World Brain

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First edition (publ. Methuen)

World Brain is a collection of essays and addresses by the English science fiction pioneer, social reformer, evolutionary biologist and historian H. G. Wells, dating from the period of 1936–1938.

Throughout the book, Wells describes his vision of the World Brain: a new, free, synthetic, authoritative, permanent "World Encyclopaedia" that could help world citizens make the best use of universal information resources and make the best contribution to world peace.

Background

Plans for creating a global knowledge network long predate Wells. Andrew Michael Ramsay described, c. 1737, an objective of freemasonry as follows:

... to furnish the materials for a Universal Dictionary ... By this means the lights of all nations will be united in one single work, which will be a universal library of all that is beautiful, great, luminous, solid, and useful in all the sciences and in all noble arts. This work will augment in each century, according to the increase of knowledge.

The Encyclopedist movement in France in the mid eighteenth century was a major attempt to actualize this philosophy. However, efforts to encompass all knowledge came to seem less possible as the available corpus expanded exponentially.

Paul Otlet, a contemporary of Wells and information science pioneer, revived this movement in the twentieth century. Otlet wrote in 1935, "Man would no longer need documentation if he were assimilated into a being that has become omniscient, in the manner of God himself." Otlet, like Wells, supported the internationalist efforts of the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation.

For his part, Wells had advocated world government for at least a decade, arguing in such books as The Open Conspiracy for control of education by a scientific elite.

Synopsis

In the wake of the first World War, Wells believed that people needed to become more educated and conversant with events and knowledge that surrounded them. In order to do this he offered the idea of the knowledge system of the World Brain that all humans could access.

World Encyclopedia

This section, Wells's first expression of his dream of a World Brain, was delivered as a lecture at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Weekly Evening Meeting, Friday, 20 November 1936.

Wells begins the lecture with a statement on his preference for cohesive worldviews rather than isolated facts. Correspondingly, he wishes the world to be such a whole "as coherent and consistent as possible". He mentions The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931), one of his own attempts at providing intellectual synthesis, and calls it disappointingly unmatched.

He expresses dismay at the ignorance of social science among the Treaty of Versailles and League of Nations framers. He mentions some recent works on the role of science in society and states his main problem as follows:

We want the intellectual worker to become a more definitely organised factor in the human scheme. How is that factor to be organised? Is there any way of implementing knowledge for ready and universal effect?

In answer he introduces the doctrine of New Encyclopaedism as a framework for integrating intellectuals into an organic whole. For the ordinary man, who will necessarily be an educated citizen in the modern state:

From his point of view the World Encyclopaedia would be a row of volumes in his own home or in some neighbouring house or in a convenient public library or in any school or college, and in this row of volumes he would, without any great toil or difficulty, find in clear understandable language, and kept up to date, the ruling concepts of our social order, the outlines and main particulars in all fields of knowledge, an exact and reasonably detailed picture of our universe, a general history of the world, and if by any chance he wanted to pursue a question into its ultimate detail, a trustworthy and complete system of reference to primary sources of knowledge. In fields where wide varieties of method and opinion existed, he would find, not casual summaries of opinions, but very carefully chosen and correlated statements and arguments. [...] This World Encyclopaedia would be the mental background of every intelligent man in the world. It would be alive and growing and changing continually under revision, extension and replacement from the original thinkers in the world everywhere. Every university and research institution should be feeding it. Every fresh mind should be brought into contact with its standing editorial organisation. And on the other hand its contents would be the standard source of material for the instructional side of school and college work, for the verification of facts and the testing of statements—everywhere in the world. Even journalists would deign to use it; even newspaper proprietors might be made to respect it.

Such an encyclopedia would be akin to a secular bible. Universal acceptance would be possible due to the underlying similarity of human brains. For specialists and intellectuals, the World Encyclopedia will provide valuable coordination with other intellectuals working in similar areas.

Wells calls for the formation of an Encyclopaedia Society to promote the project and defend it from exploitation (e.g. by an "enterprising publisher" trying to profit from it). This society would also organize departments for production. Of course, the existence of a society has its own risks:

And there will be a constant danger that some of the early promoters may feel and attempt to realise a sort of proprietorship in the organisation, to make a group or a gang of it. But to recognise that danger is half-way to averting it.

The language of the World Encyclopedia would be English because of its greater range, precision, and subtlety.

Intellectual workers across the world would be increasingly bound together through their participation.

