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...

[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...

[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.

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.

[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:First Post?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

[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.

Nine characters substrings, eh?

[John Hasler]

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

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.
 

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: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.

Re:Dupe..

[RMingin]

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

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.

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.

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.

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?