Infinite Monkeys

[Bernard Marx]

I'm trying to find the title of a short story I read a long time ago. It started out with two guys discussing the well known fact that an infinite number of monkeys, typing for an infinite amount of time, would eventually rewrite the works of Shakespeare, letter for letter (as well as all the rest of the world's literature).

Anyway, one of the guys obviously doesn't know that this is only a thought experiment, because he gets about a thousand monkeys and sets them to work typing. Instead of producing gibberish, however, they really do start reproducing the world's literature. One of them, of course, is working on Shakespeare, othersare working on the early books of the New Testament or some of Baudelaire's letters etc

The second guy comes back a week later and is amazed to see what's going on. The fact that the experiment "worked" is so at odds with his worldview that he goes crazy and kills all the monkeys.

Anyone read this story or know the title/author?

[cryptic_j]

I haven't read this story - - but I love the idea...

I had an idea for a short story involving the infinite monkeys - - so I'd love to read this to check that I wouldn't be inadvertantly copying...

... does anyone know who originally came up with the infinite monkey idea in the first place.?



I am a finite monkey

[Cliffy]

Gosh, I thought you were going to ask about the sci-fi story about the author who uses a monkey hooked in to a typwriter to convince his editor that his story is well-written.

--Cliffy

[Bryan Ekers]

The story is called Inflexible Logic by Russell Maloney. The six chimpanzees (not a thousand monkeys) produce typo-free copies of Oliver Twist, as well as:

"Oh, yes, all writing books which I have every reason to believe are in the British Museum. The prose of John Donne, some Anatole France, Conan Doyle, Galen, the collected plays of Somerset Maugham, Marcel Proust, the memoirs of the late Marie of Rumania, and a monograph by a Dr. Wiley on the marsh grasses of Maine and Massachusetts. I can sum it up for you, Mallard, by telling you that since I started this experiment, four weeks and some days ago, none of the chimpanzees has spoiled a single sheet of paper."

[cryptic_j]

so.. have I misremembered the orginial infinte monkeys thing?

was it always six with infinite time.. or is this just an adaptation of that..

because obviously it's the time not the monkeys that make the difference - - it just take 6 monkeys longer than an infinite number.. so they would take infinity * 6.

[Max Carnage]

Wasn't there an Amazing Stories episode that used this premise?

[Fiver]

There's also a play by David Ives titled "Words, Words, Words" which takes this concept and runs with it.

[Dewey Finn]

Also, there is a distributed computing project called the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator that is attempting a virtual version of this experiment. The record is the first 22 letters from "Cymbeline" and this was after the equivalent of 579,440 billion billion billion monkey-years.

[Sir Dirx]

Wouldn't an infinite amount of monkeys instantaneously produce all imaginable written works, past, present, future, and all gibberish in between?

[Zebra]

Who first said that the monkeys would type out Shakespeare?

I just want to know.

[Raygun99]

Originally Posted by Zebra

Who first said that the monkeys would type out Shakespeare?

I just want to know.

If this thread goes on for an infinite length of time, eventually someone will type it.

[Labdad]

For the first time ever, I saw this thread title and instantly thought: BAND NAME!!

[Shade]

Originally Posted by Sir Dirx

Wouldn't an infinite amount of monkeys instantaneously produce all imaginable written works, past, present, future, and all gibberish in between?

Not if you assume there's a lower limit on the time it takes to hit a key. If you assume there's a finite number of characters typable (else 'tis a whole 'nother ball game), then yeah, everything'll get typed out immediately, (indeed, on infinitely many typewriters) but you still have to wait for it to get typed.

[Hyperelastic]

Originally Posted by Dewey Finn

Also, there is a distributed computing project called the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator that is attempting a virtual version of this experiment. The record is the first 22 letters from "Cymbeline" and this was after the equivalent of 579,440 billion billion billion monkey-years.

