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ANDERSON METHOD. "Each sequence is nine characters long and each is checked to see if that string of characters appears anywhere in the works of Shakespeare. If not, it is discarded. If it does match then progress has been made towards re-creating the works of the Bard. To get a sense of the scale of the project, there are about 5.5 trillion different combinations of any nine characters from the English alphabet." https://lnkd.in/dzCpVE8 View in LinkedIn

BIG NUMBERS. "Or to put it another way, to have a one in a trillion chance to type out Hamlet we would need another 10(360,641) Universes full of monkeys." https://lnkd.in/dnbrNQ5 View in LinkedIn

NEITHER SOLO NOR PARALLEL. "The project that attracted all the attention did neither of these. It was the brainchild of programmer Jesse Anderson, who wanted to test some software for ‘cloud computing', where many individuals use cheap notepads as terminals, and the actual computation is done by vast banks of servers located in a gigantic warehouse somewhere in Kansas or wherever. So he wrote short programs to produce random 9-character sequences, e-mailed to a central repository in the cloud." https://lnkd.in/dYDipGw View in LinkedIn

PARALLEL TYPING. "Alternatively, a comparably large number of monkeys could all type in parallel. One of them would produce the entire text word for word straight away." https://lnkd.in/dYDipGw View in LinkedIn

ONE MONKEY TYPIST. "The Infinite Monkey Theorem proves that however improbable such an occurrence might be, it is virtually certain to happen if one monkey keeps typing random characters for a very, very, very long time. In order to produce the 3.7 million characters in Shakespeare, in perfect order, for instance, the monkey would have to type for a mere 10 to the power 6 million years. That's 1 followed by six million zeros. The age of the universe is roughly 1 followed by ten zeros." https://lnkd.in/dYDipGw View in LinkedIn

NOT A TEST OF THE THEOREM. "It's a neat way to test cloud computing, but it sheds little light on the Infinite Monkey Theorem, which is about getting all of Shakespeare in one go. Anderson's project is more like generating single characters at random, and every time you find one that's somewhere in Shakespeare you highlight it with a yellow pen." https://lnkd.in/dYDipGw View in LinkedIn

POOR SAFETY NET. "No virus detection algorithm can detect all possible viruses, known and unknown." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

CRITIQUE. Ian Stewart: "His calculations suggest it would take far, far longer than the age of the Universe for monkeys to completely randomly produce a flawless copy of the 3,695,990 or so characters in the works. "Along the way there would be untold numbers of attempts with one character wrong; even more with two wrong, and so on." he said. "Almost all other books, being shorter, would appear (countless times) before Shakespeare did." https://lnkd.in/dzCpVE8 View in LinkedIn

RARE CODING SEQUENCES. "This situation would make the genetic code different from other codes such as computer code or written text. In these codes, the ratio of meaningful to meaningless sequences (of information content similar to that of an average gene — 1,000 nucleotides = 2,000 bits = 250 bytes) in random sequence space is so low that the chance of finding a meaningful one in only 10^5 or 10^10 or even 10^25 trials is effectively zero. Perhaps the genetic code is so different, but this difference has not been demonstrated." https://lnkd.in/dH9XaVn View in LinkedIn

PROF STEWART'S ANALYSIS: Ian Stewart is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick. He has offered one of the few critiques of the work. https://lnkd.in/dYDipGw View in LinkedIn