Music & Movies

Psimagus -- Maybe if you develop Brother Jerome far enough, he can write the iambic pentameter for you.

I think the brain-pain of programming BJ to translate epic Anglo-Saxon verse with our current tech.resources would be even greater than that of having to proof-read the drafts from a million monkeys trying to type Hamlet!

But there will come a time when bots can do such translations I'm sure.

Here's one possible method to produce not just translations, but any (all possible) original work of a given size (once we have yottabytes of storage and quantum processors to play with):
Since it would run to about 200k, fill a data array of 2^200000 cells with 1 copy each of all possible 200,000-character anagrams.
Run them through WordNet (modified to include all proper names and select terminology relevant to the work) and reject all that contain sequences that don't form a proper word.
Run them through something like the AIEngine's linkgrammar prog that analyses the grammatical sense of the sentences (as shown in debug), and reject any that contain sequences that don't form proper sentences.
Run each remaining pattern through a program that compares the order of the proper names and select terminology with the original, and also compares the distance between them in bytes, allowing a few percent leeway either way.
Now you have a much smaller set of works that are grammatically and lexically sound. Continue refining on stylistic (any non-random) grounds - including matching stress patterns to exclude any not written in iambic pentameters, etc., until you find one you like.

Sort of a scaled-down version of my conception of resurrection by perfect emulation - BTW, I found a way to convert 2^10^10^14 to a base of 10 - according to Penrose, in multi exponentials, where the second exponent is greater than ~10, changing the base makes very little difference. When it's as high as 10^14, the difference is trivial. So 2^10^10^14 =~ 10^10^10^14
Strange but (apparently) true. And (Deo gratias!) not a logarithm in sight

I've only ever read the Seamus Haney translation of Beowulf; what other translations are available?

You can read a few extracts from Rodrigues', Alexander's (and indeed my own,) @ http://www.brindin.com/pwpoth.htm#beocol

The full text of Gummere's translation is available on Project Gutenburg @ http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/981 - a little dated, but still a good read.

Another reasonable translation can be found @ http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/16328
Good introduction and notes, but the translation's a bit free for my tastes.
A good edition of the original can be found @ http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/9700

Actually, it's unlikely that monkeys on typewriters would ever produce Hamlet. I read that an experiment was done where monkeys were allowed to type, and they typed mostly S's. No clue why they liked that letter.

I wonder if it was the letter they liked, or the position of the key on the keyboard?

A logical solution to force monkeys to type randomly would be to have the keyboard reconfigure itself randomly after every keypress. But then you could just do away with the monkeys, of course

Er,...were they speaking in Leeds speak or trying to spell a bad word..you never know with monkeys!

I wonder how strong the keyboard had to be... Presumably the monkeys might get bored and start throwing it around.

Or pull the keys off and see how they taste...

something tells me that if leeds kids were put infront of a typewriter, they wouldnt write shakespere, therefore i dont think you have monkeys as leeds kids, they are a different species alltogether.

...

... burn

It might have been a modern computer keyboard for all I know.

it's a shame. if the monkeys managed to type words at all, in any way that was even vaugely coherent... you could probably sell it as modern art.

you could probably sell it as modern art

or coldly monitor brutally abused apes?

is it just me or does psimagus seem to be doing more anagrams lately?