so incredibly slow.

Re:A million monkeys can complete Shakespeare...

[metacell]

Do you know how much Roseanne Barr eats, or are you just assuming she's gluttonous because she's fat?

Why not mock people who's had heart attacks for being lazy and not exercising enough? I exercise a few times per week and has never had any heart problems, so obviously, anyone who has them must only have themselves to blame. (sarcasm)

Re:A million monkeys can complete Shakespeare...

[metacell]

The "monkeys" were used to generate nine-character-groups, not individual characters, but yes, they didn't really recreate the works of Shakespeare on their own. They only generated nine-character-groups which could be pasted together into the works of Shakespeare by someone who already knew the end result.

Re:A million monkeys can complete Shakespeare...

[_0xd0ad]

Why's he wasting time generating long random numbers if he's non-randomly checking and combining them?

Sounds like an awfully inefficient algorithm. If the monkeys produced 1 binary bit instead of 9 bytes at a time they could recreate the works of Shakespeare in approximately 2 tries.

Re:A million monkeys can complete Shakespeare...

[jschultz410]

Exactly.

Your suggestion is even better than mine, which was going to be why not generate random "blocks" of a single character instead of nine?

I imagine the monkeys would have "recreated Shakespeare" in less than a second ...

Re:A million monkeys can complete Shakespeare...

[spads]

Per the above "no these couldn't", what I find amazing is that anyone's even following this.

Even prior to cmdrtaco's departure, I noticed this site's tendency to post things thought provoking, though stupid.

Re:A million monkeys can complete Shakespeare...

[metacell]

I bet you're one of those people who believe Elvis is dead too.

First Post?

[colinrichardday]

But could a million monkeys ever get a first post?

Re:First Post?

[Anonymous Coward]

Make that, could 999,999 monkeys get a first post.

Re:First Post?

[JAlexoi]

Make that, could 999,999 monkeys get a first post.

+1000000

Re:First Post?

[owlstead]

Yup, mod parent up, that was exactly my idea. I don't know the number of slashdot articles, but it should be close.

Re:First Post?

[colinrichardday]

There have been about 38,000,000 comments. At 100 comments per article (sheer guess), that would be 380,000 articles.

Re:First Post?

[Surt]

The number of comments per article is probably closer to 300 or 500.

Re:First Post?

[colinrichardday]

Then you would have 76,000 to 130,000 articles.

Re:First Post?

[St.Creed]

And they're all generated by monkeys! :)

It's a cheat.

[Jane Q. Public]

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.

Re:It's a cheat.

[Dan East]

Yes, we hashed through all this last time. The "monkeys" generate 9 character blocks of random letters, then that chunk of text is fitted wherever it can be into the actual works of Shakespeare. And as I said last time around, it would be vastly more efficient, and just as pointless, to generate random SINGLE characters and fit those into works of Shakespeare instead.

Re:It's a cheat.

[robbyjo]

Then, it's not really monkeys. It's more of monkeys with an oracle. That oracle thing made a whole world of difference.

Re:It's a cheat.

[JAlexoi]

Bravo for the truth. Heck why not reduce each monkey's random string length to 1 and see how long it takes to come up with every letter of the alphabet, in any order ( a few microseconds), then claim that your monkeys have covered the set of all human knowledge, past, present, and future in the English language.

And then you're screwed by an introduction of letter etalon to the english alphabet.....

Re:It's a cheat.

[Jane Q. Public]

Yes, I recall. But since the story reared its ugly head again, I felt an urge to denounce it... again.

Re:It's a cheat.

[Darinbob]

Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Dorchester, where a very good crowd has turned out to watch local monkeys write the complete works of Thomas Hardy on this very pleasant July morning. And here they come, here come the line of monkeys walking towards the typewriters. They look confident, relaxed, very much the modern novel writing monkeys in form as they mug for the very good-natured bank holiday crowd. And the crowd goes quiet now as the monkeys settle themselves at the desks, scratching themselves, pondering the unfamiliar pieces of technology. A monkey reaches over and pushes a key! It's the first letter, no wait, it's just a tab stop, a meaningless button as there are no points given for formatting. Oh dear what a disappointing start! But another monkey is off again and there he goes, the first letter of a Thomas Hardy novel at 10:35 this very lovely morning, it's an "H", Dennis.

