An infinite amount of monkeys

Have you ever heard the phrase, “When you leave a monkey in a room with a typewriter for an infinite amount of time, the monkey can create Shakespeare”? This is a metaphor that is based on the theory that if you have a machine that generates random sequences of letters for an infinite amount of time, you will eventually end up with coherent words and eventually passages of texts.

Now, try to imagine this scenario. Instead of monkeys we replace them with a 100 thousand young adults, and instead of Shakespeare we replace it with the nostalgic 1990’s game of Pokemon Red.  If we combine these two together what do we get? Twitch plays Pokemon.

Twitch plays Pokemon gameplay (graphics by Nintendo, captured by Twitch)

Twitch plays Pokemon is a real life example of the infinite monkey theorem. It is a social experiment that utilizes the massive viewership of the online streaming service Twitch to beat the game of Pokemon Red. Developed by an anonymous Australian developer, the program he developed uses  a mixture of Javascript and Python coding to parse through the chat channel in which viewers, such as yourself type in the commands of a Gameboy such as: up, down, left, a, or start. The program changes these chat commands into actual button presses for the emulator that controls the actual game.

While it seems like a simple goal, imagine trying to get a 100 thousand stream viewers to cooperate. Within those 100 thousand, you will see various groups of people: a majority of those who want to complete the game, some who only watch, and those who mess around to impede progress. With all this interference, how is it that progress is still being made?

Strategies created by viewers (Source: TPPstrategy @Tumblr)

The process has to do with Chaos Theory, which describes that the most disorderly and chaotic system will still have some sort of order. Which in the case of Twitch plays Pokemon, the order created is the common goal of beating the game. For example, in the animated image above, you see the game character Red trying to get through a route in the game to advance further in the story. A simple action easily done by one person by continuously moving right. But with people pressing down, something so easy turned into an ordeal taking over 12 hours to overcome. This lead to many people congregating together, creating sites of discussion such as Reddit where strategies for beating certain spots in the game are discussed.

Above is a video of Twitch beating Pokemon Red (explicit language may be present)

As of March 1 2014, Twitch has defeated the game of Pokemon Red and refocused efforts towards the next generation of the series, Pokemon Crystal. Since the stream started on February 12 2014, the stream has gotten over 40 million total views with an average concurrent viewership of 70 thousand. The hopes of the viewers are that they can beat all generations of Pokemon by the end of the year.

-Felix Tang-