Jesse Anderson set out to recreate every single work of Shakespeare at the same time by means of virtual monkeys that are simulated on Amazon's cloud computing platform. One million virtual monkeys create virtual text around the clock, and if any of that text matches any of Shakespeare, it is saved to the repository.
On September 23d, the monkeys recreated A Lover's Complaint.
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.
(via /.)
