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Works of Shakespeare Unlikely to be Transcribed by Apes


Obsessionist

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From Wikipedia:

 

In 2003, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes Crested Macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon in England for a month, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website.[10]

Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages[11] largely consisting of the letter S, but the lead male began by bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it. Mike Phillips, director of the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned "an awful lot" from it. He concluded that monkeys "are not random generators. They're more complex than that. ... They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there."[10][12]

 

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For the thought experiment to work properly, you'd need infinite time, but also infinite monkeys and infinite typewriters.

 

The entire lifespan of the universe would probably be shorter than the time it'd take them to type out one of Hamlet's speeches, though ...

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I figure that given infinite time the universe is sure to generate the infinite typewriters and monkeys needed. Worse comes to worse, it's got to at least generate another universe which will.

 

...right?

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All I can think after reading this, is what brand of keyboard was that? I mean, it kept working after being urinated AND defecated upon, and on top of that, smashed with a rock. I want one.

 

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:burnmad:

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