

Inifinite Monkey Theorem: Recreating Shakespeare using Hadoop and EC2 - colinloretz
http://www.jesse-anderson.com/2011/08/a-few-more-million-amazonian-monkeys/

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dialtone
Instead of having monkeys typing random characters and then collating
together, it would have been more interesting to have monkeys typing the
entire work at once and then selecting the work from the monkey with the
closest output to 'breed' (use the output as the basis for a new generation of
monkeys that will always type those letters in those positions with a very
high probability [you accept mutations]).

This would have been faster and more interesting.

For reference, this theorem was and is often used to counter evolutionism, but
those that try to use it in this way fail to grasp that evolution is not
random but selects the fittiest according to survival ability. By setting the
survival rule to 'proximity to Shakespeare' you'd reach the end result
relatively quickly.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem>

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laserDinosaur
This seems to be missing the point. The theorem is that a monkey typing
forever would eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare.
This test seems to be having a huge number of monkeys typing random letters
that might make up words, and if a word matches a Shakespeare play it is
marked in green. In other words, it's just randomly generating words and
slowly building a Shakespeare play. This doesn't seem hard at all.

Unless I'm missing something these seem to be two completely different
experiments. One saying that a monkey given enough time could randomly create
Shakespeare, and one saying given enough monkeys making random words they
could eventually check off all words in a Shakespeare play.

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kapitalx
Exactly. This requires that some "intelligent person" map all the monkey 9
char pieces together! which defeats the point. My impression of the theorem
has always been that if you had an infinite number of monkeys, each typing a
continuous random set of characters, at least one of them would produce
Shakespeare' work.

It seems more like an expensive way to capture media attention.

~~~
dialtone
The "intelligent person" would be the survival of the monkey.

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eljefe6a
I already did the the more orthodox version of the saying ([http://www.jesse-
anderson.com/2011/06/a-million-amazonian-mo...](http://www.jesse-
anderson.com/2011/06/a-million-amazonian-monkeys/)). Due to my non-infinite
resources, I had to come up with another way of attaining the goal. The saying
doesn't come with a list of rules and could be interpreted in both ways.

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sircambridge
yeah. I agree. its missing the point. It should only count if it randomly
generates an entire work continuously. All he's doing is generating 9
character segments and fitting them in.

