Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Ozark on May 11, 2003, 08:29:19 PM
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Typing Monkeys Don't Write Shakespeare
By JILL LAWLESS
LONDON (AP) - Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.
Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will make a mess.
Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.
"They pressed a lot of S's," researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. "Obviously, English isn't their first language."
In a project intended more as performance art than scientific experiment, faculty and students in the university's media program left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques.
Then, they waited.
At first, said Phillips, "the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.
"Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard," added Phillips, who runs the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.
Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in.
The notion that monkeys typing at random will eventually produce literature is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, a 19th-century scientist who supported Charles Darwin's theories of evolution. Mathematicians have also used it to illustrate concepts of chance.
The Plymouth experiment was funded by England's Arts Council and part of the Vivaria Project, which plans to install computers in zoos across Europe to study differences between animal and artificial life.
Phillips said the results showed that monkeys "are not random generators. They're more complex than that.
"They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there."
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Monkey + computer = Piss on keyboard, pushing the buttons without knowing that he is in fact typing letters.
Human + computer = Beer on keyboard, typing consists mostly of "www.google.com" followed by "nude teens hardcore facial" and you know what happens next..
Thats evolution! :cool:
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Originally posted by Ozark
Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.
Nah, we've already tried this. And the O'Club ain't nothing like Shakekspeare.
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Originally posted by Tuomio
Monkey + computer = Piss on keyboard, pushing the buttons without knowing that he is in fact typing letters.
Human + computer = Beer on keyboard, typing consists mostly of "www.google.com" followed by "nude teens hardcore facial" and you know what happens next..
Thats evolution! :cool:
lmao:eek:
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explain to me how 6 monkies, 1 computer and one month is even remotely equivalent to infinite monkies, infinite computers and an indefinite amount of time. :p
however, the humor of the "experiment" was not lost on me. :D
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Originally posted by gofaster
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FWIW, six is a bit of a ways from an infinite number....
Never thought much about the "theory" anyhow as it wouldd involve quite a bit of editing. :)
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