A few million virtual monkeys are close to re-creating the complete works of Shakespeare by randomly mashing keys on virtual typewriters. A running total of how well they are doing shows that the re-creation is 99.990% complete. The first single work to be completed was the poem A Lover's Complaint. It is also a practical test of the thought experiment that wonders whether an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters would be able to produce Shakespeare's works by accident. The virtual monkeys are small computer programs uploaded to Amazon servers.
These coded apes regularly pump out random sequences of text. Each sequence is nine characters long and each is checked to see if that string of characters appears anywhere in the works of Shakespeare. If not, it is discarded. If it does match then progress has been made towards re-creating the works of the Bard. To get a sense of the scale of the project, there are about 5.5 trillion different combinations of any nine characters from the English alphabet. The monkeys are generating random nine-character strings to try to produce all these strings and thereby find those that appear in Shakespeare's works.
More information:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15060310
More information:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15060310