Infinite Monkey Theorem

12th March 2016
by InfiniteMonkeys
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Hello and welcome to our very first blog!

We have been threatening to do this for years.. But somehow never quite found the time. So to start proceedings we thought we would write a blog post that had nothing to do with Cloud Hosting, Infrastructure or even IT. But it does at least explain our chosen nom de plume.

The Infinite Monkey Theorem

Now there have been many articles, film & TV references in relation to whether given an infinite ( or lots and lots and lots if you are little ) amount of time, a Monkey with a typewriter bashing away at random keys will produce the complete works of Shakespeare. If you follow the Wikipedia page, there are some fascinating mathematical formulas…. we skipped those, after all the sun was out.

But does spelling, grammar, word spacing or even upper and lower case count into the mix? I mean it causes havoc with PowerShell often leading to a confused Monkey in the engineering team, until the inevitable “aha!” moment (I didn’t tell you this.. but it’s more of an “oooh oooh ahh ahh”).

And the theory itself varies from one Monkey to infinite Monkeys with infinite time (where they find the time i don’t know, i guess you can just nip to the shops these days for Tea, biscuits and bananas. What a time to be alive!) and from the complete works to a sentence.

We can only presume at some point, a practical test of this was attempted and the theory was then subsequently scaled up for time, scaled out for the task force and the end goal drastically shortened. We like to think of this as re-writing the TOM (Target Operating Monkey).

Just trying to get all our Monkeys going in the same direction proved challenging at the last Christmas party. Although the morning after even this Monkey was certainly feeling like he was being “…haunted by three spirits” and in all honesty which three remains a mystery. Ok, so that was technically Dickens but artistic license and all.

Anyway getting back to the monkey matter at hand and to quote a Simpsons Episode, if they even managed a “it was the best of times it was the blurst of times” would that count, worth a tasty banana or back to the typing pool you go my fine furry simian friend?

This time to quote a radio episode of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It had the following line whilst trying to explain the ‘Infinite Improbability Drive’ citing “Ford, there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.”

So to sum up, we love the theory. But it’s never going to work in terms of producing the voluminous tones of Shakespeare ( maybe a Where’s Spot? book ) even with allowances for the odd typo.

However we successfully started our own version of the Arts Councils experiment, back in April 2011:

We gave several Monkeys a computer, lots of hardware and a simple goal. To design, build and run a stable, resilient and redundant Cloud Hosting platform without the usual banana’s, cost or hidden charges of running your infrastructure in the Cloud.

Leaving you to focus on your core business and what you do best. Get in touch today and we can talk you through our services and how best our platform can meet your infrastructure, budgetary and project requirements.

Thanks for reading!

Monkey

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