Parallella to prove/disprove infinite monkey theorem

[osteth]

I have been thinking about what a good project to use my new parralella cluster would be and I have come up with something that is complex for the sake of complexity and uses supercomputing for the sake of using super computing. my project idea is to attempt to prove or dissprove the infinite monkey theorem.

Here is a link for more info on the theorem:
just incase anyone reading is not familliar with it.

My plan is to use a software defined radio to generate a random number from atmopheric noise. each node will query a random number between 0 and 46. it will do this approximately 130,000 times (number of times will be the actual number of charcaters in shakespeers Hamlet, which I still need to count accurately) each integer will be tied to a function of a typewritter key. The results will be dumped in to a text file which will be compared to a copy of hamlet by the head node.

calculations say that there is a probability of one in 3.4 × 10183,946 to get the text right at the first trial. But I would like to test if it would ever actually happen, And if it does happen (which I assume it will) how many attempts were made to get to that point.

If anyone notices any issues with my methodology, care to join me, or just care to comment then I am all ears.

[9600]

Yes, we definitely need more slightly mad projects which nicely demonstrate the capabilities!

I won't comment on the methodology, beyond that I particularly like your source of randomness and I'm not sure whether you meant just any background noise, or VLF reception of "space weather". The latter would certainly add another dimension, the RF front-end and digital conversion could be quite simple at VLF and as a bonus you could also get to use a huge wire antenna!

Cheers,

Andrew

[osteth]

I still have to to son working out of the actual "how" im going to get it done. But the vlf sound like it could be fun
I got the idea for the random seed from the way random.org generates their random. I guess technically I could just pull random straight from their api but that seems kinda lame.

My initial idea was to attach a hack-rf one to the head node and generate black and white bitmaps then use a psudo random roll to pick a horizontal line in the picture and count the black or white pixels. I plan to do some more serious research in to random generation before I start actually coding anything.

My second idea was that if im allready doing everything in parallel maybe I should go all out and generate PARALLEL RANDOMNESS!
I found these bad boys on line for super cheap:http://m.aliexpress.com/item/1920277110.html

So im concidering buying one for every node so they can all generate their own random. Of course this has the added benefit of turning my cluster in to a completely rediculous fountain of random number generation which could be extremely useful for all sorts of fun stuff. I mean who doesn't want a supercomputer that's entire purpose it to generate random? Just think of all the random thing s you could do!

Im currently shooting for a 24 node cluster so if I did the vlf thing In parallel I could get to play with A LOT of HUGE ANTENNAS!

I just got my first four nodes in the mail today so im super excited to start playing with them once I finish loading up all these sd cards. Can't sleep, too amped!

[osteth]

Since posting my last reply I have been reading all kinds of good stuff about using sdr's for just this purpose. It also seems that I am far from the first to think that it would be nice to use those rediculously cheap sdr dongles for this as well. I stumbled my way across this fantastic git-hub page:
https://github.com/pwarren/rtl-entropy/ ... /README.md

So now that I have readily available source code and super cheap hardware at my fingertips, doing some full on parallel random generation is looking super easy and super fun!

I was also thinking about what to do with all the text files generated through this endeavor. While discarding them for sake of saving storage space seems like the most logical way to deal with it. It could be usefull to have a million or so articles of randomly generated content for things like blackhat SEO. Dump it all on to a web server and let the google spiders chew on it for a while for giggles, see it it launches your site to the top of every search instantly or see how long it takes to get the site delisted and banned.

[Gravis]

i find the infinite monkey theorem to be boring and obvious. what i think is much more intriguing is that irrational numbers contain all information, you just have to find where it begins and ends after the decimal point. this is to say that a number like Pi contains everything that ever has and ever will be said in the universe, our DNA and equations for things we may never learn and even this post. sure, expressing which digit of Pi this starts at may require more electrons than in the known universe but it's still cool.

infinity is very interesting.

[osteth]

I chose the infinite monkey theorem because it is an embarisingly parrallel situation and lends itself nicely to parallel computing. Honestly I am more interested in the entropy generation needed to create a true random seed. The actuall process that will be running the infinite monkey theorem test is placed in the project to give me a reason to actually generate a new program for this platform. Once I have it finished runing the program and seeing that it actually outputs completely random content is kind of my victory moment. I currently hava a 4 node cluster so its very near improbable that it will ever actually generate and recognize a copy of hamlet unless I run the system infinitely. If I can program each core to generate a file of the correct length, I still only have 64 monkeys going about it and dividing infinity by 64.... well you can see where I am going here. Its more of a proof of concept than anything. But I think that the sub assemblies of the project will be very usefull.

Having a massive entropy pool to pull from as well as a way to produce massive ammounts of random content can be usefull for all sorts of things. its usefullness for cryptology and SEO alone make it fun to me. I mean immagine what the google spiders will think if you have a 130,000 character post duming on to a website multiple times a second. Plus with the design I have in mind I will be generating 5Mb/s of entropy per node so once I finish with all 24 nodes, I will have a 120Mb/s entropy source which is a completely rediculous ammount of entropy generataion.

[Melkhior]

[aolofsson]