And the study was even proven wrong in the 17th century. A finite amount of monkeys already produced Shakespeare in a finite amount of time; it took roughly 55 million years.
Source: Primates show up in the fossil records, dating to roughly 55mill years. And Shakespeare’s complete works were most likely completed by William Shakespeare, a famous decendant of said primates.
Primates ≠ monkeys
If baboons and macaques are monkeys, and if howlermonkeys and spidermonkeys are monkeys, humans MUST be monkeys.
Because they can ONLY both be monkeys if their common ancestor was also a monkey and we share that very same common ancestor. In fact we are closer related to macaques and baboons than to spidermonkeys, which means we share a more recent common ancestor with old world monkeys than both us and the other old world monkeys share with the new world monkeys.
Cladistically, you can not outgrow your ancestry.
Humans are apes, apes are a subgroup of monkeys, monkeys are a subgroub of primates.
Monkeys are a social construct. Like trees.
If trees aren’t real, how can our birds be real?
…I am so sorry
Simiiformes is a clear and distinct clade.
There is no such thing for trees, because “tree” is a botanical classification, not a cladistical one.
Simiiformes is a clear and distinct clade.
Yes but who says that specific clade maps to the colloquial taxonomic word “monkey”?
Monkeys are specifically non-ape simians.
If you go back far enough they do.
We’re all apes
And apes are monkeys
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The entire thing is utterly ridiculous. The meme is infinite monkeys.
The mathematician said, “But what if it was 200k monkeys?”
Reporters claim mathematician proved infinite monkeys meme is wrong.
200,000 does not equal infinite!
The whole thing is dumb if you accept a premise of “infinite monkeys”. An infinite number of monkeys will type the works of shakespeare immediately, because an infinite number of them will start with the very first key they hit and continue until the end. (So it’ll be complete exactly as fast as a monkey can type it, typing as fast as simianly possible, with no mistakes.) You don’t even need the infinite time.
It only becomes interesting if you look at the finite scenarios.
And BTW, the lifespan of the universe is finite due to the eventual decay of all matter, including the monkeys and the typewriters. There’s no infinite time.
A more interesting calculation the mathematician should have done is how many monkeys are needed to write Shakespeare in the lifespan of the universe rather than starting with 200k.
I don’t think there is a finite number of monkeys that would be guaranteed to do so in the lifespan of the universe.
Best we could do is calculate the expected number of monkeys it would take, assuming accurate probabilities, which I also don’t think is possible to determine.
You can’t just take one divided by the number of possible characters that could be typed because monkeys can do many things other than typing away. A high portion of them would likely instead destroy the typewriter. In the infinite monkeys scenario, an infinite amount would destroy their typewriter in the middle of Hamlet’s to be or not to be soliloquy.
Plus the odds of it actually happening are going to be so astronomically low that if you filled the known universe with monkeys, you’d end up with monkey stars and black holes before any Shakespeare.
It really only works as a thought experiment about the nature of infinity.
Unless there’s an infinite multiverse, in which case we are in the universe where a monkey wrote out the complete works of Shakespeare. That monkey’s name? Shakespeare. (And yes, many clapped when he did so.)
Saying that last bit about time is not particularly meaningful for two reasons.
First of all, we do not especially know the end state of the universe. It may not be true that all matter decays, and protons may be stable. We may be in a false vacuum which will spontaneously collapse in large timespans.
Second of all, the hypothetical is a thought experiment. The monkeys are a placeholder for any random generation of characters. The thought experiment also does not take into consideration the food required to feed monkeys for infinite time, nor their aging, mutation over generations, and waste logistics. It’s not meaningful then to suddenly decide to apply the laws of physics to them. The only laws applicable in this scenario are logic and mathematics.
I generally agree with the rest of your take, although I disagree where you say the thought experiment is dumb. I only have an issue with that last point lol. Cheers.
The whole thing is dumb if you accept a premise of “infinite monkeys”.
If thats the point where you want to draw the line, I guess that it becomes dumb at exactly that point.
But the point of the thought experiment is that it says what you said: it will definitelly happen because infinity is absurdly big number.
