Monkeys Suck
05-18-2003, 12:02 AM
#1
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LONDON (May 9) - Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.
Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will make a mess.
Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.
``They pressed a lot of S's,'' researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. ``Obviously, English isn't their first language.''
In a project intended more as performance art than scientific experiment, faculty and students in the university's media program left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques.
Then, they waited.
At first, said Phillips, ``the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.
``Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard,'' added Phillips, who runs the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.
Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in.
The notion that monkeys typing at random will eventually produce literature is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, a 19th-century scientist who supported Charles Darwin's theories of evolution. Mathematicians have also used it to illustrate concepts of chance.
The Plymouth experiment was funded by England's Arts Council and part of the Vivaria Project, which plans to install computers in zoos across Europe to study differences between animal and artificial life.
Phillips said the results showed that monkeys ``are not random generators. They're more complex than that.
``They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there.''
Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will make a mess.
Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.
``They pressed a lot of S's,'' researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. ``Obviously, English isn't their first language.''
In a project intended more as performance art than scientific experiment, faculty and students in the university's media program left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques.
Then, they waited.
At first, said Phillips, ``the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.
``Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard,'' added Phillips, who runs the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.
Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in.
The notion that monkeys typing at random will eventually produce literature is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, a 19th-century scientist who supported Charles Darwin's theories of evolution. Mathematicians have also used it to illustrate concepts of chance.
The Plymouth experiment was funded by England's Arts Council and part of the Vivaria Project, which plans to install computers in zoos across Europe to study differences between animal and artificial life.
Phillips said the results showed that monkeys ``are not random generators. They're more complex than that.
``They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there.''
05-18-2003, 12:18 AM
#3
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Location: Houston Texas
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That reminds me of my math models class. Their were a bunch of morons in the class.
We had one test where the questions were broken down into 4 parts. Like question 1 would be 4 questions total labeled a, b , c and d. Each with its own question and so on. We had 4 zeros because people were circling the letters thinking it was multiple choice
We had one test where the questions were broken down into 4 parts. Like question 1 would be 4 questions total labeled a, b , c and d. Each with its own question and so on. We had 4 zeros because people were circling the letters thinking it was multiple choice
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