Wells wishes that wise world citizens would ensure world peace. He suggests that a world intellectual project will have more positive impact to this end than will any political movement such as communism, fascism, imperialism, pacifism, etc.

He was a communalist and contextualist and ended his lecture as follows:

[W]hat I am saying ... is this, that without a World Encyclopaedia to hold men's minds together in something like a common interpretation of reality, there is no hope whatever of anything but an accidental and transitory alleviation of any of our world troubles.

The Brain Organization of the Modern World

This section was first delivered as a lecture in America, October and November 1937.

This lecture promotes the doctrine New Encyclopedism described previously. Wells begins with the observation that the world has become a single interconnected community due to the enormously increased speed of telecommunications. Secondly, he says that energy is available on a new scale, enabling, among other things, the capability for mass destruction. Consequently, the establishment of a new world order is imperative:

One needs an exceptional stupidity even to question the urgency we are under to establish some effective World Pax, before gathering disaster overwhelms us. The problem of reshaping human affairs on a world-scale, this World problem, is drawing together an ever-increasing multitude of minds.

Neither Christianity nor socialism can solve the World Problem. The solution is a modernized "World Knowledge Apparatus"—the World Encyclopedia—"a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared". Wells thought that technological advances such as microfilm could be used towards this end so that "any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica".

In this lecture Wells develops the analogy of the encyclopedia to a brain, saying, "it would be a clearing house for universities and research institutions; it would play the role of a cerebral cortex to these essential ganglia".

He mentions the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, an advisory branch of the League of Nations, and the 1937 World Congress of Universal Documentation as contemporary forerunners of the world brain.

A Permanent World Encyclopedia

This section was first published in Harper's Magazine, April 1937, and contributed to the new Encyclopédie française, August 1937.

In this essay, Wells explains how current encyclopaedias have failed to adapt to both the growing increase in recorded knowledge and the expansion of people requiring information that was accurate and readily accessible. He asserts that these 19th-century encyclopaedias continue to follow the 18th-century pattern, organisation and scale. "Our contemporary encyclopedias are still in the coach-and-horse phase of development," he argued, "rather than in the phase of the automobile and the aeroplane."

Wells saw the potential for world-altering impacts this technology could bring. He felt that the creation of the encyclopaedia could bring about the peaceful days of the past, "with a common understanding and the conception of a common purpose, and of a commonwealth such as now we hardly dream of".

Wells anticipated the effect and contribution that his World Brain would have on the university system as well. He wanted to see universities contributing to it, helping it grow, and feeding its search for holistic information. "Every university and research institution should be feeding it" (p. 14). Elsewhere Wells wrote: "It would become the logical nucleus of the world's research universities and post-graduate studies." He suggested that the organization he was proposing "would outgrow in scale and influence alike any single university that exists, and it would inevitably take the place of the loose-knit university system of the world in the concentration of research and thought and the direction of the general education of mankind". In fact the new encyclopedism he was advocating was "the only possible method I can imagine, of bringing the universities and research institutions around the world into effective cooperation and creating an intellectual authority sufficient to control and direct collective life".^[ Ultimately the World Encyclopaedia would be "a permanent institution, a mighty super-university, holding together, utilizing and dominating all of the teaching and research organizations at present in existence".

Speech to the Congrés Mondial De La Documentation Universelle

This section provides a brief excerpt of Wells's speech at the World Congress of Universal Documentation, 20 August 1937. He tells the participants directly that they are participating in the creation of a world brain. He says:

I am speaking of a process of mental organisation throughout the world which I believe to be as inevitable as anything can be in human affairs. The world has to pull its mind together, and this is the beginning of its effort. The world is a Phoenix. It perishes in flames and even as it dies it is born again. This synthesis of knowledge is the necessary beginning to the new world.

The Informative Content of Education

This section was delivered as the Presidential Address to the Educational Science Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 2 September 1937.

Wells expresses his dismay at the general state of public ignorance, even among the educated, and suggest that the Educational Science Section focus on the bigger picture:

For this year I suggest we give the questions of drill, skills, art, music, the teaching of languages, mathematics and other symbols, physical, aesthetic, moral and religious training and development, a rest, and that we concentrate on the inquiry: What are we telling young people directly about the world in which they are to live?