If you follow it, you quickly end up with the Infinite Improbability Drive from The Hitchhikers Guide - if you have an infinite number of typewriters, an infinite number of them will be loaded with paper that already has the complete works of Shakespeare written on it
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You assume that monkeys are identical, communicate with each other and know what they are doing. Take one of these away and all of the infinite monkeys will press the same buttons basically making them one monkey. Take another and they will type random gibberish.
The point of the dilemma is for non of those to be the case. The point is can Shakespeare or anything valuable to humans appear in random given enough time and resources? Basically can “the AI” as we know it now that doesn’t actually have “I” create something new and valuable?
And the answer is(going from the basic maths) yes it may produce something cool but it also may never produce Shakespeare or anything cool and will never know what it can do and what it can’t.
-1/12 monkeys
200,000 does not equal infinite!
It’s close though. I can’t think of a bigger number.
What about 7?
Not sure. Gonna ask microsoft copilot
True nathematician would never make a mistake distinguishing finite and infinite cardinality. Countability, on the other hand… (but that’s a separate issue)
It only took a couple billion monkeys a few million years but one did eventually write out the full works of Shakespeare
This is always how I’ve chosen to interpret the expression. It’s not a theory. It’s an observation.
It’s a thought experiment, not an observation. The idea is that if you have infinity and it’s truly random than eventually all possibilities emerge somewhere within that.
The idea of infinite monkeys typing randomly on infinite typewriters is that eventually one of them would accidentally type out all the works of Shakespeare. Many more would type out parts of the works of Shakespeare. And many many many more would type random garbage.
If we then take that forwadd imagine for a moment the multiverse is also infinite and random, then every possible universe would exist somewhere in that multiverse.
It can be taken in other directions too. It’s a way of cocneptualising the implications of infinity and true randomness.
Meanwhile actual Shakespeare had intelligence and wrote and created his works. Him being a monkey writing Shakespeare is just a sly humerous observation, but it has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the thought experiment and the idea it is trying to convey.
Yeah, the point isn’t that they could write Shakespeare. But that they would write everything we could imagine + everything in between that.
It tries to explain the concept of infinity. Which is mind boggling to any human.
Also since it should happen once, that means that it also happens an infinite number of times, but a smaller infinity than the whole infinity.
Did you choose to overlook my intentional usage of the word “chosen” just to mansplain something obvious? I did not make my choice out of ignorance, but I appreciate you assuming I did.
Alas, not on a typewriter… Back to the drawing board!
No, the FIRST monkey to write Shakespeare used a feather and ink.
It only took a couple hundred years after all those millions for them to be written on the typewriter.
Turns out not quite. In the monkey version Hamlet says, “To be, or what.”
A property of hydrogen is that, given enough hydrogen and time, eventually it will write out the full works of Shakespeare.
As I pointed out elsewhere about this: it also is based entirely on probability, like cracking encryption. It could take longer than the universe will be around. But there’s also the possibility they write Hamlet within a year because they got lucky.
if it’s infinite monkeys then an infinite amount of them do it correct on the first try
That’s assuming they’re typing truly randomly. Which is a fair assumption.
Not necessarily. Each monkey is independent, right? So if we think about the first letter, it’s either going to be, idk, A, the correct letter, or B, any wrong letter. Any monkey that types B is never going to get there. Now each money independently chooses between them. With each second monkey, the chances in aggregate get smaller and smaller than we only see B, but… It’s never a 0 chance that the monkey hits B. If there’s only two keys, it’s always 50/50. And it could through freak chance turn out that they all hit B… Forever. There is never a guarantee that you will get even a single correct letter… Even with infinite monkeys.
I get that it seems like infinity has to include every possible outcome, because the limit of P(at least one monkey typing A) as the number of monkeys goes to infinity is 1… But a limit is not a value. The probability never reaches 1 even with infinite monkeys.
The birthday problem fits into this somehow, but I can’t quite get there right now. Something like an inverse birthday problem to illustrate how, even though the probability of two monkeys typing the same letter rises quickly as more monkeys are added to the mix, and at a certain point (n+1, where n is “possible keystrokes”) it is inevitable that at least two monkeys will key identically, the inverse isn’t true.
If you have 732 people in a room, there’s no guarantee that any one of them was born on August 12th.
There’s another one that describes this better but it escapes me.
