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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 se
by laserDinosaur 15y ago
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.
- shabble 15y agoYeah, it looks like he's generating random 9 char strings, then testing to see if they fit anywhere at all in the Shakespeare corpus. If so, they get marked as 'done' (green). The former problem you state is the correct one - that somewhere, one of those infinite monkeys, somewhere on his infinite typewriter paper, will contain a single consecutive string of the entire works of Shakespeare. Obviously that is monsterously more difficult, and almost certainly falls into one of those "If every atom in the universe was a computer, it'd still take x^n billion years" type combinatorial explosions.
- kapitalx 15y agoExactly. 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 15y agoThe "intelligent person" would be the survival of the monkey.
- esrauch 15y agoIf he did the same thing with 1 character strings instead of 9 character strings, he would generate all of Shakespheare very quickly by his definition.