He asks how the "irreducible minimum of knowledge" can be imparted to all people within ten years of education—realistically, he says, amounting to 2400 hours of classroom instruction. He suggests minimizing the teaching of names and dates in British history and focusing instead on newly available information about prehistory, early civilisation (without the traditionally heavy emphasis on Palestine and the Israelites), and the broad contours of world history. He suggests better education in geography, with an inventory of the world's natural resources, and a better curriculum in money and economics. He calls for a "modernised type of teacher", better paid, with better equipment, and continually updated training.

Influence

1930s: World Congress of Universal Documentation

One of the stated goals of this Congress, held in Paris, France, in 1937, was to discuss ideas and methods for implementing Wells's ideas of the World Brain. Wells himself gave a lecture at the Congress.

Reginald Arthur Smith extended Wells's ideas in the book A Living Encyclopædia: A Contribution to Mr. Wells's New Encyclopædism (London: Andrew Dakers Ltd., 1941).

1960s: The World Brain as a supercomputer

From World Library to World Brain

In his 1962 book Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clarke predicted that the construction of what H. G. Wells called the World Brain would take place in two stages. He identified the first stage as the construction of the World Library, which is basically Wells's concept of a universal encyclopaedia accessible to everyone from their home on computer terminals. He predicted this phase would be established (at least in the developed countries) by the year 2000. The second stage, the World Brain, would be a superintelligent artificially intelligent supercomputer that humans would be able to mutually interact with to solve various world problems. The "World Library" would be incorporated into the "World Brain" as a subsection of it. He suggested that this supercomputer should be installed in the former war rooms of the United States and the Soviet Union once the superpowers had matured enough to agree to co-operate rather than conflict with each other. Clarke predicted the construction of the "World Brain" would be completed by the year 2100.

In 1964, Eugene Garfield published an article in the journal Science introducing the Science Citation Index; the article's first sentence invoked Wells's "magnificent, if premature, plea for the establishment of a world information center", and Garfield predicted that the Science Citation Index "is a harbinger of things to come—a forerunner of the World Brain".

1990s: World Wide Web of documents

World Wide Web as a World Brain

Brian R. Gaines in his 1996 paper "Convergence to the Information Highway" saw the World Wide Web as an extension of Wells's "World Brain" that individuals can access using personal computers. In papers published in 1996 and 1997 that did not cite Wells, Francis Heylighen and Ben Goertzel envisaged the further development of the World Wide Web into a global brain, i.e. an intelligent network of people and computers at the planetary level. The difference between "global brain" and "world brain" is that the latter, as envisaged by Wells, is centrally controlled, while the former is fully decentralised and self-organizing.

In 2001, Doug Schuler, a professor at Evergreen State University, proposed a worldwide civic intelligence network as the fulfillment of Wells's world brain. As examples he cited Sustainable Seattle and the "Technology Healthy City" project in Seattle.

Wikipedia as a World Brain

There are a few similarities that link Wells' World Brain as a precursor to Wikipedia. Two to mention are the noncommercial aspect of both Wikipedia and the World Brain, as well as its international aspect. Wells did not want the Brain to be commercially funded, just as Jimmy Wales has decided not to have advertisements on Wikipedia, ensuring both were free from commercial bias. In addition, Wells envisioned microfilm as a universal format for which people could share information through the World Brain. His intention of using microfilm as the form for the World Brain mimics the use of the internet because he contended that the use of microfilm would abolish the distance between information and knowledge.

A number of commentators have suggested that Wikipedia represents the World Brain as described by Wells. Joseph Reagle has compared Wells's warning about the need to defend the World Encyclopedia from propaganda with Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" norm:

In keeping with the universal vision, and anticipating a key Wikipedia norm, H. G. Wells was concerned that his World Brain be an "encyclopedia appealing to all mankind," and therefore it must remain open to corrective criticism, be skeptical of myths (no matter how "venerated") and guard against "narrowing propaganda." This strikes me as similar to the pluralism inherent in the Wikipedia "Neutral Point of View" goal of "representing significant views fairly, proportionately, and without bias."

Infinite monkey theorem

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Given an infinite length of time, a chimpanzee punching at random on a typewriter would almost surely type out all of Shakespeare's plays.

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times. However, the probability that monkeys filling the observable universe would type a complete work such as Shakespeare's Hamlet is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time hundreds of thousands of orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe is extremely low (but technically not zero). 

