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Apart from the opportunity to steal porcelin chopstick rests, the highlight of a Chinese meal is the fortune cookie.
We sit and wait with anticipation, as if Confucius himself is writing them as we sip our strong Chinese tea. The cookie's arrive. We crack them open and pull out the fortune. 'You
will read this allowed to your date'. Somehow, most fortunes are written by Confused, Confucius' lesser known younger cousin.
If a thousand Monkeys, working at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years can come up with Shakespeare, then surely they can come up with a few fortunes. And thus, the 1'000 Monkeys Fortune Cookie is born, providing gibberish to all but the thousandth customer.
(?) Not The Nine O'Clock News
http://www.museum.t...nine/notthenine.htm
No transcripts, but it does quote po's snippet. [Nick@Nite, Oct 17 2004]
(?) Koko's CD debut
http://www.wfmu.org...play;num=1036863813
Reuters item about gorilla recording artist who's written her own songs [snarfyguy, Oct 17 2004]
(?) Monkeys Don't Write Shakespeare
http://www.wired.co...,1284,58790,00.html
May 09 2003: Plymouth Univ. actually tried the monkey/typewriter experiment, with predictable results. [krelnik, Oct 17 2004]
BBC News: Virtual Monkeys Write 99.99% of Shakespear
http://www.bbc.co.u...technology-15060310
To be fair, they are using a rather sneaky algorithm that means that any 9-character combination can be tested to see whether it forms a part of the shakespearian canon, rather than for the monkeys to generate the whole thing in sequence. Once identified, each sequence fills in a gap - which is cheating really. [zen_tom, Sep 26 2011]
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Annotation:
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Actually, I think it was a million monkeys. |
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Yeah, but then they might form a union. |
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My particular favorite at a Chinese restaurant is the chopsticks wrapper that says, verbatim, “Welcome to Chinese Restaurant please try your Nice Chinese Food With Chopsticks the traditional and typical of Chinese glonous history and cultual.” |
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The new restaurant in town makes excellent glonous and cultual. |
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Adjgu, shjdlif fghsfr gfslhfrt! ...in the bedroom. |
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The fallacy to the whole thing is that monkeys do not type randomly, any more than we do. The keys are arranged in a certain order on the keyboard, and our fingers hover over certain spots. With monkeys, they will just pound the keyboard, producing bursts of letters from the pounded area. So certain combinations of letters will recur over and over again, and certain other ones will never come up at all. |
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So those monkeys will *never* write Shakespeare or anything else worth reading. |
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The goons take Homer to Stately Burns Mansion, where... Monty shows ...A room with a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters. (``It was the best of times, it was blurst of times.'') |
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Could what the monkey's write possibly be anyworse? at least now sometimes they teach you a chinese word or phrase. |
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The other fallacy about the 1000 monkeys theory is the distinguishing of good information from nonsense. Shakespeare might just as easily end up on the cutting-room floor as ascii-garbage. |
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If you put 1000 monkeys inside Schroedinger's box, would they discover custard? |
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The idea is that, given enough randomness, a certain amount of "order" will occur. Although it has its charms, the monkey analogy is not so great, as Nick@Nite correctly notes. |
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tyskland: If the highlight of your meal is a fortune cookie, you should try a different retaurant. |
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As stated in the above idea, the highlight is the chance to steal porcelin chopstick rests. |
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whimsy/bliss: you need to insert the http:// bit. |
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I like the modern version of this old saw, not sure who came up with it: "They say a million monkeys with a million typewriters, given enough time, would eventually come up with the works of Shakespeare. Now that we have AOL, we know empirically that this is not the case." |
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acknowledge Smith and Jones (UK Comedy duo) |
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Trainer: "When we captured Gerald he was of course wild."
Gerald: "Wild? I was absolutely livid" |
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can anyone can find the full transcript? |
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[po] <pedant> Not the Nine O' Clock News, actually </pedant> |
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[bliss] Excuse my dodgy linky - it's never happened to me before... |
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MONKEY! Vietnamese exhortation for luck, great fun to sit at a blackjack table with them, fearless gamblers. |
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[po] <pedant> Not the Nine O' Clock News, actually </pedant> |
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yes, find transcript - pendant alert <slaps whimsy>
find transcript - big head - you knew the gorilla I meant </slaps whimsy>- pendant alert - find transcript, yes |
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<Nurses slapping wounds> I did actually look for transcript, but 15 minutes on Google didn't reveal anything </Nurses slapping wounds> |
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[Rayford] Re: distinguishing good stuff from garbage. Shirley one could use some straightforward computer algorithms (even MS spelling and grammar check if you were desperate) to sift out the junk. With a nice big processor doing the monkeying and checking, this might even be bakeable... I wonder what we would get. |
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[po] <pedant> you mean "pedant", not "pendant"
</pedant> |
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if I say pendent, I mean pendant. dangly things yay? |
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// given enough randomness, a certain amount of "order" will occur // |
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Of course. Chaos theory - even apparently random behaviour is ultimately deterministic. c.f. Mandelbrot Set. Oh dear, not that again .... |
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"If you give an infinite number of monkeys a login to the HalfBakery......" |
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[8th] wanna share my banana? |
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I have that gorilla interview on a vinyl disc - is worth digging out and typing up? 3 ayes and I will do it. |
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one thanks[waugs]. I regretted that the moment I typed it. |
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See link for article about Koko, the songwriting gorilla. |
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I think it's more like: "Given enough time..." A million monkeys.... |
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Well if you believe in evolution.... it took about 10 million years before a "monkey like ancestor" evolved into Shakespear. |
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Eventually, we would have shakespeare's entire worls written out in fortune cookies. |
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// If you put 1000 monkeys inside Schroedinger's box, would they discover custard? // is Schroedinger's box the one where they put a cat in a sealed box with some poison and some atoms,and if the atom collapses,it kills the cat? |
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I just found it,schrodinger's cat,its an illustration of the principle that at a quantum level all events are governed by probabilities,at a quantum level and therefore all levels,though at any level higher than the subatomic the cumulative effect of these probabilities is, in the normal course of events, indistinguishable from the effect of hard and fast physical laws.not only are quantum level events governed by probabilities, but these probabilities aren't even resolved into actual events until they are measured.up until that point all possible courses of action are open to, say, an electron,coexist as probability waveforms.Nothing is decided.Until its measured. |
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[andrew1] Please take the time to research spelling & punctuation while you are at it. |
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//andrew1] Please take the time to research spelling & punctuation while you are at it//
um...no |
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What you posted seemed like a pretty good summary of quantum theory. It was obviously not plagiarised off some site, because the spelling is dire. Run it through a checker - it doesn't take long. |
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Quantum theory, while beyond my understanding, has always fascinated me. On the surface, it appears to give one carte blanche to break physical laws willy-nilly. |
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I was just about to put up some nonsense on the back of
the trillion monkey typing theory, when I found this -
won't bother now as your idea is better - I loved it. Giving
you a whole loaf ! |
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hmm... 1000 monkeys working for 1000 years won't be nailing it every //*thousandth* customer// |
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but... does this idea involve the selective breeding of those monkeys that produce something resembling human language? if so, i would like to see the resulting population in the year 3011. |
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You could compile interpretations of the monkeys'
output. Maybe call it the _Book of Changes_. |
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