aosidfjapfbihqaenfovoanjhvoaidjflkcvnoifjalskfj!$%0uoaj if0waru2u5
089utnoi igeofr8tug jg9eu0g34u t9ug0ujin2jrp4-oy3\tw98h1i684/-2846-fjkb,.zignosdf16d ihow
And of course, ApoxyButt's problem of Signal to Noise still exists and makes such an experiment meaningless. Unless, you consider that every ugly string like that might be a file that is mime-encoded or suffering from some other more obscure form of encoding, and so every single part of the string could have meaning. Is there noise?
More to the point though, you would suffer from many counter-suits, for you would also be in posession of unencrypted versions of everything that was ever encrypted for which you would be liable under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act(DMCA).
Idea Ideas expreesed by creative works are not themselves protected. Copyright covers the work, the expression of ideas, but not the ideas themselves. That is what patents are for.
Facts Plain facts, like, say, a phone book, are not protected. However, cataloguing or organizing facts in a certain way can sometimes result in the database or collection of facts being copyrighted.
Independent Creation If an exact duplicate of a work is created independently and with no knowledge of the original, it is not a copyright infringement. Providing you can prove it.
Fair Use The one most well known. The Fair Use doctrine says that creative works can sometimes be used, in whole or in part, in specific circumstances, without violating copyright. Fair use is constantly being redefined.
As you can see, the third limitation is what makes this okay. Additionally, if the monkeys are in a nation that does not have an agreement with America, where Metallica received its copyright, then this statuatory analysis is not even required.
Since the amount of time needed to search the documents until you found a comprehensible work, (As opposed to, "alas poor Yorik, I knew hiondsfnosdinmfwap"), would be huge if not infinite, there would be plenty of time for the above restrictions to be changed. In fact an entire new race could evolve where everything is communally owned, or where all unoriginal duplicates are illegal. This latter example would get you into serious trouble with the local government.
However your team of monkeys would also provide a way out. Since the monkeys would provide ever work conceivable, they would be the ideal lawyers. Somewhere there would be the perfect legal case to not only get you off Scot free, it would get you proclaimed King and Overlord of the Universe instantly.
If lawyers have been abolished. (I don't know how, presumably they could prove it was illegal to ban them, but given an infinite amount of time, it could happen). Then it will provide you simply with something to say that will instantly bring everyone in existence onto your side leaving no one to punish you.
You must be careful, however, that you do not only search in your native language, but also every language in existence. Thetranslations will be there, but you will have to check them for accuracy. (Don't worry, the script for a program that will do it for you is going to be in there too.) Make sure that pronunciation is correct, so find a document with phonetic spelling.
The final documents to locate are the ones that prove you completely wrong. You must destroy these, don't bother finding the documents that prove them wrong or you will end up wit infinite sheets of paper, which could be time consuming to read.
If for some reason you make a mistake and none of the above works remember that money talks. Find the code for the perfect OS and sell it to the highest bidder. Distribute the money to everyone causing a fuss and relax with a good book. (Try not to read Monkey Produced whodunits. They tend to be very, very, complicated and end with "the murderer is klsjoigfrnsdofnapgf...")
*
For those who do not have enough time to precure infinite monkeys may I suggest calculating the ratio of the diameter of a circle to it's circumference (pi). You will probably find a string of numbers containing every possible combination of digits. Assign letters or words to digit combinations and begin reading.
We can safely ignore the efficiency of an actual monkey versus a computer simulation of one, as this is simply a constant factor (The ratio of energy used between computer monkeys and real monkeys is not affected by the number of monkeys).
What this means for us, is that given all the available energy in the solar system, there is a limit to the length of string we can monkey. And it turns out it's quite short. Somewhere around 192 bits, in fact2. There are many ways to represent english text as a binary number. The naïve way is to simply map the 26 possible characters to a sequence of bits. This takes 5-6 bits per character. Better ways include using a huffman tree of the character distributions in english, using a huffman tree for each preceding character, etc. etc. It is an open (and possibly as hard as the infinite monkeys problem) question whether there is a lower bound for this number.3
Giving the benefit of the doubt, we'll assume it takes only 1 bit to represent a character. So (assuming you are generating english more intelligently than picking characters at random, which would give you about 40 characters) you're getting something in the region of 192 characters. There aren't a lot of things that fit in 192 characters:
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have
You'd better hope that one of these things is an incredibly consise guide to building a computer (in the words of Bruce Schneier) from something other than matter and occupy[ing] something other than space.
printable version chaos
Everything2 Help
