Maureen O'Connor just wrote an article titled "Monkeys on Typewriters ‘Close to Reproducing Shakespeare." We've written about the Shakespeare/Monkey theorem a few times before, and a few years ago we participated in a crowd-sourced/distributed computing project that put virtual monkeys typing away on thousands of peoples computers in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. I think we came up with a couple of lines from two or three plays.
"A computer programmer testing the "Infinite Monkey Theorem"—that, with enough time, a monkey randomly mashing a typewriter would eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare—says his virtual monkeys will soon complete the works, way ahead of their infinity deadline!"
According to another article by Nick Collins in The Telegraph: "The monkeys, which started typing on August 21, have already completed more than five trillion of the 5.5 trillion possible nine-letter combinations, but have so far only finished one whole work. But the experiment is an imperfect reproduction of the infinite monkey theorem because it saves correct sections of text while discarding future wrong guesses, experts said."
According to another article by Nick Collins in The Telegraph: "The monkeys, which started typing on August 21, have already completed more than five trillion of the 5.5 trillion possible nine-letter combinations, but have so far only finished one whole work. But the experiment is an imperfect reproduction of the infinite monkey theorem because it saves correct sections of text while discarding future wrong guesses, experts said."
"As a fun side project," Jesse Anderson created millions of small computer programs that generate "random sequences of nine characters." As each sequence is created, it is compared to Shakespeare's oeuvre; if it matches anywhere, it gets checked off a list. The monkeys have been typing for 35 days, and most recently completed "A Lover's Complaint."
"Those monkeys are typing Shakespeare in order, so monkey-literature-ologists aren't sure if it should "count."
As it turns out, the one time someone actually went out and hired real monkeys to do the mashing, the sequences weren't even random, according to an article in the Daily Telegraph:
"In 2003 the Arts Council for England paid £2,000 for a real-life test of the theorem involving six Sulawesi crested macaques, but the trial was abandoned after a month.
The monkeys produced five pages of text, mainly composed of the letter S, but failed to type anything close to a word of English, broke the computer and used the keyboard as a lavatory."
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