About the project:
This project was thought of in the spring of 2007, durring a conversation between my self (Matthew Craig) and Daniel Van Tassel. We were tossing arround some tech ideas, and the concept occured to me as a joke that it might be easier to brute force the binary it self than to access a file in question. Then the idea began to hit home for both myself and Dan. We realized that it might be true, we could make every single binary, the only hard part is sorting out the good stuff (Things we want) from all the other stuff. The ramification for the though were staggering at best, we considered it for several weeks, thought it was a great idea but as neither of us had much if any personal time, put it off for later.
This project sat on the back burrner simering away, until in a conversaion with Joshua Roth, I brought up the project and it re-ignited the fire. Since that conversation, Shakespears monkeys has been created. The name comes from the statisics attage that if you have enough monkeys typing at a keyboard, for long enough, you will eventually end up with a complete work of shakespear, if properly filtered. The name idea came from Dan. I added the zero to ininity part, just because that is our goal.
Status:
At present, this project is under way. Dan, Josh, and my self are actively coding to create this project. We hope to enlist the help of the EFF, and several uniersitis for this project. As the ammount of data storae space is astronomical. While it is admitted by all three of us, that we will rapidly fill exisiting storage (our hard drives) We are confident that using a distributed client model, and with sufficient donations we will be able to achieve vast ammounts of storage, and hopefully push the tech market in a forward direction agian.
Ramifications:
The ramifications of this project are enourmous... we have yet to fully realize all of them. However, we are hoping to find vast ammounts of new data in applications that have never been concieved of as we create and test filters for rappid identification of file types.
Concept:
What we are going to try to achieve is the following, we want to complie a list of numbers going from zero to infinity, we wish to crreate a distributed client model similar to SETI at home, and have the clients perform analisis of the binary files to determine viable file types. And voulonteers to help catalog and sort this data. (This will be the complete binary work of man kind when finished... so we have no ambition of finishing it or realizing it's full completion in our life time) Thus far we have found many voulunteers who have offered time, cpu clock cycles, and storage, All of this we will need.
I could talk about this topic for hours we have considered it for months, but as this is a summary, and I should be in bed right now, I'm going to go to sleep.