In this context, "almost surely" is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the "monkey" is not an actual monkey, but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces an endless random sequence of letters and symbols. One of the earliest instances of the use of the "monkey metaphor" is that of French mathematician Émile Borel in 1913, but the first instance may have been even earlier.

Variants of the theorem include multiple and even infinitely many typists, and the target text varies between an entire library and a single sentence. Jorge Luis Borges traced the history of this idea from Aristotle's On Generation and Corruption and Cicero's De natura deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), through Blaise Pascal and Jonathan Swift, up to modern statements with their iconic simians and typewriters. In the early 20th century, Borel and Arthur Eddington used the theorem to illustrate the timescales implicit in the foundations of statistical mechanics.

Solution

Direct proof

There is a straightforward proof of this theorem. As an introduction, recall that if two events are statistically independent, then the probability of both happening equals the product of the probabilities of each one happening independently. For example, if the chance of rain in Moscow on a particular day in the future is 0.4 and the chance of an earthquake in San Francisco on any particular day is 0.00003, then the chance of both happening on the same day is 0.4 × 0.00003 = 0.000012, assuming that they are indeed independent.

Suppose the typewriter has 50 keys, and the word to be typed is banana. If the keys are pressed randomly and independently, it means that each key has an equal chance of being pressed. Then, the chance that the first letter typed is 'b' is 1/50, and the chance that the second letter typed is a is also 1/50, and so on. Therefore, the chance of the first six letters spelling banana is

(1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) = (1/50)⁶ = 1/15 625 000 000 ,

less than one in 15 billion, but not zero, hence a possible outcome.

From the above, the chance of not typing banana in a given block of 6 letters is 1 − (1/50)⁶. Because each block is typed independently, the chance X_n of not typing banana in any of the first n blocks of 6 letters is

${\displaystyle X_{n}=\left(1-{\frac {1}{50^{6}}}\right)^{n}.}$

As n grows, X_n gets smaller. For an n of a million, X_n is roughly 0.9999, but for an n of 10 billion X_n is roughly 0.53 and for an n of 100 billion it is roughly 0.0017. As n approaches infinity, the probability X_n approaches zero; that is, by making n large enough, X_n can be made as small as is desired, and the chance of typing banana approaches 100%. 

The same argument shows why at least one of infinitely many monkeys will produce a text as quickly as it would be produced by a perfectly accurate human typist copying it from the original. In this case X_n = (1 − (1/50)⁶)ⁿ where X_n represents the probability that none of the first n monkeys types banana correctly on their first try. When we consider 100 billion monkeys, the probability falls to 0.17%, and as the number of monkeys n increases, the value of X_n – the probability of the monkeys failing to reproduce the given text – approaches zero arbitrarily closely. The limit, for n going to infinity, is zero. So the probability of the word banana appearing at some point in an infinite sequence of keystrokes is equal to one.

Infinite strings

This can be stated more generally and compactly in terms of strings, which are sequences of characters chosen from some finite alphabet:

• Given an infinite string where each character is chosen uniformly at random, any given finite string almost surely occurs as a substring at some position.
• Given an infinite sequence of infinite strings, where each character of each string is chosen uniformly at random, any given finite string almost surely occurs as a prefix of one of these strings.

Both follow easily from the second Borel–Cantelli lemma. For the second theorem, let E_k be the event that the kth string begins with the given text. Because this has some fixed nonzero probability p of occurring, the E_k are independent, and the below sum diverges,

${\displaystyle \sum _{k=1}^{\infty }P(E_{k})=\sum _{k=1}^{\infty }p=\infty ,}$

the probability that infinitely many of the E_k occur is 1. The first theorem is shown similarly; one can divide the random string into nonoverlapping blocks matching the size of the desired text, and make E_k the event where the kth block equals the desired string.

Probabilities

However, for physically meaningful numbers of monkeys typing for physically meaningful lengths of time the results are reversed. If there were as many monkeys as there are atoms in the observable universe typing extremely fast for trillions of times the life of the universe, the probability of the monkeys replicating even a single page of Shakespeare is unfathomably small.

Ignoring punctuation, spacing, and capitalization, a monkey typing letters uniformly at random has a chance of one in 26 of correctly typing the first letter of Hamlet. It has a chance of one in 676 (26 × 26) of typing the first two letters. Because the probability shrinks exponentially, at 20 letters it already has only a chance of one in 26²⁰ = 19,928,148,895,209,409,152,340,197,376 (almost 2 × 10²⁸). In the case of the entire text of Hamlet, the probabilities are so vanishingly small as to be inconceivable. The text of Hamlet contains approximately 130,000 letters. Thus there is a probability of one in 3.4 × 10^183,946 to get the text right at the first trial. The average number of letters that needs to be typed until the text appears is also 3.4 × 10^183,946, or including punctuation, 4.4 × 10^360,783.

