MONKEY TYPING EXPERIMENT: A bunch
MONKEY TYPING EXPERIMENT: A bunch of monkeys are put in a room with a computer and keyboard. What is the result? If you guessed literature resembling Shakespeare, then you may be a fan of 19th-century scientist Thomas Huxley — but maybe you haven’t been hanging out with real monkeys lately.
Some researchers tried it. They actually left a computer in a monkey enclosure in an English zoo. The results are described here. In terms of the literary output, basically, the monkeys pressed the “S” key a lot. “Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in.”
It didn’t start out that auspiciously, though. Actually, according to one researcher, the first thing that happened was that “the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of [the computer] . . . Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard.”
Heh heh. Monkeys.
I once computed how far a million monkeys would get in a million years in typing Hamlet by sheer luck. Assuming 50 keys per keyboard and one keystroke per second, the monkeys could reliably type out the following:
“Act I, Sc…”
Proof:
1,000,000 monkeys begin
20,000 type “A” in the first second.
400 of those type “C” in the next second.
8 of those type “T” in the next second.
We’re now down to fractional monkeys… so let’s increase the amount of time. We’ll use rough approximations instead of exact multiples of 50.
8 monkeys type “ACT ” in one minute.
They type “ACT I” in two days.
“ACT I” takes 100 days.
“ACT I,” takes 12 years.
“ACT I, ” takes 600 years.
“ACT I, S” takes 30,000 years.
“ACT I, SC” takes 1,500,000 years.
So much for Hamlet.
Scott W. Somerville (49dea0) — 9/24/2004 @ 9:54 am