Dennis: Well, this is true to form, no surprises there. The letter "H" appears in every Thomas Hardy novel so far, comprising one third of the definite article. The letter "H" is not the most popular letter of the alphabet but it does have a solid showing. We've matched up this letter and we appear to have completed 5.93% of the complete works of Thomas Hardy finished so far. Oh dear, the monkey appears to have flung poo at his typewriter obscuring the letter "H"! The only letter written so far and now we're starting over.

Re:It's a cheat.

[icebike]

Then, it's not really monkeys. It's more of monkeys with an oracle. That oracle thing made a whole world of difference.

The guy who set this up has almost as much intelligence as a monkey but is a whole lot more intellectually dishonest much more of a publicity whore.

Re:It's a cheat.

[Mr. Underbridge]

Yeah, I got about two paragraphs in and, expecting to read a description of the actual project, all I found was a bunch of 'look at me!!!'. Then, I realized that *was* the actual project. Distributed Narcissism. Yay.

Re:It's a cheat.

[pnot]

It proves nothing, and isn't even very good as a publicity stunt.

On the contrary. It proves that with the right link-bait buzzwords and sufficiently lazy editors, even the most pointless project can make the Slashdot front page -- twice.

Come back Bitcoin stories, all is forgiven...

Re:It's a cheat.

[Thomas Miconi]

Actually, although the guy doesn't mention it, this looks a lot like an expanded version of Richard Dawkins' "WEASEL" experiment.

As such, it does have some educational purpose: by its success (which would be impossible with an actual million monkeys experiment), it shows that evolution by natural selection (that's what the guy is doing) is very different from, and much more powerful than, simple random search. Simply because it's selective (duh), and more importantly, cumulative: you don't start from scratch at every new phenotype, you keep the good stuff you've found so far.

I wish he had highlighted this bit. That would have made his experiment much more valuable.

Re:It's a cheat.

[gadzook33]

The much larger fail here is on slashdot's part. Why do they keep posting stories like this? Either they're incompetent or they're manipulative and know this will insight drama in the comments. Either is lousy journalism, blogmanship.

Re:It's a cheat.

[The Dawn Of Time]

LOL oh Slashdot, never change, never change...

Re:It's a cheat.

[theshowmecanuck]

Kind of sad actually. I was going to suggest using this technique to come up with a paper on how to travel faster than light. I guess the trick would have been to figure out which part of all the typing was the correct method. :) I guess it is easier already having the finished work to compare to.

Re:It's a cheat.

[eljefe6a]

I did this in other articles. It does require that people RTFA, which most comments show.

Re:It's a cheat.

[stephanruby]

It was rubbish when Slashdot headlined it last week. It's still rubbish now. It's too bad the editors don't read any of our comments, otherwise they would have known not to re-post it again. I'm getting kind of sick of all of this click-baiting, I'm out of here.

Re:It's a cheat.

[polle404]

It could also be taken as the monkeys are smarter than people, as a few million monkeys have produced what a few billion homo sapiens (I use the term loosely) haven't been able to do on the intertubes...

Re:It's a cheat.

[metacell]

Or The Bible Code.

Re:It's a cheat.

[metacell]

The guy who set this up has almost as much intelligence as a monkey but is a whole lot more intellectually dishonest much more of a publicity whore.

*sigh* I miss the old days on Slashdot, when trolls were eloquent.

Re:It's a cheat.

[tommy121]

I agree with you

Re:It's a cheat.