[peer reviewer]
This simulation assumes that monkeys type randomly and at a uniform rate, but when I picture a monkey at a keyboard, I see him monotously banging the same key or group of keys over and over, and then running off to climb the curtains for a few minutes. Have the investigators compared actual records of monkey typing to confirm their assumption of randomness?
[/peer reviewer]

[Munch]

[C. Montgomery Burns]
"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?!?"
[/CMB]

[cmyk]

Originally Posted by Hyperelastic

[peer reviewer]
This simulation assumes that monkeys type randomly and at a uniform rate, but when I picture a monkey at a keyboard, I see him monotously banging the same key or group of keys over and over, and then running off to climb the curtains for a few minutes. Have the investigators compared actual records of monkey typing to confirm their assumption of randomness?
[/peer reviewer]

Right. For all we know the monkeys might like to hit the "K" key over and over and over ad infinitum. To me, saying it'll take infinite time to bang out Shakespeare is really saying you'll have to wait forever... which is really saying never.

Damn monkeys.

[yoyodyne]

Infinite monkeys wouldn't type everything instantaneously in any meaningful way. You would have to wait for one monkey to type Hamlet all the way through. Otherwise you could just wait until any monkey typed all 26 letters and say they could be re-combined into any work.

[ultrafilter]

This one seems to confuse people, but given an infinite amount of monkeys and an infinite amount of time, it is logically possible that *no*work of Shakespeare will ever be reproduced.

[borschevsky]

Originally Posted by yoyodyne

Infinite monkeys wouldn't type everything instantaneously in any meaningful way. You would have to wait for one monkey to type Hamlet all the way through.

I'm not sure - each monkey typing one letter is the same number of letters as each monkey typing an infinite number of letters. You could line up the monkeys, have them each type a letter, and then read the letters off in order.

[nivlac]

Originally Posted by ultrafilter

This one seems to confuse people, but given an infinite amount of monkeys and an infinite amount of time, it is logically possible that *no*work of Shakespeare will ever be reproduced.

Really? Even a finite number of monkeys typing an infinite amount of time will eventually type out every possible sequence of letters, punctuation marks, etc. It might take an awfully long time, but "infinite" time means no limit on time. Unless by "infinite", you are restricted by the duration of the known universe.

[ultrafilter]

Originally Posted by nivlac

Even a finite number of monkeys typing an infinite amount of time will eventually type out every possible sequence of letters, punctuation marks, etc.

No, that's not guaranteed. The set of possible outcomes is the set of all countably-long strings on the alphabet of typewriter symbols. @@@@@@... is one of those, and there's no Shakespeare anywhere in there.

Note that the number of monkeys makes no difference in this case.

[Hyperelastic]

[Letterman]
I think we can all agree, that if an infinite number of monkeys were to type for an infinite length of time, the smell would be unbearable.
[/Letterman]

[Bernard Marx]

Thank you Mr Ekers, you are a gentleman and a scholar

[tracer]

Bob Newhart, on his live-performance-recording album The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back, tells a joke story about what would happen if you really did try to conduct an experiment with an infinite number of monkeys and in infinite number of typewriters. To actually check to see if they'd produced the works of Shakespeare yet, there'd have to be an infinite number of people hired to proofread the monkeys' work:

"Harry, hold on, post fifteen here has something. I think this is famous or something. Uh ... 'To be or not to be, that is thegzornenplat.'"

[Ellis Dee]

I always thought it was 7000 monkeys for 7000 years, but now I have no idea why I thought that.

When considering infinite monkeys and/or infinite time, doesn't the maxim of "all things that can happen must happen" come into play?

[nivlac]

Originally Posted by ultrafilter

No, that's not guaranteed. The set of possible outcomes is the set of all countably-long strings on the alphabet of typewriter symbols. @@@@@@... is one of those, and there's no Shakespeare anywhere in there.

Note that the number of monkeys makes no difference in this case.

Yes, you're right. The infinite number of sequences of non-Shakespeare (like the @@@...) can fill out the infinite amount of time. Damn, those monkeys can be wasting an awful lot of energy for nothing!

