h a l f b a k e r y"It would work, if you can find alternatives to each of the steps involved in this process."
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The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting
keys
at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount
of
time will almost surely type a given text, such as the
complete
works of William Shakespeare.
Since the cleanup logistics alone of even a few billion
monkeys
makes
testing this theory unpractical, we could test it with a
powerful computer. This has probably been proposed
already
so here's the idea:
A selectable variable slider that allows you to pick what
you're
modeling, from "Actually going to get a Shakespeare play in
a
few nanoseconds." to "Might get something sometime
between
now and infinity."
First a little background. They actually gave a group of real
monkeys a keyboard to see if anything useful got written.
Not
only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages
largely consisting of the letter S, the lead male began by
bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys
continued
by urinating and defecating on it. (Much like how they
generate posts on Democrat websites commenting on Donald
Trump.)
So a completely accurate computer analog of this model,
while
entertaining, probably wouldn't be of much use, however it
would be one of the selections in your variable slider.
So on the far left of your selector slider, you'd have a small
amount, say a billion monkeys all just hitting random keys,
but
each simulated simian is assigned a place in the given
Shakespeare play. So if a given play has say, 100,000 letters
you'd be assigned 100,000 monkeys, each tasked with
coming up with his assigned letter. So if the first line is
"Who's there?" this line would be assigned
11 "monkeys". Each monkey would hit a random character
until
the appropriate one came up at which time it would be
registered in its appropriate place. I believe with this
method
it would only take a few nanoseconds for the entire play to
be
"written".
Next position on the slider would be "Letter by letter in
correct sequence, each letter has assigned monkey" so
"monkey" 1 would have to "type" "W" and monkey (I'll drop
the
quotes, you get the idea) and monkey 2 would type "h",
monkey 3 would have to type "0" or the whole process gets
reset. I'm not sure what kind of results you'd get with this
model, I assume a few words in a row possibly but of course,
the longest string of words created with this model could be
saved so you might be able to watch a sentence grow over
time. So to clarify, to get "Who" you'd need monkeys 1, 2
and 3
to randomly type, in exact order, "W", "h" and "o".
The variables further up the line would get increasingly
closer
to the actual infinite monkeys model with corresponding
longer computing time with worse results.
Point is, it would take
a little thought to come up with this progression of variables
and that would be the interesting bit. Might make an
interesting homework project for a
statistical mechanics computing class.
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Annotation:
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Yikes, this came out a lot longer than I anticipated. (That's
what she
said.) |
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You realize Shakespeare himself is the monkey? It just took
13Billion years give or take a couple, and a few supernovas. |
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Never thought of it that way. Only took one "monkey" a few
decades to write all of Shakespeare's works. |
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Yes. Pretend primates, mockup marmosets, bogus baboons,
counterfeit capuchins and no bonobos. |
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So, are you going to sing "Yes ! We have no bonobos !" for the
audience, then ? |
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The scary part is that I got that reference. Even read it in my
head to the melody. |
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"... we have nooo bonobooos today!" |
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The best result you're going to get from this is a *pre-existing*
Shakespeare play. Wake me up when you've generated a new
Shakespeare play (as the Earl of Oxford said to Marlowe). |
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Oh, and I think it was originally donkeys, but there was a typo. |
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You could use this line of thought to write a pretty good
scathing review of a play. "We may not know how many
monkeys with typewriters it would take to write one of
Shakespeare's plays, but we know it only took one to write this
piece of garbage." |
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^[doctorremulac] Not good. Let the idea lie. There might (same probability the monkeys can produce a sentence) be a gem in there somewhere. |
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Due to causality, the lateral contact of the direct contact of lateral the contract, this bash on the keys might be beneficial. |
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//the lateral contact of the direct contact of lateral
the contract// |
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You don't have a pet monkey by any chance do you? |
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Perhaps a more apposite question might be "Who's pet monkey are you, [wjt] ?" ? |
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You do realize of course that the analog version has already
been done? |
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We evolved (entirely within the
experiments original design parameters of course) &
eventually one of us
wrote
the complete works of Shakespeare. |
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They'll be along to pack
up the lab & equipment any millennia now. |
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They sent us all an office memo about it (earths impending
destruction etc.) in 1980. |
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But due to
some
communication
difficulties between hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional
beings
& (well..) us some of it was lost in
translation
& came out garbled, you probably now it as the
hitchhikers guide
to the
galaxy. |
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Shakespeare wrote 37 plays and 154 sonnets. |
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154 devided by 37 = 4.16. |
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10 x 4.16 = 41.6. Close, but not quite 42. |
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I think I might have found the problem. |
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No, what you've found there is the Answer. Now, you have to spend many millions of years working out what the Question was (or maybe just ask the mice ?). |
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