November 22, 2004

The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator "If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters, they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare." Currently, the record is the first 22 letters from "Cymbeline"

Link found in this NY Times article. This is my first post! I hope it's not a dupe--I searched and found nothing.

posted by Pryde 20 years ago
  • I bet that a thousand of our monkeys here could do better than that in just a thousand years. I want beeswacky on my team if we do that. I think that their results would be a bit better if they did not give the monkeys access to the numeric keys.
  • wyioxbkkjlkjlal;l'x''l''an ,mn,pslkinteresting!9mnx,,mmn,msn
  • whoa.... gjhskjlkaakmnxbvzlksanalmassageinthefenlandslkjsipouois....
  • gh gfkd xtob e frnottoket hatisstheq; eshion.
  • Hunh. I had not idea the first 22 letters of "Cymbeline" were "acsiwldjSwmxzoHIJTpoop"
  • kamus - Your second effort seems to be making some progress, though I inexplicably got an erection looking at it. flashboy - Almost there..... I knew these monkeys were not like the others.
  • I don't think the keystrokes the monkeys would hit would be totally random. For instance, they'd be much more likely to mash buttons that are close to each other on the keyboard in sequence, again and again, it seems to me. Like so: zxczxcvzxczxcvxcvzvzxc xcvvczxzxCswzxcv Of course, that might be Shakespeare in simian cypher. Or a form of poetry so sublime that only Chimps can understand it, far surpassing anything old Will ever produced.
  • I've often wondered -if you had an infinite number of Shakespeares sitting at an infinite number of typewriters, how long would it take before they produce the lyrics to "I'm a believer"? hey hey, I'm a Monkee!
  • Axaxaxas mlö.