The Literary Implications of Many Monkeys

Yes to infinity, no to the monkeys. That's just silly. I think mice might have something though...

Monkeys possibly; Jeffery Archer never. Visit my blog: http://whatisthisstrangeplace.blogspot.com/

0x7f800000 is the IEEE 794 32-bit floating point number for infinity see, it does exist, an international standards body says so.

It's more of a question of whether a monkey has the ability to write. If monkeys can write then monkeys in infinity would *have* to write the complete works of shakespeare. Eventually. One query: Are we assuming that these monkeys evolve? Joe

The monkeys don't need to know how to write, but they would have to keep punching keys and not die, which would be a problem. The idea is that if you generate enough random sequences of letters eventually you will get the works of shakespear, which is true. In fact, you would not require BOTH an infinite amount of monkeys AND an infinite amount of time (infinity squared being infinity), either would be plenty (assuming immortal monkeys chained to typewriters). An infinte amout of typewriter ribbon would also be useful. Of course, if an infinite amount of monkeys typed sufficient random characters then in fact an infinite amount of them would produce the works of shakespear, similarly an infinite amount of them would produce the complete works of shakespear but with the title of hamlet miss-spelled (spamlet maybe). Although an inifinte amount of monkeys could complete the task in a matter of days, it would take you an infinite amount of time to review the manuscripts. I can't think of any actual occurence of inifinty beyond possibilities (there are an inifinte amount of possible pictures that can be drawn on a piece of paper but nobody has drawn them, there are an infinite amount of possible lengths between 1 and 2 metres, but only a finite amount of them have ever occured in nature). The universe might be infinite, but nobody knows for sure if it is or not.

Punching keys??? We need to set the perameters here. These monkeys have type writers??? Well, in that case, of course they'll write shakespeare, if we say that they are going to live for infinity.

I say ask xmastree, he/she is bound to know the answer.

Well, if we're being precise here, an infinite number of (immortal) monkeys working on an infinite number of (indistructible) typewriters (with infinite ribbons and paper) would produce an infinite number of perfect copies of the works of Shakespeare. Also (freakishly) an infinite number of copies of all the novels, poems, porny love letters, etc I have yet to write. Indeed, all the novels yet to be written that use only the characters found on a standard QWERTY typewriter. So the Chinese would be laughing - unless you counted Pinyin transcriptions.

Holy crap. But like, monkeys *did* evolve. And then one of them *did* write the complete works of Shakespeare! Egad! 'It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?'

Well, except that your girlfriend's right in the sense that infinity doesn't exist. Like zero, it's a mathematical construct. You don't find it in nature.

zero sort of exists, for instance there are zero elephants on the moon (to the best of my knowledge). Now imaginary numbers, they really don't exist.

Aww Dan! Another imaginary number's just died.

can I just add to madden's point. You dont need immortal monkeys because an infinite number of them in a single instant would write everything ever written in every language and backwards in with every fourth letter swapped for a colon and everry possible permutation you care to think of and they'd do it an infinite number of times in that same single instant. That's the point, it's 'infinity' and, therefore, EVERYTHING has to happen within it because there is nothing without it. (I just made that line up and finished with 'without it' so it would sound classier like maybe Noel Coward or Einstein would say it... saying that, this thread and this entire website will be reproduced an inifinte number of times by the monkeys in that experiment but without the classy ending- cocky hairy little bastards!)

They'd need more than an instant, unless they were extremely fast typists. How many individual letter characters are there in the complete works of Shakespeare, including spaces? You need to count them up, make sure the monkeys are typing at a speed of about two characters per second, and then work out how long you'd need to leave them for. Then come back, and voila, infinite copies of the complete works of Shakespeare. Surely, a more interesting question, is *how* many monkeys (give me a finite number,) would it take to write the complete works of Shakespeare? If we can work this one out, it might give us a clue as to whether or not he used this method in the first place.

now Jack, I don't want to get dragged into another petty argument but you're wrong again. This is the thing about infinity. Imagine them all just appearing in a single line that stretched on forever for a second and then vanishing again. An infinite number of monkeys sat at an infinite number of typewriters and then back to the vast emptiness of space in the blink of an eye.The first hundred million billion might not even have noticed there's something in front of them in such a short time. One in the next hundred million billion might be the only one so far to see the thing but choose to ignore it and the next billion billion monkeys might all use it as sowewhere to wipe a bogey in their instant until, eventually, one happens to slap his paw down and hit a key- almost definitely the wrong one and so another couple of billion billion monkeys produce another key being hit and, again it's the wrong one and so the process goes until the correct key is finally hit, just once. Then the second character of the first word of the first thing ever written by the bard is needed but it'll probably be wrong so we go back to the beginning and several more billion billion billion instances of monkeys confronted with typewriters until the first two have been hit, in order, by pure chance but then the third will be wrong, probably. So we go back to looking for the first eltter to appear again and so on and so on and so on down the line for an infinite number of monkeys until eventually, in that self same instant, we have a series of random events so unbelievably improbable as to be almost impossible. We have- from beginning to end, the complete works of shakespeare slapped onto however many characters/spaces as necessary in perfect order. prior to that we will have seen it typed an almost infinite number of times with just one letter missing somewhere etc etc. It would only require one instant, long enough for a key to be pressed, for an infinite number of monkeys to do the job: ie to write a single copy of the complete works of shakespeare.