[cryptic_j]

So... should I strap the monkeys in.. and force them to sit at the typewriter?

what if they had predictive text style word processors...

also, does the world produce an infinite amount of Banana's?

I can see this is going to be an expensive undertaking...

One question... has anyone thought maybe this experiment has been done already - - the evidence is there before us..
when reading Shakespeare - - most of it is gibberish - -

[Max Carnage]

I just realized the Amazing Stories I was thinking of was actually a houseplant grown by the light of a TV that began to type up successful TV comedy scripts.

Monkeys...what was I thinking.

[jay-c]

Originally Posted by cryptic_j

... does anyone know who originally came up with the infinite monkey idea in the first place.?

Infinite Monkey Theorem

[ultrafilter]

Originally Posted by jay-c

Infinite Monkey Theorem

That article is incorrect because it makes the assumption that an event with probability 0 can't happen (or more formally, that a set of measure 0 is necessarily empty).

[Chronos]

Gosh, I thought you were going to ask about the sci-fi story about the author who uses a monkey hooked in to a typwriter to convince his editor that his story is well-written.

For what it's worth, it's Asimov, but I don't remember the title.

[Shade]

Originally Posted by Chronos

For what it's worth, it's Asimov, but I don't remember the title.

The Monkey's Fingers.

[dotchan]

Paraphrasing a Usenet .sig file...

"Come to think of it, we already do have a million monkeys at a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare."

[phaishazamkhan]

I hope no one considers me adding to noise rather than the signal. I recall a short story featured in one of those Dozois edited "Year's Best" anthologies. A man writes a program that he names after the concept of a million monkeys at a million typewriters. As the story progresses he starts getting interesting results as he improves the program. He realizes with regular computers he can not achieve true randomness, just an illusion of randomness no matter how well he seeds it so he starts using data acquired from supercolliders and radio telescopes, using their background noise for true randomness. Towards the end he discovers old conversations he had while he was a child, things said and yet to be said or written. Sadly I do not recall the title or the author.

[Jake]

Given an Infinite amout of time, in our Universe, an infinite number of "Things" can happen.

I think.

Well, at least I happened!

[Roland Orzabal]

Originally Posted by nivlac

Really? Even a finite number of monkeys typing an infinite amount of time will eventually type out every possible sequence of letters, punctuation marks, etc. It might take an awfully long time, but "infinite" time means no limit on time. Unless by "infinite", you are restricted by the duration of the known universe.

Not so. This reminds me of a conversation I once had with a friend of mine when we were in fourth grade, while waiting for the bus one day.*

Roland: Let's play a game. You pick a number, then I'll pick a number, and we'll see whose is higher.
Friend: Okay. Apple.
R: ...what?
F: Apple.
R: "Apple" isn't a number.
F: Yes it is. If there's infinite numbers, then eventually there's got to be one called "apple".
R: (thinks about this for a minute) No, I think that's still wrong.
F: Well, what's a thousand times a million?
R: A billion.
F: What's a thousand times that?
R: A trillion.
F: What's a thousand times that?
R: ...I dunno, I think it has a name though...
F: See, you run out of names after a while, and if there's infinite numbers, you have to go through every name.
R: (thinks about this for a minute) No...that's still wrong. Ok, what if we call a million times a million a "megamillion". [I didn't know what a trillion was, but I knew what the metric prefix 'mega-' meant. I was a weird kid.]
F: Okay.
R: Now, what if we called a million times that a "mega-megamillion". And a million times that is a "mega-mega-megamillion".
F: Okay.
R: So, from there you can go as long as you want, and just keep adding "megas" to it. You'll still have infinite numbers, but you'll never get anything called "apple".
F: (thinks about this for a minute) Yeah, I guess...
(We stand in silence until the bus comes)

It's the same thing with the monkeys and the typewriters. Even if the keypresses are completely random -- and we have not-insignificant reason to believe that they wouldn't be -- it's possible that you could still end up with a series of infinite 'K's (with a nod to kevsnyde). Not bloody likely; indeed, exponentially less likely even than the works of Shakespeare, but possible nonetheless. It is possible to have an infinite string of random characters and not wind up with Hamlet, just as it is possible to have an infinite number of named entities (e.g. numbers) and never end up with one named "apple".

