20 Monkeys
Generations of Virtual Monkeys Typing Hamlet
Cyclically: one Hamlet after another, a line at a time, typed by whoever is watching.
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Starting…
Where the troop took over
On 7 April 2016 the server finished a Hamlet, and its counter read 11. It was last seen that evening, at 23:35, on line 151 of its twelfth Hamlet, one letter away from the line: “What we have two nighss seen.” In November 2026 the troop took up that line again, in the browsers of whoever is watching: the 2015 program runs in each of them, and a relay passes the book from one visitor to the next, a line at a time. The count of lines and of Hamlets started again from zero.
The counter was the program’s own: the file of the last line of the book holds 44 winning monkeys, so the server typed Hamlet at least 44 times and its counter was set back at some point; and whether it ran on after that evening is not known.
The original run
What the server left behind, from February to April 2016: its last list of typed lines (lines 1 to 79, 28 March 2016), scattered attempts at other lines, and the traces of 7 April 2016, the day it was last seen.
An earlier run, complete: 21 November 2015
A copy of the server’s folder as it stood on the evening of 21 November 2015, five weeks after the launch: the first 100 lines of a first Hamlet, each with all its attempts and its winning monkey, and the attempt at line 101, where the copy stops. The server typed those 100 lines in a little over eight minutes, at about 1,575 generations per second: twice the pace it had in 2016.