
Virtual monkeys write Shakespeare - draegtun
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15060310
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mrcharles
It seems like cheating to me that he's just matching small strings against the
whole. I was always under the impression that this kind of thing would require
them to hit the right keys in order, start to finish, to create a work. But if
it's just matching a few words at a time...

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corin_
Yep, you could take it a step further and check after every one character
rather than every 9, that should speed things up nicely.

My already low expectations of online content from the BBC dropped further
after reading this.

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jtdowney
The article is pretty interesting. My favorite part is the last paragraph:

 _Also in 2003, Paignton Zoo carried out a practical test by putting a
keyboard connected to a PC into the cage of six crested macaques. After a
month the monkeys had produced five pages of the letter "S" and had broken the
keyboard._

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libria
I find the last bit the most poignant observation there. "Monkeys pounding on
the keyboard" has been taken to mean an unintelligent being diligently typing
at random. That experiment showed that one monkey probably leaned on the "s"
key for a bit and that's it. If we literally meant (generations of) monkeys
with indestructible keyboards, it seems more likely that they would evolve
intelligence far sooner than they would bang out complete sentences on
accident.

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schrototo
While this project is clearly a joke and the article has fun with it, the
statement

 _It is also a practical test of the thought experiment that wonders whether
an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters
would be able to produce Shakespeare's works by accident._

is rather idiotic. Nobody "wonders" whether this'll work. Of course it'll
work. It's a mathematical certainty. It just... takes a while.

~~~
amalag
It's a mathematical certainty that it will happen in an infinite amount of
time, which is like saying it is infinitesemly possible or in layman's terms,
impossible. They have reduced that infinite amount of time by having the works
of Shakespeare at hand and then selectively choose the words that fit. Kudos
to BBC for printing pseudo scientific dung from the so called scientific
community.

