1940 – In "Inflexible Logic" by Russell Maloney, a short story that appeared in The New Yorker, the protagonist felt that his wealth put him under an obligation to support the sciences, and so he tested the theory.1939 – Jorge Luis Borges' essay – “ The Total Library”.1931 – James Jean’s book – The Mysterious Universe.1928 – Arthur Eddington’s book – The Nature of the Physical World.1913 – Émile Borel’s essay – “Mécanique Statistique et Irréversibilité”.The initial timeline starts with some of the early history following Borel, and the later timelines record examples of the history, from the stories by Maloney and Borges in the 1940s, up to the present day. His monkeys immediately set to work typing, without error, classics of fiction and nonfiction. 1969 - "Uncollected Works", a short story by Lin Carter, describes a machine that rapidly simulates the infinite monkeys with the result that it generates the sum total of human writing from first principles, and onward into the future.The rich man was amused to see unexpurgated versions of Samuel Pepys' diaries, of which he owned only a copy of a bowdlerised edition. While you won’t find this technology everywhere in the near future, the scientists are trialing it out with real humans now and it may be another tool to help those affected by paralysis.1979 – Chapter XXIII of The Neverending Story by Michael Ende describes a city full of people that have lost their memories, overseen by a monkey.Lafferty, "Been a Long, Long Time" ( Fantastic, December), tells the story of an angel who is punished by having to supervise (for trillions of years) randomly typing monkeys who are attempting to produce a perfect copy of the collected works of Shakespeare. In other words, there’s now an upper bound on typing speeds, or communication speeds for that matter of fact, given specific brain-computer interfaces. Interestingly, the scientists also showed in their paper that there’s a direct correlation between the typing speed and the amount of information being captured by the electrodes. While that’s about as fast as your grandma trying to send a text message, the scientists are confident the system is robust and agile enough for a basic conversation. The two monkeys that trialed the system, named L and J, were able to achieve typing speeds of around 10 and 7 words per minute. Patients - or rather, in this preliminary test case, monkeys - were able to then control a cursor and type out sentences using their thoughts alone, as you can see in the video above. Using long-term implantable electrodes, the scientist were able to develop a robust algorithm that could translate electrical signals in the brain, essentially thoughts, into usable inputs for a cursor on a screen. While devices, such as prosthetic limbs that use our muscles’ electrical signals, aren’t new, the Stanford approach is different, because it relies on the brain’s own signals. The technology could be used to allow paralyzed people to communicate even if they can’t move their body at all. Stanford researchers achieved an impressive result recently, when brain-scanning technology, also called a brain-computer interface (BCI), allowed a monkey to control a cursor on a screen and type out a line from Hamlet. That’s exactly what scientists at Stanford University achieved by scanning the monkey’s brain and teaching it to type out letters using telepathy science. Do infinite monkeys typing on infinite keyboards eventually write out Hamlet? The answer is definitely yes, but the interesting part is that even one monkey can type out Hamlet, or a copy of The New York Times.
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