[Bakkster]

Still, I have the same issue with that experiment (which isn't particularly surprising since it is Dawkins), in that you are starting with the end result and contriving a way to generate it. In that way, it isn't much different from an Intelligent Design proponent's argument. In this thought experiment, Dawkins is the intelligent designer, and it's a shame he doesn't see the irony in that. A better thought experiment would be generating five words, checking each for fitness against the list of ALL dictionary words, and seeing how long it takes to generate 5 words that if arranged correctly would match any 5 word phrase in the complete works of Shakespere. It's trivially easy when you prevent the computer/monkeys from arriving at a dead end, but the case of guiding the system away from those evolutionary dead ends ends up providing more weight to an ID viewpoint than darwinian evolution.

Re:It's a cheat.

[mianne]

Careful what you wish for. We'll end up with a story about a million virtual monkeys generating bitcoins!

Re:It's a cheat.

[Krokus]

Then, it's not really monkeys. It's more of monkeys with an oracle. That oracle thing made a whole world of difference.

I remember reading a blurb in a book some time ago about some university actually trying this out with a room full of monkeys. After three days, all they had typed was several pages filled with the letter "s". I suspect that, when using real monkeys, even an oracle would throw up her hands. :)

Re:It's a cheat.

[Bucky24]

Clearly they didn't give the monkeys long enough.

Deception.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Deception.

[hedwards]

That's a good summary of it. I always imagined it was an infinite number of monkeys out of which a smaller number typed in its entirety one of Shakespeare's plays and that a sufficient number of them did so independently so as to finish the complete works. Probably with a few duplicates and an unimaginably large number of near misses.

Breaking it up into small chunks that aren't even the size of an act really degrades the whole point of the activity in the first place. I doubt that the computing power will ever be there to really simulate this in it's full scope, but simulating it at least at the sentence or act level is really necessary for this to be of any particular value.

It went viral when?

[Baloroth]

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.

Re:It went viral when?

[A.Bettik]

The time-traveling nature of this article honestly hindered my ability to read it. Boo bad editing.

Re:It went viral when?

[eljefe6a]

Thanks for pointing that out. I have fixed it in the post.

Re:It went viral when?

[eljefe6a]

Thanks, I fixed that one too. See what happens when you let monkeys randomly generate your posts?

Re:It went viral when?

[Derf the]

Please, I would like to know if you have come to some new, more informed, position having read these comments posted in response to your story or if you were already largely aware of the deficiencies in this 'persons' actions.
I am a believer in taking responsibility for your own actions, and I hope you feel a significant degree of regret in your actions which have allowed the Slashdot editors to make 'their' mistake of put this story on the front page(again).

Re:It went viral when?

[eljefe6a]

I never said I had the infinite resources and yes I do understand infinite monkey theorem. I realize there are different interpretations to this saying/theorem and I have done 2 different ones already. I understand the definition of infinite and infinite monkey theorem and I realize that this project does not have infinite resources. This project was funded and written by myself and was not supported by any grant money or federal money. No monkeys were harmed during the making of this code. This project is my attempt to find a creative way to attain an answer without infinite resources. It is a fun side project.

Re:It went viral when?

[maxwell demon]

No monkeys were harmed during the making of this code.

I don't believe you. I'm sure you did some test run on your code. And I'm sure that at the end of the test run, you terminated the process, thus killing all virtual monkeys living in it. Killing a monkey most definitely is harming it. Therefore I'm pretty sure you harmed virtual monkeys during the making of this code.

Misleading name

[BitZtream]

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.

Re:Misleading name

[owlstead]

Agreed.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

There, I created each and every Shakespeare work by typing every letter. I must be a genius. Oh, and even better, look at the dot at the end of this sentence -> [.]
When multiplied and put in the right place in a 2D grid, it represents all the works of Shakespeare all by itself.

He did know that it was not correct, he just implemented an approximation and abused the title for his hobby project. No harm done. He did even explain that he was just testing some techniques and warns people not to get angry, which I will implement by drinking a Lagavulin single malt on his health.

