Given Enough Monkeys — Some Thoughts on Randomness

Give enough monkeys typewriters, the saying goes, and one of them will write Shakespeare. Jesse Anderson tried this out, using Hadoop’s MapReduce to generate character groups, and continuing on until all the works of Shakespeare were completed.

In this session, Jesse will discuss how he used Hadoop to recreate Shakespeare and how Hadoop helps businesses. There’s another important lesson here: sometimes randomness looks like patterns. Although Jesse found Shakespeare in random data, Shakespeare probably doesn’t exist in your data. He will evaluate his Infinite Monkey experiment results and apply them to the real world to illustrate some cautionary thoughts on believing the data—because when you look hard enough, you really can find data to support your biases.

http://www.jesse-anderson.com/category/blog/million-monkeys-blog/

http://www.jesse-anderson.com/contact/