A Few Million Monkeys Randomly Recreate Shakespeare
via slashdot, someone has used a few million monkeys -- well, Amazon EC2 virtual monkeys -- to reproduce the works of Shakespeare. So far they have completed A Lover's Complaint.
Now for the nit-picking -- if I understand correctly, he has them generating 9-character strings, which are checked against the Shakespeare corpus to see if they match anything. If they do, that section of 9 characters is considered complete. And they have randomly accumulated enough completed sections to cover all of the aforementioned work.
IMO this isn't the "correct" approach. To me, the saying means that one single(virtual) monkey out of the millions and millions will reproduce an entire work of Shakespeare from start to finish on a single typewriter (or other transcription device).
The author addresses this complaint:
A Few Words To Try and Prevent The Usual Comments
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.
OK, fair enough, and doing it my way would take a lot longer and consume a lot more resources on what is already a pretty silly thing: "A day's worth of monkeys costs $19.20 and does 6,980,000,000 checks."
Even with the nitpick/caveat, this is still geekily awesome.
Now for the nit-picking -- if I understand correctly, he has them generating 9-character strings, which are checked against the Shakespeare corpus to see if they match anything. If they do, that section of 9 characters is considered complete. And they have randomly accumulated enough completed sections to cover all of the aforementioned work.
IMO this isn't the "correct" approach. To me, the saying means that one single(virtual) monkey out of the millions and millions will reproduce an entire work of Shakespeare from start to finish on a single typewriter (or other transcription device).
The author addresses this complaint:
A Few Words To Try and Prevent The Usual Comments
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.
OK, fair enough, and doing it my way would take a lot longer and consume a lot more resources on what is already a pretty silly thing: "A day's worth of monkeys costs $19.20 and does 6,980,000,000 checks."
Even with the nitpick/caveat, this is still geekily awesome.