Re:Misleading name

[FrootLoops]

This was discussed to death in the original version of this story. Here's a copy of one of several +5 comments describing the strategy:

This experiment, while fun, isn't exactly the infinite monkey experiment.

What's happening here (if I understand the writeup) is that the monkeys are typing random letter combinations, until they hit a small phrase that happens to be in shakespeare. Then that phrase is marked as done.

Let n be the size in characters of the target phrase. If n=1, then the complete works of shakespeare are obtained as soon as each of the letters of the alphabet have been typed at least once. You could do this in a few seconds on your computer keyboard. If n=2, then the complete works are obtained as soon as all the possible pairs of letters have been typed. The experiment in TFA has n=9 I think.

As n grows larger, the time until completion grows exponentially. Once his expeiment is done, the case n=10 should take roughly 26 times as long (ignoring punctuation capitals and diacritical marks). Alternatively, it would require a cloud roughly 26 times bigger to do it in the same amount of time.

(source; taken from martin-boundary)

The author knows it's not the regular interpretation. Here's his response to one of my comments:

I found that mathematicians and statisticians had the most adverse reaction to my project. If you have half an infinite resource to give me I would gladly use it and run the project again. I even wrote a brief section on the post saying: I realize there are different interpretations to this saying/theorem and I have done 2 different ones already. I understand the definition of infinite and infinite monkey theorem and I realize that this project does not have infinite resources. This project was funded and written by myself and was not supported by any grant money or federal money. No monkeys were harmed during the making of this code. This project is my attempt to find a creative way to attain an answer without infinite resources. It is a fun side project.

(source; taken from eljefe6a)

And here's a repost of some of my own calculations concerning the improbability of the real version:

If he had successfully randomly achieved a shakespeare play, [...] It would be like a flying saucer landing and informing someone that they won the galactic lottery.

It's far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, (...), far more improbable than that. The text of Hamlet (see Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org]) is around 180 KB long, so around 1.44 million bits. Being generous and lopping off half (since most of the characters aren't present), and then rounding down, let's say it's 500,000 bits. There are 2^500,000 possibilities; this is a number with around 150,000 decimal digits. It's comparable to the odds of winning a 1-in-a-million lottery 25 thousand times in a row.

Winning a galactic lottery, in comparison, would be extremely, almost incomparably, frequent. There are something like 300 billion stars in the Milky Way. Suppose each star had 30 planets with 100 billion "people", being very generous. That's only about one million billion billion inhabitants. Winning such a lottery would be the same as winning 4 1-in-a-million lotteries in a row. 4 versus 25,000, and that 25,000 is an exponent--these two can't just be divided to property compare them.

It's closer to winning 6 thousand galactic lotteries in a row.

(source; taken from me)

Re:Misleading name

[eljefe6a]

Yes, and now the source code is released so anyone can run their "correct" version. Better start now, the universe isn't getting any younger.

Re:Misleading name

[retchdog]

the point is more that he apparently doesn't realize how completely pointless this is, whatever his resources. the coupon collector's problem has basically been completely solved (in the sense we have an asymptotic rate, and shakespeare's work are long enough that this limit applies). there's no point whatsoever in simulating it.

it would be exactly like taking physics I and then trying to create an ideal point mass or a completely frictionless surface because they talked about that in a few of the lectures... 1) it's impossible; 2) you've missed the point entirely.

Re:Misleading name

[retchdog]

actually, i take it back partially. this is somewhat interesting, but not because of the infinite monkey "theorem"; that's just silly.

what's interesting is that there are different ways to get 9-character covers of the same text. for example, i could pull "tobeornot" and then "tobethati". alternatively i could pull "rnottobet" and then "hatistheq". either one will cover the substring "rnottobethati" and remove it from the pool.

i'm pretty sure there is a way to find the approximate number of draws by an entropy argument, but it is not a trivial application of coupon collecting, since a draw can give you more than one coupon.

Re:Misleading name

[epine]

he apparently doesn't realize how completely pointless this is

No, he has the psychological structure where he enjoys pretending he doesn't get it, then he slurps up the ensuing attention because it gives him a troll woody.