Infinite monkeys. Any probability greater than zero times infinity is infinity. You will see an infinite number of monkeys hitting A and an infinite number hitting B. If there were a finite number of monkeys, you would be correct, but that is not the case.
No, that’s not how probability works. “Any probability times infinity is infinity” doesn’t even mean anything. Probabilities are between 0 and 1, and you do not multiply them by fixed factors. Infinite probability has no meaning.
I explained the infinity monkeys in another comment more clearly than I did above -here you go.
I could have worded that better. Any probability with a non-zero chance of occurring will occur an infinite number of times given an infinite sequence.
To address the comment you linked, I understand what you’re saying, but you’re putting a lot of emphasis on something that might as well be impossible. In an infinite sequence of coin flips, the probability of any specific outcome - like all heads - is exactly zero. This doesn’t mean it’s strictly impossible in a logical sense; rather, in the language of probability, it’s so improbable that it effectively “never happens” within the probability space we’re working with. Theoretically, sure, you’re correct, but realistically speaking, it’s statistically irrelevant.
Eh, I don’t think it’s irrelevant, I think it’s interesting! I mean, consider a new infinite monkey experiment. Take the usual setup - infinite monkeys, infinite time. Now once you have your output… Do it again, an infinite number of times. Now suddenly those near impossibilities (the almost surely Impossibles) become more probable.
I also think it’s interesting to consider how many infinite sequences there are which do/do not contain hamlet. This one I’m still mulling over… Are there more which do, or more which don’t? That is a bit beyond my theoretical understanding of infinity to answer, I think. But it might be an interesting topic to read about.
Fair enough, I suppose it is interesting!
In terms of the question, “Are there more infinite sequences that contain Hamlet or more that don’t?”- in the context of true randomness and truly infinite sequence, this feels like almost a trick question. Almost every truly random infinite sequence will contain Hamlet an infinite number of times, along with every other possible finite sequence (e.g., Moby Dick, War and Peace, you name it). In fact, the probability of a random infinite sequence not containing Hamlet is effectively zero.
Where it becomes truly interesting is if you have an infinite number of infinite sequences. Now you’d certainly get instances of those “effectively zero” cases, but only in ratios within infinity itself, haha. I guess that’s probably what you were getting at?
That’s not true. Infinite doesn’t mean “all”. There are an infinite amount of numbers between 0 and 1, but none of them are 2. There’s a high statistical probability, sure, but it’s not necessarily 100%.
It is necessarily 100%. That’s the whole idea behind infinity. There is a 0% chance of rolling a “2” because it’s outside the bounds of the question. Theres a 0% chance of the monkeys typing in chinese too.
No, it isn’t, that’s a misunderstanding of how independent random variables behave. Even with an infinite number of trials, in this case there is never a guarantee of a particular outcome.
Consider a coin flip, 50/50 chance of either getting heads or tails on each flip. Lets say we do an infinite number of flips, one by one, so that we end up with an infinite ordered set of outcomes, like so: {H, T, T, H, … }. Now, consider the probability of getting a particular arrangement of heads/tails in this infinite list, like the one I wrote before. You can’t calculate a probability for each arrangement - there are an infinite number - but it should be clear that each arrangement is equally likely, right? Because {H, …} is just as likely as {T, …}, same with {H, H, …} and {H, T, … } and so on and so on. In other words the probabilty of getting all heads on infinite coin flips is the same as the probability of getting any other combination.
In the same way, the infinite monkeys are doing ‘coin flips’ involving more than 2 options. Lets just assume they have 26 keys, one for each letter, and assume they hit each of them with equal probability. In the same way, for an individual monkey the probability of going {a, a, a, a, a, a, …, a} is the same as the probability of the same sequence with hamlet somewhere (in a particular position that is - the probabilities are only equal when we consider exactly one arrangement). What might make it more intuitively clear is that even after an infinite number of trials you only have one sequence of letters (or set of sequences, with infinite monkeys). It’s clear that there are other possible sequences - like only the letter a - and these all have a non 0 chance of having arisen given a different infinite set of monkeys for a different infinite time period.
It’s easy to be misled here! If we return to the coin flip example, the probability of flipping at least 1 head after infinite coin flips approaches 1. The limit of P(at least one H) as the number of flips approaches infinity is 1. But this is a limit! You never reach the limit, even considering infinite situations.
