Like many great things, Jesse Anderson's latest project was inspired by a classic Simpsons line. Of course, the cartoon didn't come up with the idea of a lot of monkeys sitting around, banging out some of the great works of Western literature. The concept of infinite primates being able to generate Shakespeare predates even The Simpsons' Tracey Ullman days, believe it or not. Anderson used Ubuntu, Hadoop and Amazon EC2, with his simulated monkey creating random data sets. Millions of virtual monkeys (not quite infinite, but still something) are participating in the project. Their outputs were mapped and are checked against all of Shakespeare's work. Not surprisingly, they've still got a ways to go. Looks like the project, like The Simpsons, may have to go on forever.