I'd like to take all his 9-tuples and pave the Bulwer-Lytton or the collected utterances of Wesley Crusher or the cc: transcripts from Howard Stern. It would cover them all.

Re:Misleading name

[mmontour]

it would be exactly like taking physics I and then trying to create an ideal point mass or a completely frictionless surface...

That reminded me of http://xkcd.com/669/

Re:Misleading name

[ChatHuant]

The name of this project is completely wrong compared to what anyone who knows of the Million monkeys can recreate Shakespeares works' concept.

Yeah, I don't get the point of this exercise at all. Writing a trivial program to count the distinct strings of length "n" from the Shakespeare text file, and applying a bit of really elementary calculus of probabilities will get you the same results in about a hour altogether, and should be doable by a medium bright high schooler.
 
Has basic mathematics literacy gone so low? What's next, first page articles on a big program that computes the square root of two via brute force by generating random numbers and squaring them?

Re:Misleading name

[retchdog]

in fact, that xkcd came to mind after i typed that.

you know, eventually, nerds won't need english anymore. we'll just cite the index number of the xkcd which conveys our point. :-/

Re:Misleading name

[retchdog]

+1, Insightful.

What a strange way to live.

Re:Misleading name

[cathector]

thanks for the conceptualizations around large numbers.
for another example, one way to visualize 10^300 is that if you take a sphere the size of the universe (sphere of radius 14 billion light years) and then fill it with grains of sand, and then replace each of those grains of sand with an entire universe filled with grains of sand, and then replace each of those grains of sand with yet another universe of sand, you have about 10^300. by my estimate. this came up because i was pissed off at string theorists claiming that there are 10^500 different sets of laws of physics, which is just an absurd number to bring into a discussion about reality.

Re:Misleading name

[retchdog]

it doesn't have to generate every distinct string.

Re:Misleading name

[maxwell demon]

Winning a galactic lottery may be frequent. Winning the galactic lottery is, however, extremely unlikely.

Well, here's how the galactic lottery works: For each star in the galaxy, a random number is drawn from the integers between 1 and the age of the universe in Planck times (to be exact, the longest time path from big bang to the place of the lottery drawing is taken). Only if you guess each single number right, you'll win. Indeed, it has been won just one time yet, however some people claim to have measured an infinite improbability field, and therefore doubt the legitimacy of the win.

Re:Misleading name

[FrootLoops]

A hobby is a hobby. Who am I to judge how worthwhile it is? I agree, the results are wildly unsurprising, but so long as the guy enjoyed doing it, so what? I suppose he's made quite a few nerds indignant, though I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or not. A few people have probably found it interesting, and maybe a few were lead to read up on the infinite monkey theorem.

Re:Misleading name

[retchdog]

that's fine; i'm sure it was also a nice exercise in learning hadoop. it's the gloryhounding that bugs those of us who've done much more and much harder work without recognition (which is most of slashdot).

Re:Misleading name

[ChatHuant]

it doesn't have to generate every distinct string.

Sorry, I don't understand you - I may have been unclear in my post; let me explain: it doesn't have to generate anything. All I need to know is the number of characters he takes into consideration (say 80, for a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and maybe some extra colons or stuff) and the number of strings he wants to generate (for example the 100000 (or however many there are) different substrings of length 9 in the Shakespeare oeuvre). I can then compute the probability of a random generated substring falling into this particular subset (something like 100000/80^9, for the values pulled out of thin air above). At this point all I need to do is apply a formula to get the number of samples (monkey generated strings) I need to cover all the space (the 100000 substrings) with a given probability. It'll be something like "with 100,000,000 samples, you have a 20% chance of hitting all the target substrings, with 1,000,000,000 you have a 70% chance", and so on). Given this number and assuming a robo-monkey generates a string every X milliseconds, I can plot the graphs showing me the distribution of results I'd get in different tries, and I'd be able to say "if you wait a week, there's a 20% chance for your monkeys to finish the task, but if you wait a month it's 80% and if you wait a year it's 99.9999, so if you don't get your results in a year better check your monkeys, you've been sold a bad lot or something". All that without generating a single substring!