0.99999… repeating equals 1. Not close to 1. Equal to 1. The monkeys will necessarily type hamlet somewhere in the sequence. If your group of monkeys hasnt typed it yet, double the number of monkeys.
A monkey could type any infinite sequence of letters if it types at random. Since infinite sequences of single letters, repeating patterns, and those containing hamlet except one letter is wrong every time are all possible infinite sequences, it’s possible that the money produces one of them.
Probability behaves strangely in infinite situations. A single monkey will almost surely produce the complete works of Shakespeare in infinite time… But this is partially a flaw of infinity in general.
As another example, let’s say your monkey produces an infinite sequence containing hamlet. What is the probability of that particular sequence arising? It’s 0. There is no chance of any particular sequence arising… And yet that one did arise! It was almost surely not going to be that one, but it was. The probability of any single infinite sequence arising is 0, but nonetheless one of them will be the outcome.
If the monkeys were truly infinite would time even matter? For any set of monkeys that could write Hamlet within a year there’s an infinite number of duplicate sets, so they could do as much writing in one day as the original set would do over the age of the universe.
You don’t get to pick and choose! You get infinite monkeys. What’s all this about duplicate sets? Sounds like somebody is trying to bring in a ringer! That’s cheatin!
That’s the thing about infinity. If you have infinite monkeys, you don’t have to choose. You’ll have infinite instances of every possibility.
Finding any of the monkeys that typed out something interesting (or did something interesting that wasn’t typing or more common interesting monkey stuff) is another issue. If there’s an 0.0000001% of something interesting and unusual happening by coincidence, then there will be 999,999,999 uninteresting or usual instances for each interesting and unusual one.
Now if there were infinite copies of you searching the infinite monkeys for interesting and unusual events and all interesting ones get sent to an email address, the email server would overload in about the time it takes for the quickest interesting thing to happen, be noticed, and reported.
What part of Infinity is a mathematician, of all people, failing to comprehend? So what if it takes until cosmological decade 1,000 or 1 million or 1mil⁹⁰⁰⁰, it’s still possible on an infinite timescale, of one could devise a way for it all to survive the heat death of the universe ad infinitum.
I have read the paper, the news make it seem like something that is not. It’s a tough experiment and mostly a joke. From the paper closing remarks:
Given plausible estimates of the lifespan of the universe and the amount of possible monkey typists available, this still leaves huge orders of magnitude differences between the resources available and those required for non-trivial text generation. As such, we have to conclude that Shakespeare himself inadvertently provided the answer as to whether monkey labour could meaningfully be a replacement for human endeavour as a source of scholarship or creativity. To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No”.
Hell, infinite monkeys over a finite amount of time or finite monkeys over an infinite amount of time does the trick.
I was about to say…
An infinite amount of monkeys could (depending on how you make the rules) write Shakespeare within a second.
if each monkey just has to type one letter on a page and you just take a group of monkeys in a long line and you read each letter on the line you would read Shakespeare. It would be done in a second.
It’s also possible that it’s not possible even on an infinite time scale. A quick example: if you asked an algorithm to choose a number, and you choose 6536639876555721, but the algorithm only chooses from the infinite number of even numbers, it will never choose your number. So for the monkeys, if they are just not ‘programmed’ to ever be able to write a whole Shakespeare play, they will not be able to even with infinite time and infinite moneys.
Disagree. Within the confines of the thought experiment the monkeys are working with the standard alphabet and punctuation. There’s no reason to assume that they would never use the letter t or something like that, especially given the infinite time scale.
I see what you’re saying, but I do think they would have behavioral ‘rules’ that would stop them even on an infinite time scale. It would work if monkeys were capable of pressing one letter at a time, walking away, and pressing another letter and so forth… and while that’s of course physically possible for the monkeys to do, I don’t think it’s actually possible because they are susceptible to their own behavior. Not saying they would never type one specific letter, but a better example would be the behavior of rolling their finger/hand while pressing a letter, such that a conglomeration of letters are pressed in a way that would never match a Shakespeare play.
The problem is that you’re underestimating infinity then. If it only happens 1 in 1000000000000^10000 times but there’s an infinite number of attempts over an infinite amount of tine, it’s still bound to happen eventually.
