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."
It's a cheat. (Score:5, Insightful)
It proves nothing, and isn't even very good as a publicity stunt.
Re:It's a cheat. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, we hashed through all this last time. The "monkeys" generate 9 character blocks of random letters, then that chunk of text is fitted wherever it can be into the actual works of Shakespeare. And as I said last time around, it would be vastly more efficient, and just as pointless, to generate random SINGLE characters and fit those into works of Shakespeare instead.
Re:First Post? (Score:2, Insightful)
Misleading name (Score:4, Insightful)
The name of this project is completely wrong compared to what anyone who knows of the Million monkeys can recreate Shakespeares works' concept.
If a random sequence output from one of the 'virtual monkeys' matched some sequence of characters in a work, they counted it as if the monkey typed part of that work.
At no point did any one of their virtual monkeys ever turn out even a single coherent sentence, let alone one that could be found in a work of Shakespeare.
This guy seems to think that if you get enough output from /dev/urandom that you can account for all the characters in a book, then you've recreated the book. Doesn't matter than /dev/urandom didn't actually spell out the words in the book.
Re:A million monkeys can complete Shakespeare... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, these couldn't.
By any normal persons definition, these monkeys also never actually produced any of Shakespeare's works either. They basically produced the right number of As, Bs, Cs, ect ... and then the guy running the project rearranged them into the right order and says the monkeys wrote shakespeare!
I guess if you count the guy who is reassembling the letters as a monkey, then its probably true that 1 million virtual monkeys and 1 human monkey could do it, though I'm guessing he probably fucked up the reassembly as well considering everything else about this 'project'.
It's also to world class stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
the set up for this is that it they just emit 9 character random strings and cross off anything that matches. Emit 8 character ones and it's 26 times easier. So why not just emit 1 character strings.
perl -e 'print "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" '
there done.
Re:And the point is? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure there is something I'm missing from this, so what is the point in spending time doing something like this? Programming techniques? Or simply for insight in to random character generation? To me it seems fairly arbitrary and pointless.
Slashdot whoring is the only point as far as I can tell. The "Monkeys" are virtual processes. The methodology is flawed and arbitrary as everyone keeps pointing out. Yet it keeps appearing on slashdot as if this were news for nerds. Heck it's not news for a first year comp sci student.
Re:Misleading name (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed.
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
There, I created each and every Shakespeare work by typing every letter. I must be a genius. Oh, and even better, look at the dot at the end of this sentence -> [.]
When multiplied and put in the right place in a 2D grid, it represents all the works of Shakespeare all by itself.
He did know that it was not correct, he just implemented an approximation and abused the title for his hobby project. No harm done. He did even explain that he was just testing some techniques and warns people not to get angry, which I will implement by drinking a Lagavulin single malt on his health.
Re:It's a cheat. (Score:5, Insightful)
Then, it's not really monkeys. It's more of monkeys with an oracle. That oracle thing made a whole world of difference.
The guy who set this up has almost as much intelligence as a monkey but is a whole lot more intellectually dishonest much more of a publicity whore.
Re:A million monkeys can complete Shakespeare... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the same guy that pretended to have a work of shakespear a few weeks ago, simply by selectively combining overlapping strings of 9 random characters together?
What I find most amazing about this project is that his random character generator is so incredibly slow.