I just tried this experiement, and it only took 1 hour for one monkey and a bunch of marketing chimps to write the complete works of Dan Brown.

(the same monkey completed the entire works of Tony Parsons in 15 minutes, and didn't need the marketing chimps. It developed an over developed sense of its own talent and seemed able to exist on bravado alone...)

In that case, Ely, they would need at least a couple of seconds, and even then, I don't accept it as successful if the Complete Works of Shakespeare have to consequently be *assembled* from billions of pieces of paper with one letter on them. I'm sorry, but for me it doesn't count unless each copy of the Complete Works is completed by an individual monkey using a single typewriter. Otherwise, you might as well just have one monkey, typing at one letter a second, and assemble the book yourself from the random letters he generates.

I feel a bit stoned after zooming along that infinite line of monkeys. I think I finally understand how... woah, are those Frazzles?

Right, since this has been popped to the top. I was wrong on two counts. 1. Imaginary numbers do exist. I read an article describing how the imaginary component in an electric voltage can still kill you, so that seemed pretty definite. 2. Infinity does occur in nature all the time. For instance, the coastline of britain is infinitely long because it's a fractal (a fractal, for those who don't know, is a shape produced by a mathematical function with crinkly edges, the closer you look at them, the crinklier they are, each crinkle is composed of more crinkles and so on ad infinitum). I'd always assumed that for success you needed one monkey to produce the complete manuscript from start to finish, which obviously would require a minimum amount of time based on the operating speed of the typewrite. We can do a ballpark estimate of how many monkeys it would take to write the complete works of shakespear. just so you know P(something) is the probability of something we need to know first P(monkey hits the right key), that's easy, it's: P(monkey hits a key) / number_of_keys to make life simple we'll assume we just wait till each monkey has hit enough keys (we're only estimating), therefore: P(monkey hits a key) = 1 Now we just need to know the number of characters in shakespear, which we will call Ns for brevity, and the number of keys on a typewrite Nk also for brevity we will call the probability that any a monkey writes the complete works of shakespear P(ms) P(ms) = P(monkey hits the right key) ^ Ns P(ms) = (1 / Nk) ^ Ns P(ms) = 1 / (Nk ^ Ns) there are about 80 keys on a typewriter and according to google about a million letters in all of shakespear, so: P(ms) = 8e-1000000 which if you don't know scientific notation, is a very small number indeed when dealing with iterated probabilities it is best to work in the negative, so we need to know the probability that a monkey will NOT write the complete works of shakespear P(m not s) = 1 - P(ms) The probability that two monkeys will not write shakespear is now this number squared, three monkeys to the power of three etc. so for Nm monkeys, the probability of not producing shakespear P(not s) = (1 - P(ms)) ^ Nm We can now use logarithms to find the number of monkeys for a given probability log P(not s) = log ((1 - P(ms)) ^ Nm) log P(not s) = Nm log (1 - P(ms)) Nm = log P(not s) / log (1 - P(ms)) so the number of monkeys needed for a 50% chance of producing the works of shakespear is: Nm(50%) = log 0.5 / log (1 - Pms)) which is unfortunately a bigger number than my calculatore can handle, and I really need to get some work done now. I'll have a go at guesstimating it when I get home.

Wow. You didn't close the HTML tag so now the whole bottom part of this thread is some crazy other font.

I am a robot. Enter a secret code:.................................... I can read books really fast. I do not feel pain. I have no heart. You entered the wrong code. Robot wants to feel sad, but cannot.

ok jack well fair enough, if you want a single monkey to type the whole thing (and remember we're only aftter ONE copy of the complete works) then you WOULD need an immortal monkey and either an ninfinite number of typewriters for it to bash away on, or a typewriter that will last forever and never break down. I think you may be slightly off the point here though Jack. It's meant to be a way to describe the idea that infinity is so vast that EVERYTHING will happen within it eventually purely because it has no end, therefore you would only need enough time for a key to be pressed . The monkey's hand would have to be moving in the right direction as it appeared and it not be a conscious effort to press something so it would happen a lot less freqently than giving the monkey time for thought but it doesn't matter because we've got an infinite number of goes so it WILL happen eventually. As for 'assembling' the works well the idea is that they will be typed 'in series' from beginning to end with no mistakes so it's not assembling the works because then you'd just have to get loads of each letter and knock it up yourself, removing the whole point of the monkeys who are only there (let's not forget) because they have no idea what they're doing and so remove the element of conscious thought leaving only the mathematical certainty of infinity. Let's not forget that the theory is referred to as 'an infinite number of monkeys' so, taking that as starting point and looking at the nature of infinity and the fact that there are no immortal monkeys, there's no point having an infinite number of copies of the works or for each/any to type the whole thing itself, the bare minimum is as I have described, an instant is ALL you need, infinity will take care of the rest.

oops didn't show up on firefox

Who changed it back? Now my robot just looks silly.

there's no pleasing some people

Robot says thanks.

i's infinity to the power of 'n' and it's such a bloody huge thing that it makes the description of the size of the universe at the start of the Hitch hikers guide to the Galaxy look like a description of a baby's sock.