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

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.

[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.

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: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)