Update: “Few Million Monkeys Randomly Recreate Shakespeare”

September 26th, 2011

Last month I blogged about a virtual Amazon experiment that wanted to see if a large number of virtual monkeys could recreate the works of Shakespeare. Looks like they have some success.

Today (2011-09-23) at 2:30 PST the monkeys successfully randomly recreated A Lover’s Complaint. This is the first time a work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly reproduced.  Furthermore, this is the largest work ever randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere.

The monkeys will continue typing away until every work of Shakespeare is randomly created.  Until then, you can continue to view the monkeys’ progress on that page.  I am making the raw data available to anyone who wants it.  Please use the Contact page to ask for the URL. If you have a Hadoop cluster that I could run the monkeys project on, please contact me as well.

This project originally started on August 21, 2011.  Over the course of the project, over 5 trillion character groups have been randomly generated and checked out of the 5.5 trillion possible combinations.

I can’t wait to get these million Amazonian monkeys predicting the Supreme Court!