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Comment by aba_sababa | Hacker News Reader

But nine characters at a time? Is that really impressive? I thought the whole allure of the Infinite Monkey Theorem is that ONE monkey might reproduce an ENTIRE work, all by himself, in a single shot. That doesn't seem to be what's happening here...

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Yes, this seems considerably easier. If we're going to relax the requirement that each monkey must generate a substantial portion of the work in one shot (or the complete work in toto), then 9 characters is just as arbitrary as 1 character (in which the fitting would occur quite rapidly).

At the very least, we should require that the Map Monkeys produce complete sentences.

I was always under the impression that since it's typewriters, a page at a time was required. Therefore in the piles and piles of pages written, Shakespeare's work would actually exist.

I built a fun little tool to do this a few years ago... probably at least 3 if not 4. I did the entire first act of Hamlet... as in I generated a string (300,000 odd characters from memory) and compared it to the proof. 9 chars at a time is a whole lot better optimastion than what I was doing.

It was when ever Google App engine launched anyway. The reason I didn't care about optimization was I was planning on abusing the free GAE processing power... turned out after I wrote the app that I should have read the T&C etc... what I was planning wouldn't have been permitted :( so I pulled the plug.

My home version ran for a few weeks, but I think I was only in the millions, and not trillions like this guy. Hamlet never materialized.

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