A Million Monkeys Just Might Write Shakespeare

Jesse Anderson created an application that mimics monkeys tapping away at keyboards. The result, as he writes, is Shakespeare:

Today (2011-09-23) at 2:30 PST the monkeys successfully randomly recreated A Lover’s Complaint. This is the first time a 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.

Anderson’s non-technical explanation runs like so:

Instead of having real monkeys typing on keyboards, I have virtual, computerized monkeys that output random gibberish. This is supposed to mimic a monkey randomly mashing the keys on a keyboard. The computer program I wrote compares that monkey’s gibberish to every work of Shakespeare to see if it actually matches a small portion of what Shakespeare wrote.

Click through for a more technical explanation, including his use of Hadoop and Amazon EC2.

H/T: Slashdot.