A Few Million Monkeys Finish Recreating Shakespeare's Works 186
eljefe6a writes "The Million Monkeys project has finished every work of Shakespeare. The last work was The Taming of the Shrew (insert shrewish joke here), which finished on October 6. I give my thoughts on going viral. If this article about going viral goes viral, it will create an infinite loop that will bring about the destruction of the world. The project source is released, too."
Re:Dupe.. (Score:5, Informative)
And if the submitter or the editor had read the article, they'd have come across this gem:
On Sunday night October 25, 2011, I was reading through my RSS feeds on Google Reader. Some new Slashdot stories appeared and I dutifully started reading them. When I started reading about myself and my project, I started to think I had clicked on the wrong feed or I had erred in some fashion. I could not believe I was reading about myself on Slashdot after many years of reading it. My wife was next to me at the time and I tried to explain why I was so ecstatic to be on Slashdot. Explaining to a non-geek about Slashdot is difficult, but I think she could see it was important to me. If the media blitz had died at that point, I would have been happy. It didnâ(TM)t. Over the course of the next day, the story kept on gaining momentum, getting more news stories, and more hits on the website.
If I had posted this, after such a clear dupe reference in the article, I'd have been humiliated.
Re:Misleading name (Score:5, Informative)
This experiment, while fun, isn't exactly the infinite monkey experiment.
What's happening here (if I understand the writeup) is that the monkeys are typing random letter combinations, until they hit a small phrase that happens to be in shakespeare. Then that phrase is marked as done.
Let n be the size in characters of the target phrase. If n=1, then the complete works of shakespeare are obtained as soon as each of the letters of the alphabet have been typed at least once. You could do this in a few seconds on your computer keyboard. If n=2, then the complete works are obtained as soon as all the possible pairs of letters have been typed. The experiment in TFA has n=9 I think.
As n grows larger, the time until completion grows exponentially. Once his expeiment is done, the case n=10 should take roughly 26 times as long (ignoring punctuation capitals and diacritical marks). Alternatively, it would require a cloud roughly 26 times bigger to do it in the same amount of time.
(source; taken from martin-boundary [slashdot.org])
The author knows it's not the regular interpretation. Here's his response to one of my comments:
I found that mathematicians and statisticians had the most adverse reaction to my project. If you have half an infinite resource to give me I would gladly use it and run the project again. I even wrote a brief section on the post saying: I realize there are different interpretations to this saying/theorem and I have done 2 different ones already. I understand the definition of infinite and infinite monkey theorem and I realize that this project does not have infinite resources. This project was funded and written by myself and was not supported by any grant money or federal money. No monkeys were harmed during the making of this code. This project is my attempt to find a creative way to attain an answer without infinite resources. It is a fun side project.
(source; taken from eljefe6a [slashdot.org])
And here's a repost of some of my own calculations concerning the improbability of the real version:
If he had successfully randomly achieved a shakespeare play, [...] It would be like a flying saucer landing and informing someone that they won the galactic lottery.
It's far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, (...), far more improbable than that. The text of Hamlet (see Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org]) is around 180 KB long, so around 1.44 million bits. Being generous and lopping off half (since most of the characters aren't present), and then rounding down, let's say it's 500,000 bits. There are 2^500,000 possibilities; this is a number with around 150,000 decimal digits. It's comparable to the odds of winning a 1-in-a-million lottery 25 thousand times in a row.
Winning a galactic lottery, in comparison, would be extremely, almost incomparably, frequent. There are something like 300 billion stars in the Milky Way. Suppose each star had 30 planets with 100 billion "people", being very generous. That's only about one million billion billion inhabitants. Winning such a lottery would be the same as winning 4 1-in-a-million lotteries in a row. 4 versus 25,000, and that 25,000 is an exponent--these two can't just be divided to property compare them.
It's closer to winning 6 thousand galactic lotteries in a row.
(source; taken from me [slashdot.org])
Re:Misleading name (Score:5, Informative)
the point is more that he apparently doesn't realize how completely pointless this is, whatever his resources. the coupon collector's problem has basically been completely solved (in the sense we have an asymptotic rate, and shakespeare's work are long enough that this limit applies). there's no point whatsoever in simulating it.
it would be exactly like taking physics I and then trying to create an ideal point mass or a completely frictionless surface because they talked about that in a few of the lectures... 1) it's impossible; 2) you've missed the point entirely.
Re:It's a cheat. (Score:5, Informative)
It proves nothing, and isn't even very good as a publicity stunt.
On the contrary. It proves that with the right link-bait buzzwords and sufficiently lazy editors, even the most pointless project can make the Slashdot front page -- twice.
Come back Bitcoin stories, all is forgiven...