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. A library to surpass Babel.

For every run of text, in response to any instruction, we knew the distribution of what a good monkey would type next.

A machine could return all the simulated monkey keystrokes you could want, nearly instantaneously.

We welcomed the machinized ghosts of the tortured monkeys as our God and dumped the typewriters in the ocean.

To ape intelligence, in the limit, we are bound.