There’s an old saying about a million monkeys hammering away at keyboards such that eventually, one of them will randomly produce the works of Shakespeare. Some people refer to it as the infinite monkey theorem and in the past various feasibility studies have looked into how valid it is. Well, the theory has been put to the test using Amazon EC2 distributed computing resources by Jesse Anderson.

“For this project, I used Hadoop, Amazon EC2, and Ubuntu Linux. Since I don’t have real monkeys, I have to create fake Amazonian Map Monkeys. The Map Monkeys create random data in ASCII between a and z. It uses Sean Luke’s Mersenne Twister to make sure I have fast, random, well behaved monkeys. Once the monkey’s output is mapped, it is passed to the reducer which runs the characters through a Bloom Field membership test. If the monkey output passes the membership test, the Shakespearean works are checked using a string comparison. If that passes, a genius monkey has written 9 characters of Shakespeare. The source material is all of Shakespeare’s works as taken from Project Gutenberg.”