The theory goes that a million monkeys typing at a million typewriters will produce the entire works of Shakespeare. Thoughts?
by 
knightrider17
ANSWERS: 29
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Not true. The wording and depth of even one page is to methodical to be created randomly. I can't remember who, but a mathematician logically proved it. I'll try to dig it up.
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That would not get Shakespeare, a million monkeys would just be a big mess, and the odds of all those monkeys typing on the same type writer the exact words of something Shakespearean, are small. The saying is: If you put enough monkeys in a room with a type writer, you will get Shakespeare. And if "monkeys" is a metaphor for unintelligent people. here's my theory: a negative plus a negative is still a negative.
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The whole thing goes that the monkeys will type so much that eventually the random letters they type will happen to sequence into the works of Shakespeare, In reality this is all too unlikely and you would need far more monkeys and far more typewriters to achieve this.
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Um i dont think thats possible or are they just saying shakespeare was a monkey?
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How boring would that be? It was dull enough the first time around.
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Quite possible unless you show one your banana.
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The odds of a million monkeys, in front of a million typewriters, typing the works of Shakespeare are about as small as the Earth is compared to the rest of the universe. Damn near impossible but still there.
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So much for theories. Besides, the million monkeys are working at my job as managers and they don't have time to use a typewriter. Do you suppose using PCs would help? Probably not, I say.
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well, shakespeare was a monkey....
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from http://groups.google.com/group/Atheism-vs-Christianity/web/15-answers-to-creationist-nonsense . As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence "TOBEORNOTTOBE." Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days.
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A Million Monkeys at keyboards? Isn't that the internet?
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Well sometimes it looks like alot of those monkeys have been practising their litary prowess on AnswerBag!
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Would a million rednecks shooting at road signs ultimately produce the entire works of Shakespeare in braille?
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That Depends, can they touchtype?
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The actual theory is that one monkey with a typewriter given an *infinite period of time* will produce the works of Shakespeare and the Bible and the Encyclopedia Brittanica, etc. That infinite period is the important thing. A similar idea can be found in Jorge Luis Borges' story The Library of Babel. Though the story contains no monkeys. :)
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The actual theory is that one monkey with a typewriter given an *infinite period of time* will produce the works of Shakespeare and the Bible and the Encyclopedia Brittanica, etc. That infinite period is the important thing. A similar idea can be found in Jorge Luis Borges' story The Library of Babel. Though the story contains no monkeys. :)
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Its just an analogy to demonstrate the laws of probability - it isnt even really a theory, its juwst the probability of selecting specific letters followed by specific letters, the point is the probability is exctremely low, but it not zero
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The maths of it say that in that particular case, they could have been typing since the beginning of the Universe (13 and a bit billion years I think?) and they still wouldn't even have formed one paragraph of Shakespeare, let alone the complete works ; ) That's with a brute-force approach though - if any correctly typed character was saved, meaning it were cumulative, then (across all million monkeys) it could take only a few hours for all of it to have been typed out.
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My question is this who was there typing teacher? I just wonder how Shakespeare will feel with somebody monkeying with all his hard work!!!
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Crap. Shakespeare had great insight into the human condition; such works are not the accident of fools.
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The experiment was actually tried, and the monkeys defecated on the keyboards. As a matter of fact, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says what we already know to be true--that without organizing energy and organizing information, random processes just produce increasing chaos.
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Yeah, can those monkeys take a break to do my homework?
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Well, it's been shown that 6 monkeys/blindfolded humans can produce about 5 words a day. So it would take a million billion billion years (give or take) for them to type out the complete works of Shakespeare.
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According to the May-June 2005 issue of mental_floss magazine, in a very entertaining piece: "If a million monkeys typed on a million typewriters for a million years, could they produce a work of Shakespeare? This notion has been used to indicate how, over the vastness of time, complex creations could arise my chance. Well, researchers at Plymouth University in England carried out a small-scale experiment to put the theory to the test." In short, "[Y]ou'd have to have a million monkeys typing at a rate of 31 million strokes a year (one per second) for a million years ... and then multiply that by 200."
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well this explanes the weekly world news, room full of monkeys pounding on keybords - also sounds like my highschool typing class
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it could be.. but you'd need much, much more than a million monkeys for that. Monkeys behave in a certain way, I honestly don't think there's any possibility for that
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sure, i don't see why not. they've already shown that chimps and gorillas have much higher mental function than previously thought. there's new discoveries about their mental function all the time. and in animals in general, we give ourselves too much credit i think, we're not as far advanced compared to the "lesser" animals as we think we are ;)
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I always said an infinite number of monkeys etc.
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I honestly believe that shakespeare was a bad poet at the time who was "dicovered" after death because of the fanciiness of his writings So, back to the original q. - why not?
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