The Limit of Laboring Monkeys

We took a trillion monkeys and chained them to typewriters. We took a trillion monkeys and chained them to typewriters for a million years. We recorded every keystroke.

At first, we killed the monkeys that refused to type. We eventually killed the monkeys that had too many typos.

The monkeys that lived fostered the next generation.

Soon, we forced the monkeys to type only after reading. Soon after, we began killing monkeys that incorrectly solved a mathematical problem, could not translate Sanskrit to Latin, or made suboptimal chess moves.

Eventually, the monkeys competed with each other to survive: They competed to invent problems for other monkeys to solve. Monkeys died by the billions competing to solve the hardest puzzles monkey-minds could devise.

Only the most useful monkeys survived, generation after generation.

So many typewriters. So many dead monkeys.

We recorded every keystroke.

In the end, we killed all the monkeys. We had what we wanted: The recordings.

For every run of text, we knew the distribution of what a monkey would type next.

For every run of text, a machine could reproduce all the next monkey keystrokes you could want.

We welcomed the mechanized ghosts of the chained monkeys as our God.

Our God did not need have human intelligence, after all.

Our God needed only ape intelligence — and respond for $1.00 per million characters.