No, I’m saying it’s not just improbable (if it were improbable, then yes, it would happen), I’m saying it’s impossible because of behavior.
As a small example, let’s say you wanted to type the ABC’s. However, every time you typed, your finger slid to press the key next to it as well. Then, no matter how many times you tried, you would never be able to type the ABC’s. That’s an exaggerated example of what I believe the monkeys would do. They simply would not be able to type letters at random. The way they work, they would be forced to mush buttons that do not allow for whole words.
If there was another scenario where there were about 30 boxes (one for each letter and any punctuation needed), and the monkey had to get a banana from one of the boxes, and that is what ‘typed’ the script, then yes, an infinite number of monkeys would be able to type Shakespeare. But because it’s a typewriter, I don’t think even an infinite amount would be able to.
No. If a monkey inherently NEVER, EVER hits one key at a time, then I gu3ss that scenario would make it impossible but that’s just stating that something is impossible in the first place and doesn’t affect the actual thought experiment in any way. Assuming that the typing monkeys literally ever have the possibility of only hitting one key at a time, no matter how many times they press two keys at a time and type nonsense, they will eventually and necessarily, bc of the definition of infinity, type Shakespeare. I don’t know how I can explain this better but I’ll try later when I have some time.
The theorem is only true if monkeys are random. But monkeys are not random, and therefore this cannot be proved true using monkeys.
The “Infinite monkey theorem” concerns itself with Probability (the mathematical field). It has been mathematically proven that given the random input (the mathematical kind - not the human-created kind) of the monkeys, and the infinite time, the probability of the “complete works of William Shakespeare” rolling out of the typewriter in between the other random output is
1.It’s a mathematical theorem that just uses monkeys to speak to the imagination, not a practical exercise, other than to prove the maths.
You should look into another brain-breaking probability problem called the “Monty Hall Problem”. Note that some of the greatest mathematical minds of the time failed said puzzle. Switching 100% increases the chance of winning. No, it won’t guarantee a win, but it will increase your chances, mathematically.
The probability is 1 but that does not mean that it will happen. There is a set of options where it does not happen. It happens “almost surely”.
Yeah I get that, what I’m arguing is that monkey input != random input. Therefore the probably is not 1.
And the Monty Hall problem is really cool, and yes, I’ve seen it before, but it doesn’t have anything to do with this one.
The proof assumes that the monkeys mash the keys at random and that there is a nonzero probability to write any chunk of text appearing in Shakespeare’s works. If there is a section that the monkeys cannot generate, for example if we removed the letter ‘e’ from their typewriter, the monkeys will never write the complete works of Shakespeare regardless of the amount of time spent on it, so their point still stands and it depends on the assumptions you make about the monkey typists’ typing skills.
Except for (cosmic-) bitflips and/or evolution changing the programming
I’m not terribly bright, but I’ve never understood the original statement.
If I bash my right hand on a typewriter an infinite number of times, that will never turn into the complete works of Shakespeare. If we assume a monkey will enter one random letter at a time, that probably would, but that is a big assumption that a monkey would be actually random.
But given infinite time, could OP spell “infinity” correctly?
Well if you give them infintiny time… maybe.
infintiny? you bloopid monkye
Infynyty?
I like “infintiny” as a replacement for “infinitesimal”
Good glad to hear monkeys will produce their own unique literature instead of copying the classics.
Huh. I’d never thought of it like that, but now that you mention it with an infinite number of monkeys one of them will eventually write an entire literary canon of plays that blow that loser Shakespeare out of the water.
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.
You stupid monkey!
Damn. So close
That research is worst type of reddit ACKCHYUALLY taken to academia
I fear the plague of reddit brainrot will soon make even research papers plain insufferable. Would you want to have moderator of 11 subreddits and holder of top 1% commenters achievement in your research group?
Something weird I’ve been noticing. Lately I’ve been unintentionally minimizing comments before I’ve finished reading them. Just happened with yours. It’s like some subconscious part of my brain goes “booorrring!” half way through reading anything longer than two sentences and immediately goes for the next dopamine kick.
And I’m not knocking your comment. I was genuinely interested in what I was reading. It’s just a little troubling. I dropped Reddit and Lemmy a while back because I felt like I was becoming addicted. I lasted a few months, but evidently I’ve fallen off the wagon.
