Register Log in  Scientific Method / Science & Exploration
Richard Dawkins’ weasels beat random monkeys to Shakespeare’s
work  One guy and his home computer are attempting to get an
army of virtual monkeys …   Jesse Anderson, who's running the
virtual monkeys on a home computer, describes his system using
text and video on his site. One thing that's very clear is that
he made the challenge a bit simpler than it might have been.
Each virtual monkey on his machine only spits out a string of
standard ASCII letters—no punctuation, no capitals or digits,
not whitespaces. This cuts the potential space he's searching
down considerably.  But that's not the only thing that's been
simplified in order to make the monkeys' virtual lives a bit
easier. Instead of being an attempt to reproduce Shakespeare
with random characters, the algorithm Anderson is using is a bit
closer to one used as a simple demonstration of the power of
biological evolution (one that, coincidentally, also used
Shakespeare as its text).  Recapitula