Posted by Simon on August 05, 2003 at 08:08:02:
I thought perhaps the collective here might be interested in another attempt to create poetry from randomness, but in a rather different fashion - using brute force rather tahn evolution. They say that if you have an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters, eventually one of them will produce Hamlet. Well, someone's decided to put it to the test, with the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator - link below.
I've had it running on my computer all day, simulating 600 monkeys typing for 40 years and producing 900,000,000 pages. So far the best they've managed is the first four letters of Measure for Measure, and nobody at all has got beyond six letters! Looks like they'll take a while - our method may be quicker.