Monkey Authors Making (Slow) Progress
From AP, via Janus, comes word of this nifty experiment/performance art: Typing monkeys don’t write Shakespeare. And though it may make no sense to you whatsoever, I really liked Lucy’s comment when Janus mentioned the URL (which included the string ‘britain_monkey_authors’) in the mud: “Even without looking at that article I want it to be about Tommy.” See, it’s funny because Tommy is me in the mud, and I wrote this book with a monkey on the cover and… Oh, never mind. You had to be there.
May 9th, 2003 at 4:28 pm
Phillips said the results showed that monkeys “are not random generators. They’re more complex than that.”
An “S” generator with errors is more complex? Or was Mr. Phillips speaking of the monkeys’ ability to “think outside the box?”
Rather than generate more material to numb the skulls of high schools students. The monkeys invented “the stoning of outsiders” and “defecation as an initiation ritual.” That intellectual feat alone puts them on the level of religious fanatics or Chicago high school students. Which would also explain their aversion to Shakespeare.
It is scary that even a monkey understands the inherent evil of a computer and attempts to destroy it. To bad the story didn’t mention if the computer was Apple or Windows.