But then I wouldn't get to play with the monkeys, would I?

Re:Misleading name

[retchdog]

i was being unclear. i'm more a mathematician than a programmer (though really i'm neither). by generate, i meant that there is a probabilistic model generating these strings. i wasn't talking about actually investing a few bob on amazon ec2 instances to gloryhound a trivial pursuit.

nonetheless, i illustrate my point here. fix the alphabet as letters a-z without capitalization or punctuation or spacing (as the schmuck in the story actually did). now suppose shakespeare's idiot brother produced a single work which reads: "polyps", and let's suppose the monkeys are working on 2-character groups rather than 9.

there are five 2-character groups: "po"; "ol"; "ly"; "yp"; "ps". your argument is totally correct if the objective is to collect all of these groups; the waiting time is a sum of independent geometric random variables with (parameters p1=5/26^2, p2=4/26^2, ..., p5=1/26^2).

however the objective is to generate the _text_, not all groups. thus for instance {"po", "ly", "ps"} (up to ordering and repetitions) will work and is the minimal 2-cover. there is also however {"po", "ol", "ly", "ps"} (up to ordering, repetitions, and which one of the covers doesn't overlap the others). finally, only if one is unlucky one is stuck with the maximal cover of all five groups. so, not only are the covers generated randomly, but there are different random absorbing states.

your method gives a very loose upper bound on how long it will take to do what this guy was doing (i know because i made the same mistake, and came up with an estimate which was 6x his result). the real mathematical model is beyond me and probably requires entropy arguments and a sophisticated model of shakespearian english.

Nine characters substrings, eh?

[John Hasler]

Would have gone faster had he settled for one character (and faster yet with just one bit).

Re:Nine characters substrings, eh?

[owlstead]

Yup, with one bit it would take just 5 tries to have a success rate of over 90%. You may not need a fast computer to accomplish it. Heck, the piece of shit calculator in my brain could easily do the job. Unfortunately generating usable random numbers is extremely unreliable as well :)

It's also to world class stupid

[goombah99]

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.
 

Re:It's also to world class stupid

[_0xd0ad]

Why not just emit 1 binary bit and you finish in approximately 2 random guesses.

I suppose ...

[PPH]

... this will satisfy the need for .NET programmers.

And the point is?

[Beelzebud]

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.

Re:And the point is?

[syousef]

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.

Slashdot whoring is the only point as far as I can tell. The "Monkeys" are virtual processes. The methodology is flawed and arbitrary as everyone keeps pointing out. Yet it keeps appearing on slashdot as if this were news for nerds. Heck it's not news for a first year comp sci student.

Re:And the point is?

[BillX]

That, and near the beginning of TFA the guy is actively soliciting someone to contact him if they want to "do a story". I dare not count the occurrences of the word "viral".

Re:And the point is?

[syousef]

That, and near the beginning of TFA the guy is actively soliciting someone to contact him if they want to "do a story". I dare not count the occurrences of the word "viral".

Monkeys....Viral....Anyone else thinking of the movie Outbreak? When does Rene Russo show up?

Re:Dupe..

[kiwimate]

And if the submitter or the editor had read the article, they'd have come across this gem:

On Sunday night October 25, 2011, I was reading through my RSS feeds on Google Reader. Some new Slashdot stories appeared and I dutifully started reading them. When I started reading about myself and my project, I started to think I had clicked on the wrong feed or I had erred in some fashion. I could not believe I was reading about myself on Slashdot after many years of reading it. My wife was next to me at the time and I tried to explain why I was so ecstatic to be on Slashdot. Explaining to a non-geek about Slashdot is difficult, but I think she could see it was important to me. If the media blitz had died at that point, I would have been happy. It didnâ(TM)t. Over the course of the next day, the story kept on gaining momentum, getting more news stories, and more hits on the website.

