... but they cheated.
BBC news reported on virtual monkeys almost writing the complete works of Shakespeare.
The Infinite Monkey Theorem says that if you have enough monkeys bashing random buttons on keyboards, and you give them enough time, they will eventually produce any given text. I like to think that this is how the Twilight trilogy came to be.
Anderson, a US programmer, decided to test this theorem out on the entire works of Shakespeare. He programmed some virtual monkeys, and ran a few million of them tapping virtual keyboards on the Amazon servers. So far they're 99.990% complete with the works of Shakespeare.
Anderson cheated, though.
The monkeys are supposed to type the entire Shakespeare collection in one coherent sequence. What Anderson did was record lots of 9 character long sequences from each monkey, and then see if they occurred anywhere in Shakespeare's writings. If that 9 character long sequence existed, he then ticked off that tiny part of the works of Shakespeare as "written." The monkeys therefore did very little of the actual writing, because an intelligent search performed the construction of the works.
Bummer. Shakespeare 1 - 0 Monkeys.
 |
| Infinite Monkey Theorem.. or Telkom customer support centre? |
