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No words to describe monkeys' play


Six monkeys took part in the experiment at Paignton Zoo
A bizarre experiment by a group of students has found monkeys cannot write Shakespeare.

Lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth wanted to test the claim that an infinite number of monkeys given typewriters would create the works of The Bard.

A single computer was placed in a monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo to monitor the literary output of six primates.

But after a month, the Sulawesi crested macaques had only succeeded in partially destroying the machine, using it as a lavatory, and mostly typing the letter "s".

The project, by students from the university's MediaLab Arts course, received £2,000 from the Arts Council.

Director of the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), Mike Phillips, denied the project was a disaster and said they had learned "an awful lot".

He also denied it had been a waste of money.

He said the £2,000 was spent on purchasing the hardware to set up a radio link so the activities in the enclosure could be watched live on a website.

"Compared to the cost of reality TV, this was a tiny pinch of money," he said.

"It provided very stimulating and fascinating viewing."

The six monkeys - Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan - produced five pages of text which consisted mainly of the letter "s".

Book published

But towards the end of the experiment, their output slightly improved, with the letters A, J, L and M also appearing.

However, they failed to come up with anything that remotely resembled a word.

Paignton Zoo scientific officer Dr Amy Plowman said: "The work was interesting but had little scientific value, except to show that the 'infinite monkey' theory is flawed."

The results of the experiment formed part of a larger project developed by i-DAT.

They have been published in a limited edition book entitled Notes Towards The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/3013959.stm

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At least they were using the home keys properly.

Last edited by Aydin on 05-09-2003 at 08:40 PM

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i bet thwey could come up with a good RiZZ word or two

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Brown monkeys probably.

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"...the infinite monkey theory is flawed..."

Yes. Easily proven with five monkeys and one computer.

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quote:

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Originally posted by RiZZ
i bet thwey could come up with a good RiZZ word or two

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They need an ergonomic keyboard control group. This isn't science!

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dont they know that monkeys use dorvak

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Heh.

quote:

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Originally posted by RiZZ
dont they know that monkeys use dorvak

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this doesnt prove/disprove anything.

Humans have a very limited ability to conceptualize the very large and the very small. This holds true for both size and time.

Evolutionarily, we are adapted to have only the conceptualizing skills that allow us to hunt and gather, reproduce and live in small bands of a few hundred individuals.

So, many hundred billion documents would be only shit stains and random letters. That doesnt disprove anything.

Geological time is unfathomable to us. We live short droplets of time. Each of us is the drop of water that moved a grain of sand one millionth of an inch inside the grand canyon.

How can we appreciate the time it took to carve out the grand canyon when we are so limited in lifespan? And the formation of the grand canyon is but a tiny speck of time in the history of the formation of the world... and the world isnt even old, as far as planets go.

when we think of time... we are going to be wrong by several orders of magnitude.

We make time more fathomable by modelling it onto tangible everyday things, like trivial length, "3 times as long as" methaphors and so on.

The same goes for extremes of size.
Try to visually imagine what 1000 matches looks like. Will they fit on your dining room table?
I dont think any of us has an intutitive sense of what the number 1000 really is. We can relate it to other things. 10x100 for example. If I concentrate, I am able to visualize what 100 bookshelves would look like.

but not a thousand, except in relation to the 100 bookshelves.

How on earth am I supposed to appreciate what an infinite number of bookshelves looks like - much less the productive process of an infinite number of monkeys equipped with typewriters.

we can operationalize time and size through mathematics... but we cant conceptualize them.

Our sense of correlation and causality are instrisically linked to the scope of our lives - our little specks of dust in an infinite sandstorm.

life is glorious - and mindboggling

Last edited by mudded on 05-10-2003 at 03:42 PM

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and full of stars

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i wonder is mudded is a plagerizer like LU

if not thats an awsome post

either that or i only got 3.5 hrs of sleep

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I am not plagiarizing anything...

I have just reread Dawkins' "the Blind watchmaker"...
It has inspirired me, sure, but I challenge you to find anything plagiarized from the book to my post.

... and do read it... it is an awesome piece of writing (Smug doesnt like Dawkins, but I think that is because Dawkins consistently calls the study of physics "simple things")

Oh, and on plagiarism in general. If you think you have had an original thought, it is simply because you havent read enough...

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quote:

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Originally posted by mudded
this doesnt prove/disprove anything.

Humans have a very limited ability to conceptualize the very large and the very small. This holds true for both size and time.

Evolutionarily, we are adapted to have only the conceptualizing skills that allow us to hunt and gather, reproduce and live in small bands of a few hundred individuals.

So, many hundred billion documents would be only shit stains and random letters. That doesnt disprove anything.

Geological time is unfathomable to us. We live short droplets of time. Each of us is the drop of water that moved a grain of sand one millionth of an inch inside the grand canyon.

How can we appreciate the time it took to carve out the grand canyon when we are so limited in lifespan? And the formation of the grand canyon is but a tiny speck of time in the history of the formation of the world... and the world isnt even old, as far as planets go.

when we think of time... we are going to be wrong by several orders of magnitude.

We make time more fathomable by modelling it onto tangible everyday things, like trivial length, "3 times as long as" methaphors and so on.

The same goes for extremes of size.
Try to visually imagine what 1000 matches looks like. Will they fit on your dining room table?
I dont think any of us has an intutitive sense of what the number 1000 really is. We can relate it to other things. 10x100 for example. If I concentrate, I am able to visualize what 100 bookshelves would look like.

but not a thousand, except in relation to the 100 bookshelves.

How on earth am I supposed to appreciate what an infinite number of bookshelves looks like - much less the productive process of an infinite number of monkeys equipped with typewriters.

we can operationalize time and size through mathematics... but we cant conceptualize them.

Our sense of correlation and causality are instrisically linked to the scope of our lives - our little specks of dust in an infinite sandstorm.

life is glorious - and mindboggling

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quote:

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Originally posted by Paint CHiPs
Yeah but dude, the monkeys. They pissed on the computer.

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Nobody said the complete works of shakespeare couldn't smell like piss...

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