If I had posted this, after such a clear dupe reference in the article, I'd have been humiliated.

Article is redundant

[Hentes]

This story was already posted and it wasn't random even then.

Million /. monkeys

[roman_mir]

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.

Re:Dupe..

[RMingin]

October 25, 2011 hasn't happened yet. Is it a Dupe From The Future!?!?

"The Library of Babel"

[Doc Ruby]

My favorite version of this meme is Borges' story "The Library of Babel".

It was the best of times...

[Deaths Proxy]

...it was the blurst of times. STUPID MONKEY!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcSUWP0QNeY

Re:It was the best of times...

[Brett Buck]

God Damn plagarism... I ripped off that Simpson's quote LAST WEEK! I mean, it's getting to the point you can't even get credit for remembering and randomly regurgitating lines from TV shows any more.

Yet again, Slashdot is weeks behind

[raaum]

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.

Re:Yet again, Slashdot is weeks behind

[FrootLoops]

The original version of this story appeared on September 26th. The Ars Technica piece you linked was published on the same day, the 26th of September, actually later (~3am on /. vs. 12pm on Ars). In fact my link appears in the "Related Links" below the summary on this story, though I have to admit I typically never look there. It would have been nice if the summary had linked to the previous story to prevent all these stupid reposts.

Re:Yet again, Slashdot is weeks behind

[raaum]

Point taken. Yet, if Slashdot is going to retain any relevance whatsoever, some mechanism to (mostly) eliminate weeks-late reposts needs to be developed.

Re:Yet again, Slashdot is weeks behind

[raaum]

Note that Ars isn't reposting this on a bi-weekly basis... Not that they are the be-all and end-all of internet news, but they're beating the pants off slashdot in the last few years.

Re:Yet again, Slashdot is weeks behind

[JoeMerchant]

/. hasn't been the fastest news source around since blogs took off. The point of /. isn't getting news first, it's getting news that matters to Nerds without having to scrounge the entire net to get it. If you scrounge the entire net every day, then there's no point at all in reading /.

Re:Yet again, Slashdot is weeks behind

[raaum]

I go to 5 or so sites on a daily basis. Slashdot is in that list as a reflex. I'm not scrounging the entire net, yet /. is still reposting stuff from weeks past.

I like slashdot; I've been visiting for 13 years, but it's not often "news for nerds", and similarly rarely "stuff that matters." By definition, news is timely. And the editorial (community) selections lead to "stuff that matters" only the first time around - not on the 4th repost.

Re:Yet again, Slashdot is weeks behind

[JoeMerchant]

Simple answer, if you don't like the output of the editorial staff, take it off your list (as I have done a couple of tech blogs that went down the tubes for whatever reason.) Yes, the editors of /. have a reposting habit, it's only a problem if you're too OCD to skip a story you think you've seen before.

Methinks it is like a weasel

[sqlrob]

The early 80's wants its program back.

The only thing this has demonstrated is computing power has increased. Whoop de doo.

The doesnt belong here

[westyvw]

Sensationalist crap. Not interesting in the least. A very misleading title to boot. Make it go away.

Re:The doesnt belong here

[JoeMerchant]

The million dollar webpage was sensationalist crap too, there's tangible value in sensationalist crap.

Re:Dupe..

[Sensible Clod]

Some bored guy at CERN posted it while beta-testing a FTL neutrino network card.

It's always bugged me

[FrootLoops]

...that monkeys are an extremely poor imitation of a random text generator. In Wikipedia's words:

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.

Re:It's always bugged me

[3dr]

So, the monkeys used pretty much the same tactic I used for term papers in English lit.

Re:It's always bugged me

[JoeMerchant]

Thus, needing an infinite number of monkeys... actually, I think long before you achieve a dozen planets full of monkeys, you'll probably hit a genetic aberration or two that will break any statistical models by variations in their behavior - some might actually type words, if they are exposed to them in print or spoken form. The monkeys that finally produce a work of Shakespeare are apt to be different from your average monkey.

