The Infinite Monkey Theorem states:

a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

This made me think… and more importantly, think about Twitter… I am thinking about my Final Year college project, and have been playing with the Twitter Streams API for the last few days. So far, i have about 650k of tweets to play with, but it made me think about using “fake” data for tweets… take the following as an example:

  • monkey tosses coin to say if its a response or a new tweet. if its a response, a new coin is used to figure if he responds to some he follows or someone he does not follow… if he does not follow, finally tosses a third time to figure if he wants to respond to a “famous” (more than 10000 followers) or not other monkey…
  • if response, find a tweet to respond to
  • monkey randomly takes a number from 1 to (140 – 1 (@) + twitter user name + 1 (space)). this is char count
  • monkey now tosses a coin to figure if he wants to add a hash tag… if yes, he tosses again to either use a random trending hashtag or a completely different one…
  • finally, the monkey, using the number of characters left, randomly hits the keyboard and makes a nonsense tweet…

this is much how i tweet at @tiernano :)

anyway, using this as an idea, and adding in monkeys following each other depending on how they feel (more coin tossing) you could get a lot of tweets using some lower powered machines (worker nodes) and some beefy hardware… this is starting to sound like an interesting problem… now to figure out more… leave it with me…