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NON CIGAR. "Virtual monkeys have not written Shakespeare. They've thrown random darts at the pages of Shakespeare's Complete Works, and everything they hit has been colored yellow. So far they've hit 99.99% of the target." (Ian Stewart). https://lnkd.in/dYDipGw View in LinkedIn

BEST DATA TO DATE. "The longest randomly-generated sequence of Shakespearian characters, to date, is the one found by The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator website. After a mere 2,737,850 million billion billion billion (simulated) monkey-years the pinnacle of its literary output was 24 characters from Henry IV, Part 2: RUMOUR. Open your ears; (the 24th character is a space)." https://lnkd.in/dYDipGw View in LinkedIn

INTERESTING EXERCISE. "Anderson makes all this clear on his website. Most media reports sensibly treated it as an amusing exercise. Several even managed to make the distinction between what had been achieved and what the Infinite Monkey Theorem is really about. But the headlines were usually exaggerations, and many of the articles were a bit confused." 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

CODING: NONCODING GENE RATIO. "If the proportion of functional gene-length strands of DNA to nonfunctional ones is not as low as we actually find in nature — (10^12 different genes) x (10^25 estimated average number of functional alleles each) / (10^600 possible sequences) = 10^-563 conservatively — but is as high as 10^-10, say, this situation would lead to something like a "many worlds" theory of evolution." https://lnkd.in/dH9XaVn View in LinkedIn

GIANT STEP. "The monkeys accomplished their goal of recreating all 38 works of Shakespeare. The last work, The Taming Of The Shrew, was completed at 2 AM PST on October 6, 2011. This is the first time every 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." https://lnkd.in/djJFZTk View in LinkedIn