Re:It's always bugged me

[metacell]

Obviously, those monkeys hadn't received adequate training. I blame their employer!

Re:It's always bugged me

[FrootLoops]

Strictly speaking, even an infinite number of monkeys wouldn't work if they produced particularly non-random text. The output I linked wasn't even close to making words, let alone sentences, scenes, acts, and plays. If they always typed a bunch of s's on each page, for instance, they would never type the complete works. Genetic aberrations--methinks I see a monkey Shakespeare, ho! [It's in iambic pentameter. I'm a nerd.]

Re:Dupe..

[dropzonetoe]

Damn you John Titor!!!

for those who missed it!

[johnsnails]

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

ok?

[the_Bionic_lemming]

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?

Re:ok?

[Kittenman]

Yep - it's called data mining. Used already to look for secret coded messages in the bible, etc. If you look hard enough and don't particularly care what you find, then you're sure to find something.

Funny ...

[ProfM]

The last work was The Taming of the Shrew (insert shrewish joke here)

She doesn't look Shrewish

Oh stop

[PopeRatzo]

Goddamn, this story again? It was bogus the first time it came around.

Man, the weekend staff around here needs a little supervision.

Re:Oh stop

[Nationless]

Or more monkeys.

Or is that less..? I get those two mixed up at the worst of times.

Re:Oh stop

[pcjunky]

Not possible. Randomly recreating just 100 characters of any work via random generation would take more time than from the big bang. Just the letters in the English language would be 26^100. A number larger than googol (10^100). The total number of elementary particles in the known universe is about 10 to the power of 80. If this space was packed solid with neutrons, so there was no empty space anywhere, there would be about 10 to the power of 128 particles in it.

Million Monkeys and Probability

[Paul Slocum]

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]"

Not just dumb, but old news.

[Beorytis]

Slashdot got scooped by Language Log days ago...

Re:Dupe..

[Dunbal]

It all makes sense now. Somewhere in the future they lost control of the monkeys. He came back to get some specific hardware to be able to talk some sense into them.

Fails to impress me somehow

[Dunbal]

Now I challenge the monkeys to create a grand unified theory. You have 2 weeks. Go! What do you mean it only works backwards?

How much energy was wasted doing this?

[myforwik]

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.

Re:How much energy was wasted doing this?

[reubenavery]

This was my immediate reaction as well.

Infinite time wasting

[curranstat]

http://www.statschat.org.nz/2011/10/06/infinite-monkeys-shakespeare-and-all-that/

I like this logic

[naturalog]

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.

One minor difference?

[SpaghettiPattern]

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.

Well, that's a novel postmodernist demonstration

[Gimbal]

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...

What's next?

[rnturn]

"The Million Monkeys project has finished every work of Shakespeare. "

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?

Re:What's next?

[Arancaytar]

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out...

Hoax anyone?

[pinkeen]

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.

Re:Dupe..

[blind biker]

October 25, 2011 hasn't happened yet. Is it a Dupe From The Future!?!?

It must be from an alternative reality, since October 25 2011 isn't a Sunday.

Re:Monkeys

[allenw]

In the case of a Hadoop task failure, the errant monkey was genetically cloned but put into a different environment. So it also served as a nature vs. nurture experiment. :)

What else could they do?

[UpYoursNetwork]

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!!!

Re:Dupe..

[maxwell demon]

Or he just uses an alternative calendar where the names of September and October are exchanged.

Re:Yes

[maxwell demon]

I wonder why this non-story gets so much slashdot attention?

Because it allows everyone to show his brilliance by pointing out how this is a non-story.

The monkeys are not the point

[Sqr(twg)]

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?

Seems so pointless

[DrXym]

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.

sic Al Gore on these guys

[bill_mcgonigle]

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?

Yes Re: a million monkeys and "first post"

[davidwr]

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".

Better Comments this time around

[yogidog98]

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.