*Yes, this conversation actually happened, and yes, we were in fourth grade. I promise. We were, and are, complete and utter dorks.

[Roland Orzabal]

Originally Posted by Roland Orzabal

[I didn't know what a trillion was...]

Er, a quadrillion, that is. Meaning that I couldn't answer my friends question of "what's a thousand times a trillion". Just wanted to avoid confusion.

[Bernard Marx]

originally posted by Roland Orzabal
Even if the keypresses are completely random -- and we have not-insignificant reason to believe that they wouldn't be -- it's possible that you could still end up with a series of infinite 'K's (with a nod to kevsnyde). Not bloody likely; indeed, exponentially less likely even than the works of Shakespeare, but possible nonetheless.

Surely a series of "k"s is just as likely as Shakespeare, assuming that each letter struck is independent of the one struck before it (in the same way that a series of coin tosses HHHHHHHHHH is just as likely as HTHTHTHT and HTHHHTHTTT)

[Roland Orzabal]

Originally Posted by Bernard Marx

Surely a series of "k"s is just as likely as Shakespeare, assuming that each letter struck is independent of the one struck before it (in the same way that a series of coin tosses HHHHHHHHHH is just as likely as HTHTHTHT and HTHHHTHTTT)

For a string of "k"s containing the same number of characters as the relevant portion of Shakespeare, certainly. I was referring to the likelihood of a "k" series of indeterminate length, presumably greater than the length of Shakespeare's texts, that would at any point of reference seem to continue indefinitely.

[moriah]

This gets around to the age old argument whether an infinite number of possibilities will guarantee all possibilities (it doesn't). Lay folk who aren't that familiar with probability and infinity find it counterintuitive.

Here's a way to explain it:

Imagine the set of all counting numbers, {1, 2, 3, 4, 5....}

It's a set with an infinite amount of members. Now take out the number '3,' {1, 2, 4, 5...}. It still has an infinite amount of members, but it doesn't have all possible members of the counting numbers set.

If an infinite amount of monkeys are forced to create random numbers, it's a possibility that none of them will ever choose '3,' even though you have an infinite amount of numbers created by those monkeys -- just like the counting number set minus the number 3. Infinite, but not containing every possibility.

Now, it becomes more likely, that as the number of monkeys or their time spent hitting random keys approaches infinity that 3 will be pop up in their number set. Though, it will never be guaranteed.

If 3 isn't guaranteed to pop up in an infinite list of number, consider how much more likely that Hamlet will not pop up in an infinite number of random-keystroke manuscripts.

Peace.

[Götterfunken]

Originally Posted by kevsnyde

Right. For all we know the monkeys might like to hit the "K" key over and over and over ad infinitum. To me, saying it'll take infinite time to bang out Shakespeare is really saying you'll have to wait forever... which is really saying never.

Damn monkeys.

Actually, this experiment suggests that they prefer the "s" key:

Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare (pdf version is free to download)

[Based on the efforts of five Sulawesi Crested Macaques named Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan--not quite an infinite number, but, hey, it's a start]

[Ninja Pizza Guy]

[semi-hijack]
There's another "infinite monkeys/time/typewriters story I've been trying to find.

Way, way back, just after the war in heaven, an angel was exiled by both sides. He wasn't good or evil, but too wishy-washy to pick a side. So, he ends up with a bunch of monkeys and an equal number of typewriters. The monkeys have to type Shakespear. The "punchline" as I remember it is "damn that sticky g-key!"

[sweepkick]

There are more imaginitive texts that these monkeys should be able to come up with.

[smiling bandit]

Was there an actual reason in the story for the Monkeys to never fail to produce some classical script por whatever? Die the monkeys just channel the psychic energy of Shakespeare or what?