Reproducing the Bard is virtually monkey business now

The virtual monkeys,developed by programmer Jesse Anderson,have already typed up the whole of the poem ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ and are 99.99 per cent of the way through the Bard’s complete works,the Daily Telegraph reported.

Anderson said he was inspired by an episode of ‘The Simpsons’,which spoofs the famous hypothesis that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters would eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare by chance.

Using Amazon’s SC2 cloud computing system,Anderson set up millions of small computer programmes,or virtual monkeys,and programmed them to churn out random sequences of nine characters.

If the nine-letter sequence appears anywhere in one of Shakespeare’s writings,it is matched against the relevant passage in a copy of the Bard’s complete works,and is checked off the list.

The monkeys,which started typing on August 21,have already completed more than five trillion of the 5.5 trillion possible nine-letter combinations,but have so far only finished one whole work.

But the experiment is an imperfect reproduction of the infinite monkey theorem because it saves correct sections of text while discarding future wrong guesses,experts said. Dr Ian Steward,emeritus professor of mathematics at Warwick University,said that for the monkeys to type up the complete works in the correct order without mistakes would take much longer than the age of the universe.

“Along the way there would be untold numbers of attempts with one character wrong; even more with two wrong,and so on. Almost all other books,being shorter,would appear (countless times) before Shakespeare did,” he said.