GPIO output from "Monkeys with Typewriters" expiriment

[Super-Nathan]

Recently I was sitting around looking at my RasPi and I was thinking, dangerous thoughts.

"Given a long enough timespan, a room full of monleys with typewriters will re-create the entire works of William Shakespeare."

So I wrote a piece of Python code that uses the RasPi like a monkey in a room with a typewriter. The code generates a random set of characters to form a string the same length as a Shakespearian Sonnet. Then if the random string does not match the sonnet, it deletes the first character and adds a new random character to the end and tests again for a match. With the sonnet I am using being 560 characters including spaces long, I am expecting this to take a very long time.

The code is available for DL and or improvement on github:

https://github.com/super-nathan/monkeys-w-typewriters

[joan]

An interesting but ultimately fruitless project.

May I suggest you spend the Pi's time constructing spam e-mails for Viagra. I'm in need of some good quality medication. I just don't trust the sellers based on the quality of the spam in my inbox.

[meltwater]

Sounds good fun! Perhaps an extension to the project would be to do it live on a webpage, for a whole play!

Now, back to programming mine to work on the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything to which the answer is 42.

[Super-Nathan]

I was getting 2 digit results in under a minute easily!

[toxibunny]

have the program check for completed words and save them in that position. repeat until the whole thing is filled, tweet it and start again.

[Ravenous]

have the program check for completed words and save them in that position. repeat until the whole thing is filled, tweet it and start again.

That's a clever idea and a far more interesting exercise. It'll complete sooner for authors who use lots of short words, than for those who use a smaller number of longer words.

[Emul]

There is already a standard for doing this via distributed computing. The IETF, the agency that creates all of the Internet standards, has a standard for the Infinity Monkey Protocol Suite. It can be found at:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2795.txt