DanaC • Sep 27, 2011 4:43 am
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15060310
It's slightly less exciting than the headline would suggest once you get to the fact that they are operating within certain constraints. To do it with complete randomness would apparently take longer than the age of the universe.
But that hasn't stopped people attempting to test the hypothesis for real. My absolute favourite of which is this one:
Like the title says: I saw this and thought of us :p
A few million virtual monkeys are close to re-creating the complete works of Shakespeare by randomly mashing keys on virtual typewriters.
A running total of how well they are doing shows that the re-creation is 99.990% complete.
The first single work to be completed was the poem A Lover's Complaint.
Set up by US programmer Jesse Anderson the project co-ordinates the virtual monkeys sitting on Amazon's EC2 cloud computing system via a home PC.
It's slightly less exciting than the headline would suggest once you get to the fact that they are operating within certain constraints. To do it with complete randomness would apparently take longer than the age of the universe.
But that hasn't stopped people attempting to test the hypothesis for real. My absolute favourite of which is this one:
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.
Like the title says: I saw this and thought of us :p