Sure thing - it's a travesty that hasn't sifted yet. You know the old saying about million monkeys typing on a million typewriters? I think that's Videosift sometimes - the voting is basically random and every once in a while something of actual high quality gets sifted.

In reply to this comment by SpaceOddity:
In reply to this comment by jonny:
*promote

Thanks man!

I got just past baffled so, 91 odd wpm. He is fast to be sure, but I've seen videos of faster. Particularly an old black and white of a guy on an old typewriter who was typing so fast that the typing sound blurred together. That was with an old hard-press typewriter.

Who still uses the typewriter? Hipsters and old people, apparently.

What happened to all their typewriters?

The truth is: a chimp has already created the works of Shakespeare. Didn't even need a typewriter. Apparently its name was Shakespeare. Probably isn't the first time either...

Infinity stares indifferently from far beyond the limits of our perception.

i think it is true for a perfect random number (ascii symbol) generator, but monkeys like humans are not perfect they would fall into patterns, or like a particular sound of click in the typewriter or shape of letters better, or they would bash the keys never reaching the others and so on...

As long as you have typewriters and typing monkeys FOREVER, The rules don't matter, infinite means infinite, they would type it, not only once either, but actually an infinite number of times as well. When you are dealing with infinity, everything probable and improbable isn't just probable, it's INEVITABLE, thats the whole point. As Ricky says, they'll type EVERYTHING, and they'll type everything an infinite number of times too. Thats what infinity means.

@Ariane

If there were an infinite amount of monkeys sat down to work non-stop at one typewriter each, it would necessarily mean that every possible string of characters was being typed, and so in the time it would take a single monkey to type the number of characters in all of Shakespeare, one monkey (or an infinite number of monkeys, if you prefer) would have actually done it, by accident. As a corollary, every other past and future written work that is not longer than the complete works of Shakespeare would also be produced.

>> ^djsunkid:

The other problem is that we don't have enough typewriters.


What about laptops?

As far as I understand this you wouldn`t even need an infinite number of monkeys and typewriters only one monkey typing infinitely...

Actually I don't think the issue of representation is critical here. I think it's very easy to point out where Ariane went wrong:

"What are the odds that the random number generator would spit out the Shakespeare number? About 1 in infinity."

That's our intuition, but it's wrong. That's why this thought experiment is interesting. The likelihood is perhaps 1 in 10^10000000, but it is very much not "about 1 in infinity".


>> ^Sotto_Voce:

>> ^Ariane:
Pilkington is right. It would never happen. Lets just reduce this whole idea to mathematics. The complete works of Shakespeare can be translated to a number, by converting every character to ASCII, and ASCII to binary, so you end up with a really large binary number, which you can convert to decimal if you are so inclined.
So we have one number representing the complete works of Shakespeare. Then instead on Monkeys with typewriters, we have a random number generator, that can spit out any number from 1 to infinity. What are the odds that the random number generator would spit out the Shakespeare number? About 1 in infinity. Or for you calculus geeks, the limit of 1/x as x approaches infinity = 0.
So what happens if you ran the number generator an infinite number of times. Turns out infinity x infinity = infinity. Or again to be more exact aleph-naught times aleph-naught equals aleph-naught. So we are still at 0. What if we had an infinite number of number generators. That would be aleph-naught cubed, which is still equal to aleph-naught. Therefore, the odds are still zero.

You're using the wrong probability distribution. If we do what you suggest and convert each possible string of characters into a binary number, then the monkey experiment will not give us a uniform distribution over the binary numbers. It won't be like a random number generator. The monkey experiment gives us a uniform distribution over individual characters, and this does not translate into a uniform distribution over strings. As an example, consider the string "ee" vs. the string corresponding to Tolstoy's "War and Peace". Each of these corresponds to a single binary number, and if your random number generator analogy is right, then they should be equally likely. But obviously a monkey is far more likely to type "ee" than "War and Peace".

>> ^Ariane:

Pilkington is right. It would never happen. Lets just reduce this whole idea to mathematics. The complete works of Shakespeare can be translated to a number, by converting every character to ASCII, and ASCII to binary, so you end up with a really large binary number, which you can convert to decimal if you are so inclined.
So we have one number representing the complete works of Shakespeare. Then instead on Monkeys with typewriters, we have a random number generator, that can spit out any number from 1 to infinity. What are the odds that the random number generator would spit out the Shakespeare number? About 1 in infinity. Or for you calculus geeks, the limit of 1/x as x approaches infinity = 0.
So what happens if you ran the number generator an infinite number of times. Turns out infinity x infinity = infinity. Or again to be more exact aleph-naught times aleph-naught equals aleph-naught. So we are still at 0. What if we had an infinite number of number generators. That would be aleph-naught cubed, which is still equal to aleph-naught. Therefore, the odds are still zero.


You're using the wrong probability distribution. If we do what you suggest and convert each possible string of characters into a binary number, then the monkey experiment will not give us a uniform distribution over the binary numbers. It won't be like a random number generator. The monkey experiment gives us a uniform distribution over individual characters, and this does not translate into a uniform distribution over strings. As an example, consider the string "ee" vs. the string corresponding to Tolstoy's "War and Peace". Each of these corresponds to a single binary number, and if your random number generator analogy is right, then they should be equally likely. But obviously a monkey is far more likely to type "ee" than "War and Peace".

Actually, with an infinite number of monkeys, as long as they each type different things, one of those monkeys will necessarily type shakespeare as soon as he sits at the typewriter. But there is no way you could hope to find his work, because you'd be searching through an infinite number of monkey's work, which would take an infinite amount of time.

The other problem is that we don't have enough typewriters.

Pilkington is right. It would never happen. Lets just reduce this whole idea to mathematics. The complete works of Shakespeare can be translated to a number, by converting every character to ASCII, and ASCII to binary, so you end up with a really large binary number, which you can convert to decimal if you are so inclined.

So we have one number representing the complete works of Shakespeare. Then instead on Monkeys with typewriters, we have a random number generator, that can spit out any number from 1 to infinity. What are the odds that the random number generator would spit out the Shakespeare number? About 1 in infinity. Or for you calculus geeks, the limit of 1/x as x approaches infinity = 0.

So what happens if you ran the number generator an infinite number of times. Turns out infinity x infinity = infinity. Or again to be more exact aleph-naught times aleph-naught equals aleph-naught. So we are still at 0. What if we had an infinite number of number generators. That would be aleph-naught cubed, which is still equal to aleph-naught. Therefore, the odds are still zero.

I guess the grump didn't grasp the separation of hardware and software, and that Bill Gates had nothing to do with where the on/off switch migrated to. Did Mr.Rooney bypass electric typewriters altogether?