Apparently, they can’t produce it within a month, anyway:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030509/ap_on_fe_st/britain_monkey_authors_1
Not sure if it proves anything, but just for producing the following quotes, i’d consider the experiment a success on some level:
My favorite thought along this lines was the one that goes something like this:
*We used to think that if we put a million monkeys on keyboards they would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.
Now, thanks to the Internet, we know that’s not true.*
Present company excepted, of course!
The bashing with a rock and other ape-like behaviors remind me a lot of how I’ve felt a few times at work…
A million monkeys on keyboards would be awesome!
fwiw, a Yamah DX-7 can take an awful lot of abuse.
Now, put a million babboons on drums, a million great apes on bass, a million gibboons on lead guitar, and have Sammy Hagar for lead vocals.
The monkeys did, however, come up with three shooting scripts for Everybody Loves Raymond.
*Then I saw her face
And now I’m a believer
'Cause I’m in love Ooh
I’m a believer
I couldn’t leave her
If I tried*
Eve, that reminds me of a “letter” I saw in National Lampoon over 20 years ago.
(Quoting from memory, so it won’t be anywhere close to exact)
“They say if you give a million monkeys with typewriters enough time they’ll turn out Shakespeare. I don’t know about that, but I can tell you that I gave one monkey a typewriter, and in six hours he wrote a script for The Love Boat. And it’s not half bad.”
One of the all-time great flames, posted on OpalCat’s Teaming Millions page:
Regards,
Shodan
So the monkeys piss and shit all over the keyboards? I knew Lucas had a collaborater for his latest movies…
They had just read the complete works of David Eddings and were in an aggravated state.
Obviously, we need more funding for more monkies.
It takes an infinite number of monkies.
One more great pop song from the pen of Neil Diamond.
Just shows what a few monkeys can do if they have great managers & producers.
Who said Art was dead?
:rolleyes:
Art Garfunkle’s dead?!
Here’s some quick and dirty calculations. Let’s say you have a standard 104 button keyboard. What are the odds of typing :
To be or not to be, that is the question
Well, there are 40 characters in that string. To type the original capital T requires pushing the T and one of the shift keys simultaneously. Probability = 1/104 x 2/103 = 2/10,712
Now to type the other 39 characters in succession is 1/104 to the 39th power.
So the chances of typing out this one sentence is 2 out of 10712 * 104 **39,
or 4.04 x 10 to the minus 83rd power. A room full of monkeys would never produce this sentence, let alone one play, let alone the complete works of Shakespeare.
…not even trained monkeys…?
Yeah, a million wouldn’t do the trick, but how about an infinite number of them? That’d go back to the concept of an infinite universe; like, “somewhere out there, we’re having this exact same conversation, except we’re talking about donkeys instead.”
I’m re-writing the grant proposal now.
We NEED more monkeys damnit!
How much do you suppose an infinite number of monkeys costs?
…trained donkeys…?
My local news site (newsday) had the following link:
The monkeys’ output: www.vivaria.net/experiments/notes/publication/
But the site is really slow or overloaded. Anyone know of some other place to get the output?
Didn’t Peter Gabriel record an experimental album with a bunch of primates plaing percusion instruments?
MtM