I just finished destroying my brain on my latest project. Infinite Monkeys is an external for Max/MSP and PD that takes a musical score as input, creates a random score with the same number of events and slowly mutates the random score over generations to try to re-create the original score by grading each generation of mutants and choosing the most successful as the parent of the next generation.

The Idea for this project came from the old addage, "an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters will eventually produce the entire works of Shakespeare". Nobody seems to know who said this first but I have heard it many times in many situations. Richard Dawkins also uses this idea as an example of genetic algorithm usage in his book The Blind Watchmaker (do I compensation for plugging his book so much?)

The first piece I plan on subjecting to this process is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. It is a universally recognisable piece so I hope the morphing from complete randomness to a recognisable structure over a period of days will be interesting (it is to me anyway). The piece will hopefully be performed by the end of this semester at California Institute of the Arts by a Yamaha MIDI Grand Piano accompanied by a Dual Pentium II Xeon PC running Linux RedHat and PD.