I’d burn them in a furnace. Energy crisis solved.
Maybe this is my computer science education talking, but this seems awfully silly. The point of the monkey-typewriter scenario as I understand it is an exercise in probability. That is, you would create the complete works of Shakespeare because the chance that it will show up in any finite number of random key strokes is infinitesimally small, but when the sequence approaches infinity, even such a small probability must occur.
The problem I’m seeing is that, even with a sufficiently advanced search engine, you’re not really solving anything. To use the haiku example, if you want haikus about red helicopters and sardines, you’ll get ANY possible haiku that includes that, even ones that are terrible and worthless (although, I imagine any haiku about sardines is probably terrible).
Essentially what you’re doing is mapping all human literary creativity to a massively multi-dimensional space and then using a brute force search algorithm to look for results. Even worse, you’d have no methodology for determining the good meatloaf recipe from the bad, which means you’re not even allowing for non-determinism.
Seems to me, it’s just a lot more efficient to be creative.
Any discussion of infinite monkeys and Shakespeare practically requires a reference to W.R. Bennett’s work, in particular his 1977 article “How Artificial is Intelligence?” in American Scientist back in 1977 (Vol. 65 #6, pp. 694-702). It’s one of the funniest scientific papers I’ve read. Dig it up and have a look - you won’t be disappointed. Bennett hooked up a random-number generator to his virtual typewriters and essentially did the experiment of havimng his monkeys try to generate Shakespeare – or anything, for that matter. Third- and Fourth-order Shakespearean monkeys have an obscene vocabulary.
One interesting outcome was that Bennett thought it extremely improbable that his “monkeys” would ever gebnerate Shakespeare – even when he used text from Shakespeare in calculating the probabilities of letters, bigrams, trigrams, and so forth. There simply wasn’t enough “randomness” in his pseudo-random number generators.
That was thirty years ago. Computing power, thanks to Moore’s Law, has increased astronomically since Bennett’s paper. I wonder what the result would be if you did it today?
Disturbingly, an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters means that it is inevitable that this very thread will be typed out.
Even more disturbingly, it is inevitable that some of those infinite monkeys will have gone insane, and are hallucinating that they are human beings posting on a message board.
This is a good thread to introduce http://www.1000000monkeys.com/
I have no answer for the OP. I am not a fan of monkeys or typewriters. I’d probably give them away
CalMeacham and Malkavia, thanks for the link. Will read tomorrow.
Since we are in the literary recommendation stage, “The Spade of Reason” by Jim Cowan was what inspired this thread.
Blaster Master, watch it. I like sardines! I agree with you, though. In the end you are either going through mountains of crap or having your search engine choose for you which is not terribly different from having one artist create one for you.
No good use for all them monkeys, I guess.
Okay, I have thought of a potentially profitable use: blackmail.
This notion is inspired by the Arthur C. Clarke short story The Nine Billion Names of God, in which a group of monks is working to compile all the possible names of God, operating under the belief that when all such names are written, the universe will end. In the story, no one is particularly impressed by this, since even if the belief were true, it would take hundreds of thousands of years to work all the names out by hand.
But your infinite monkeys on their infinite typewriters can do the task instantly. So all you need to do is find people who ascribe to such a belief, and issue your ransom demand. They will pay you to prevent the monkeys from typing.
Even if such people can not be located, there have to be others who would be subsceptible to a variation on this proposal. Hey, radical Islam! Excuse me, but I believe that your collective ass now belongs to me and my monkeys? Sure, you can try to take me out… but can you do it before I command my infinite monkey armada to start typing? Literally within instants, an infinite amount of blasphemous pornography will be generated featuring the Prophet Mohammed being serviced by various underage boys and farm animals! You’ve got to ask yourself: do I feel lucky? Well, do you, punk? My finger’s on the button. Shall we start the bidding at ten MEEELYON dollars?
No doubt there’s other, less volatile folks who would trip to the same scam. Just the risk that something has been typed out somewhere would be enough to get under their skin. It wouldn’t matter that it would be practically impossible to locate or verify it; just the fact of its existence would be enough. Your infinite monkeys will produce a list of every person’s worst sins as soon as they start typing.
The point isn’t to replicate something already written. You don’t check for an exact copy of other books. The point is that something they typed out is a well written story or play. Yes they could write a good story or play. Here’s the problem, you have to read everything and you don’t have infinite capacity to do that.
Use them for fuel (or labor) to solve the oil crisis.
Finally we are up to something. This is using the actual text output of the monkeys and in a way that doesn’t depend on your ability to see all the text.
The names of God approach should definitely work. It doesn’t matter if it would bring the world to an end, only that someone believes it to be the case and be willing to pay for it. Even for low amounts, it is all profit.
I am not so sure about the Islamic extremists. I don’t see why infinite badmouthing of the Prophet would offend them much more than one instance (ask the Rushdie dude).
As for actual blackmail of individuals, the whole no factual information thing strikes again. You can show a person a list of his sins, but you have no way of knowing if the list if correct or not, and if you show them the wrong list, they will just dismiss you for making stuff up. This is not better than just you with a typewriter.
What if we do an experiment to get the monkeys drunk or high while they write? Oh yeah, that one has been done many times: college students.
Except with the monkeys, you still have a chance of getting some Shakespeare.
Heck, with the monkeys, you have a chance of getting something legible.
I’d sell the monkey shit for fertilizer.
Before you can do anything you need a way to search what the monkeys wrote. Luckly for us this problem has already been solved.
Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS)
-Otanx