Don’t worry I actually nurture my internet presence to be a little controversial and edgy. Not for every taste but those who enjoy we instantly are friends. It’s a filter of sorts. I want ppl who feel offended about such things to block me
Actually, we should be thankful for their divine presence.
Them saying that is like me saying Bizmuth isn’t radioactive because it’s half-life is many, many times longer than even the most conservative estimates for the heat-death of the universe.
In finite time that’s effectively true, because the universe itself would decay before a block of bizmuth lost any significant weight - but it isn’t physically true, because with infinite time a block of bizmuth left completely alone would evaporate away via alpha decay.
And that’s the point of infinite time - to let you throw away time and probabilities as obstacles and strictly focus on whether something could physically happen, rather than the odds of it occurring.
infinite monkey theorem relies on the assumption that infinite banana theorem is valid
Just thinking at a high level, an infinite number of monkies should hypothetically almost instantly produce Shakespeare (or at least as quickly as they can type)
Conversely, 1 monkey would eventually produce it given infinity time.
1 monkey would likely die before producing Shakespeare
oh absolutely, this is purely a thought experiment of course.
not if it’s an infinite monkey
Well, an infinite amount would.
So as weird as it sounds not all infinities are equal. For example there is an infinite set of odd numbers. That set will never include the number 2 though.
Two is the loneliest number?
OK but what if we had one monkey typing away for every real number between zero and one?
One monkey may never produce it even given infinite time. It could just produce an infinite string of the letter a and never change it’s mind. That’s less likely that it writing hamlet, or even many hamlets… But nonetheless, it could. In fact all of the infinite monkeys could do that. If you repeated the experiment and infinite number of times, it’s likely that one of them will simple produce an infinite number of infinite strings of only the letter A. Or, idk, ASCII art.
This is the same type of criticism the paper made. The real intent behind the saying is given random output (where all outputs have nonzero probability) eventually you will create anything/everything.
Its a thought experiment around infinity, probability, and art.
Yeah, I haven’t read whatever paper this is talking about, but I imagine, it’s looking at the saying in a more literal fashion for the sake of argument…
That’s why a monkey is used in the thought experiment. Monkeys do think at a low level. As it goes insane over centuries of imprisonment in front of its jailer, it’s likely going to try complex solutions to get out. Think of the hell infinity would really be for this monkey.
Yes, and given infinite monkeys no doubt they will eventually evolve into something that allows them to escape!
Hell, an actually infinite amount of monkeys would produce the complete works of Shakespeare plus some originals in the same style in the exact amount of time it took to literally press the necessary buttons.
An infinite amount of monkeys each given an infinite amount of time would produce all infinite strings possible on a typewriter (this includes ones that just happen to be terminated with a neverending substring of blank spaces, i.e. one where the monkey stops or presses whitespace keys and nothing else an arbitrary number of times).
If a cure for cancer exists and is expressable through language, they would not only produce one, but it would be there in every single language transliteratable to a Latin script; it would be there in ASCII art; it would be there in literally every text-based form imaginable. Of course the trouble would be sorting the infinite wheat from the infinite chaff.
Edit: https://libraryofbabel.info/ for the finite strings of 3200 characters.
I mean, even if the typewriter had an extra button setting off a bomb, killing the monkey and all the monkeys around them, they’d still pull it off. That’s infinity baby.
The Library of Babel Jorge Luis Borges (1941)
A good read.
That is wrong assumption. We know that even when something is infinite it may never reach required value. Shakespeare or anything else may be a unique event in the infinite space-time universe.
Back in my IT support days, IPX routing had a “Count to Infinity” problem when the number of hops between sites went above 15. We used to joke that this made 16 “Infinity”.
Being nerds at the time, we did napkin math to prove the Shakespearian Monkey Quotient was 256cmy (combined monkey years) for “Hamlet”.
Combined Monkey Years just aren’t the same since their lead singer left, I’m hoping they improve eventually.
Don’t worry, the reunion tour is in 35cmy
This thread could well have been written by an infinite amount of monkeys, too.
Thoiei0z ao;qjlk a 2897n3 eiie??! hoenwk a ;jihiwe a wiiien theohg rosebud oiwoi;qne i93823hnn banana
Nah, internet commenters are definitely crows.
