Saturday, October 1, 2011

Monkeys nearly reproducing Shakespeare, dominating world.


Scientists enjoy bandying about the "Infinite Monkey Theorem," which states that a monkey could hammer out the completed works of Shakespeare on a typewriter if given enough time. These scientists offer infinity as a timeline for getting the work completed, which is on par with Axel Rose's work ethic.

Well, according to the Daily Telegraph, someone set up a computer program using "virtual monkeys" (which is to say not monkeys) set to pound out nine characters at a time. If any of the nine characters matched anything Shakespeare wrote, it's crossed out. So far, according to the report, the "monkeys" have typed out 5 trillion of the 5.5 trillion possible nine character combinations, and are 99.9% complete with Shakespeare's works.

Scientists are snooty crowd though, so most don't believe this should count.

Best part of the story? Apparently, the Arts Council for England tried real monkeys a few years ago and gave up after a month. The monkeys completed five whopping pages in that time (sounds like me) which mainly consisted of typing the letter S repeatedly (sounds like me). They wrote nothing close to a word of English (sounds like me), and used the keyboard as a lavatory (eh...I haven't reached that point yet).




No comments:

Post a Comment