If 100,000 monkeys were locked in a room full of typewriters do you think (given time) one of them would?

Question

eventually type out the equivulancy of a masterpiece such as :"War and Peace"?

If "no" than what IS creative intelligence ?

Answer 1

The actual problem is an indefinite number of monkeys for an indefinite period of time. Yes, they would eventually write every masterpiece known to man. Because 'War and Peace', the 'Works of Shakespeare', etc, would also come out of an infinity of random characters.

However, we cannot conclude from this that creative intelligence is meaningless. First of all, the monkeys don't have creative intelligence. Most of what they would write would be gibberish. Human intelligence, the intelligence that finds meaning in things, would also be necessary to find the manuscripts from the huge pile of gibberish the monkeys would produce.

The problem can be posed in another way and you can clearly see how preposterous the pretension the statement has to nullify intelligence is: All literature ever produced can be reproduced using the symbols abcdefghijklmnpqrstuvwxyz,.!?(). Therefore, all you need is that string of symbols. All literature is contained there.
It's re-stating the same idea in a ridiculously absurd, simplistic way. But the monkey 'problem' really isn't any different. The meaning is not contained in the symbols, or even in their proper arrangement. Meaning in language (at the level we understand language) is something that is distinctly human.

Answer 2

In Practice - NO; totally impractical. Who's gonna maintain (i.e. see to their requirements for food, water, sex, health, happiness, sanitation, etc.) that many monkeys for an indefinite length of time in a room (no less) just to see if they could reproduce a literary work that's already been done by a distant cousin of theirs? lol

In Theory - Well, I suppose there is an infinitesimally small probability that it might be done. But I doubt that the monkeys would live that long before their eventual evolutionary cousins would pick up the task, that is given the typewriters would still function and they had enough time, and................. Oh what the heck, the answer is NO, again.

In a Dream World - Well, with Dream Monkeys I suppose most things are possible. But even then, War and Peace (and not its moral / philosophical content) is a very specific story about a very specific place and a very specific period in the human history, so why would a monkey have any reason to duplicate that (if not totally at random, at which point it wouldn't really mean much, would it?) So, even then I would say you were having a nightmare on a full stomach.

In an anomalous world – Now, that is a heck of an interesting place where anything and everything is possible – there, even monkeys could be inventing things and having extra sensory abilities beyond our wildest imagination. …Wait a minute - or is that REAL life we're talking about here? lol

Answer 3

in war and peace tlks about wars and how they avect people. then a monkey would write about what.

say in the time they are traped that they come up whith ther one language using are symples then we could not read it in till it is decooded.

do you consider wr and peace a master peice or it being really long.

the time it whould take for the monkeys to comunicate well, creat a language, learn to type it, proof read it peer edit ti, and publish it would be so emense it you becoume unbeilevable

can monkeys think on that level to write a store.

what kind of monkey would matter to. such as great ape could not touch only one key.

would they have all the paper they need.

food water will sleep.

hand eye cordination

one big deal is planing a head could the monkeys come p whith a plot.

with a great amount of thime the monkeys could do it. all things i listed would be a little of the proplems they would have.

Answer 4

An infinite number of monkeys, given an infinite amount of time CANNOT type any masterpiece since an actual quantitative infinite cannot exist. It is a metaphysical impossibility. See the entry on Hilbert's Hotel at wikipedia.

Answer 5

Yes

If you consider what the monkeys are typing to be random, then technically there would exist a probability that one of their random series of characters would be War and Peace. There would also be War and Peace with one typo in it in every possible location. Because ANY text (even ones not written yet) can be produced by randomly choosing characters, then it is indeed possible (even though it would take an excessive amount of time) that monkeys would produce every work of litterature, whether already in existence or not, of all time.

Answer 6

No

100,000 is way to small a number.

The usual phrase is that if an infinite number of monkeys sat at an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite length of time, they would write all the classics.

That concept is not as accepted now as once it was.

And please excuse the response above, they forgot to take his typewriter away from him after the experiment was abandoned.

Answer 7

hear here my expensive, can no longer you tell that a million monkeys already have typewriters (desktops) and maximum can slightly form a coherent sentence! Shakespeare (*bows*) walks hallowed floor. Monkeys have not have been given anyplace being in the comparable sentence as he.

Answer 8

The answer is no. All the letters would be used and in enough time, all the words, but not by any one monkey, rather by all of them. You would have to pick and choose among gibberish to assemble the novel "War and Peace".

Answer 9

I dont know about creative intelligence, but they should learn how to talk first and learn how to put that in letters before they start using the typewriter.

Answer 10

If you LOCK 100,000 PRIMATES in a room with no food, no water, and no bathroom, you would have chaos.

Remember the New Orlean's Superdome after Hurricane Katrina?

If humans could do that, what do you think 100,000 monkeys would do?