Monkeys. ‘Nuff Said.

The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite

This memo describes a protocol suite which supports an infinite number of monkeys that sit at an infinite number of typewriters in order to determine when they have either produced the entire works of William Shakespeare or a good television show. The suite includes communications and control protocols for monkeys and the organizations that interact with them.

The Mathematics of Monkeys and Shakespeare

Well, there are 32 keys, so starting at any moment, the chances of our monkey getting the first keypress right are one in 32. Not good, but we have fast monkeys and lots of time.

Monkeys Typing Shakespeare: Infinity Theory

As you can imagine, there are some serious practical problems with having an actual infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters (e.g. where would you put them? what would you feed them?), but since we’re mathematicians we can gleefully ignore such considerations.

Thanks to eccesignum for the links

One of my goals was to take a good picture of a cow. You wouldn’t think this would be difficult; cows are not the stealthiest of creatures, nor the smartest. But they do have the middle-of-the-food-chain instinct of recognising that anything that looks directly at one of them is probably thinking of eating.

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