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How About That

A Million Virtual Monkeys Are About to Produce the Works of Shakespeare

by Max Eddy | 11:15 am, September 26th, 2011

While many of you are probably familiar with the thought experiment about the infinite number of monkeys chained to an infinite number of typewriters eventually producing the works of Shakespeare, few of you have probably attempted this. Programmer Jesse Anderson, however, is giving it his best shot and his million-strong army of virtual monkeys are 99.990% through reproducing the Bard’s corpus. Amazingly, they’ve only been at it since late August.

There are a few middling differences between the thought experiment and Anderson’s approach. First and foremost, Anderson’s monkeys only exist on a computer in the form of software that produces random nine-character strings. Second, Anderson uses an evolutionary approach which saves only the worthwhile character strings and discards the rest. So instead of waiting for the single impossibly lucky monkey that just happens to bang out every word of Shakespeare, the monkeys are working together; chipping away nine characters at a time.

Anderson says that this is, first and foremost, a side project. He was interested primarily in working with Hadoop and the Amazon cloud computing system, though he has since had to move the project onto a local server to save money. On an academic level, Anderson says that this exercise solves an infinite problem with limited resources.

Since beginning the project on August 21 of this year, the monkeys have moved quite quickly and are a hair’s breadth away from completion. However, as of writing only one work, The Lover’s Complaint, has been completed in its entirety. The other plays and sonnets have a few dozen characters remaining. The Tempest is likely the next to go, needing only two more characters, followed by As You Like It with five characters.

While Anderson expects the project to end soon, you never can tell with monkeys, virtual or not.

(Jesse Anderson, BBC, image from DC Comics)

  • http://www.facebook.com/michael.hails Mike Pants

    Thanks for the reminder, I gotta get around to finishing Y The Last Man. 

  • hajike

    the hugest and most blatantly stupid flaw of this experiment is that in order to get to the final product the comparison routine already has to have the entire works of Shakespeare as a reference. Thus rendering the entire thing a complete waste of time, since you’re generating information you already have. FAIL.

  • Anonymous

    I read that whole series except for the very last issue. I just didn’t care to finish it. It’ll take like five minutes, I should probably do that as well.

  • http://www.facebook.com/michael.hails Mike Pants

    First time through, I thought it was a snooze that was reaching for something but couldn’t quite get there. I tried it on again a few weeks ago and something clicked. Maybe I’m just a sucker for monkeys.

  • Fishy

    Yeah, he’s gonna be gutted when he realises that he already had it. He should have looked harder before deciding to make a new one.

  • Jackbondnj16

    Actually the real flaw with this is that they’re making concessions to make the results look better than they would be if they were really following the original problem. The problem is simply an illustration of how unlikely evolution is, so it’s stupid to rig the demonstration.

  • FNG

    love “&” picture.

    okay… Ampersand.

  • Kyle

    So if the program saves “worthwhile” nine character strings, does that mean everything that makes grammatical sense, or only the things which are Shakespeare? Cause I’d like to see what sort of non-Shakespearean, grammatically sensible works it came up with.

  • Kyle

    So if the program saves “worthwhile” nine character strings, does that mean everything that makes grammatical sense, or only the things which are Shakespeare? Cause I’d like to see what sort of non-Shakespearean, grammatically sensible works it came up with.

  • Bill

    waste of bits

  • Max Eddy

    It’s worth reading, but I wouldn’t say worth buying. Fortunately, a lot of libraries have it.

  • Max Eddy

    As I understand it, the character strings are compared to all of shakespeare to find a match. I imagine the rejected bits would be total gibberish, though probably similar to @horse_ebooks:twitter 

  • Max Eddy

    As I understand it, the character strings are compared to all of shakespeare to find a match. I imagine the rejected bits would be total gibberish, though probably similar to @horse_ebooks:twitter 


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