Monkeys and computers and "Shakespeare... Oh MY!

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What do you think of this ?

So, no Shakespeare in sight.

(Hmm... did I get the forum right, I wonder?)

 

I think that someone is bored to death, someone is desperate to prove the ill-fated evolution theory and someone has enough money to try to make those two happy.
It's like trying to make the carfuel to smell as a rose. The only thing that moronic experiment didn't include is genetical modifications on the "subjects".

Where's the end of the human stupidity?

 

Well, I will say this...monkeys and humans are not so different...we both tend to leave bodily fluids on keyboards.

 

Um ... we do? What the hell do you do with your keyboard?

 

This puts me in mind of an article I read in New Scientist some time back about a bonobo chimp. Apparently researchers studying a bonobo named Kanzi at Georgia State University noticed Kanzi making gentle noises during its interactions with them. After examining 100 hours of video of Kanzi, they decided the ape had likely invented "words" for "banana", "grapes", "juice", and "yes". The article also states that a chimp learned to communicate in American Sign Language, but gives no indication as to the extent of that communication, and that some form of syntax might have been found in monkey calls.

Of course, the article also said that the observations weren't enough to draw firm conclusions from.

I've got no idea what the researchers hoped to discover from the experiment described, although the article does state that it's more performance art than science. That said I do agree that it's interesting to find the monkeys prefered certain clusters of keys - I just have no idea what the possible significance could be.

A thought's just occurred to me. This could indicate that monkeys hammering on keyboards would be less likely to produce Shakespeare, or even human language than a purely random process - it looks like they bash specific areas, therefore mainly press keys which are close to each other. The Qwerty keyboard, if I remember correctly was designed so that the letters commonly used together in the language spoken by the inventor were separated - to prevent typewriters jamming when somebody typed too quickly.

 

And THEN they started to type with it?! Egh, groce!

 

My sentiments exactly.

I've heard one like that: "According to theory, if you give an infinite number of rednecks an infinite number of double-barreled shotguns, made them ride an infinite number of horses and shoot at an infinite number of street signs, they will eventually produce the entire works of Shakespeare in Braille."

Or something like that.

 

You know, the money that throw into this experiment can invest in much need aids like for the North Koreans and their nuclear energy program.