Even if every proton in the observable universe were a monkey with a typewriter, typing from the Big Bang until the end of the universe (when protons might no longer exist), they would still need a still far greater amount of time – more than three hundred and sixty thousand orders of magnitude longer – to have even a 1 in 10⁵⁰⁰ chance of success. To put it another way, for a one in a trillion chance of success, there would need to be 10^360,641 universes made of atomic monkeys. As Kittel and Kroemer put it in their textbook on thermodynamics, the field whose statistical foundations motivated the first known expositions of typing monkeys, "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event...", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers." 

In fact there is less than a one in a trillion chance of success that such a universe made of monkeys could type any particular document a mere 79 characters long.

Almost surely

The probability that an infinite randomly generated string of text will contain a particular finite substring is 1. However, this does not mean the substring's absence is "impossible", despite the absence having a prior probability of 0. For example, the immortal monkey could randomly type G as its first letter, G as its second, and G as every single letter thereafter, producing an infinite string of Gs; at no point must the monkey be "compelled" to type anything else. (To assume otherwise implies the gambler's fallacy.) However long a randomly generated finite string is, there is a small but nonzero chance that it will turn out to consist of the same character repeated throughout; this chance approaches zero as the string's length approaches infinity. There is nothing special about such a monotonous sequence except that it is easy to describe; the same fact applies to any nameable specific sequence, such as "RGRGRG" repeated forever, or "a-b-aa-bb-aaa-bbb-...", or "Three, Six, Nine, Twelve…".

If the hypothetical monkey has a typewriter with 90 equally likely keys that include numerals and punctuation, then the first typed keys might be "3.14" (the first three digits of pi) with a probability of (1/90)⁴, which is 1/65,610,000. Equally probable is any other string of four characters allowed by the typewriter, such as "GGGG", "mATh", or "q%8e". The probability that 100 randomly typed keys will consist of the first 99 digits of pi (including the separator key), or any other particular sequence of that length, is much lower: (1/90)¹⁰⁰. If the monkey's allotted length of text is infinite, the chance of typing only the digits of pi is 0, which is just as possible (mathematically probable) as typing nothing but Gs (also probability 0).

The same applies to the event of typing a particular version of Hamlet followed by endless copies of itself; or Hamlet immediately followed by all the digits of pi; these specific strings are equally infinite in length, they are not prohibited by the terms of the thought problem, and they each have a prior probability of 0. In fact, any particular infinite sequence the immortal monkey types will have had a prior probability of 0, even though the monkey must type something.

This is an extension of the principle that a finite string of random text has a lower and lower probability of being a particular string the longer it is (though all specific strings are equally unlikely). This probability approaches 0 as the string approaches infinity. Thus, the probability of the monkey typing an endlessly long string, such as all of the digits of pi in order, on a 90-key keyboard is (1/90)^∞ which equals (1/∞) which is essentially 0. At the same time, the probability that the sequence contains a particular subsequence (such as the word MONKEY, or the 12th through 999th digits of pi, or a version of the King James Bible) increases as the total string increases. This probability approaches 1 as the total string approaches infinity, and thus the original theorem is correct.

Correspondence between strings and numbers

In a simplification of the thought experiment, the monkey could have a typewriter with just two keys: 1 and 0. The infinitely long string thusly produced would correspond to the binary digits of a particular real number between 0 and 1. A countably infinite set of possible strings end in infinite repetitions, which means the corresponding real number is rational. Examples include the strings corresponding to one-third (010101…), five-sixths (11010101…) and five-eighths (1010000…). Only a subset of such real number strings (albeit a countably infinite subset) contains the entirety of Hamlet (assuming that the text is subjected to a numerical encoding, such as ASCII).

Meanwhile, there is an uncountably infinite set of strings which do not end in such repetition; these correspond to the irrational numbers. These can be sorted into two uncountably infinite subsets: those which contain Hamlet and those which do not. However, the "largest" subset of all the real numbers are those which not only contain Hamlet, but which contain every other possible string of any length, and with equal distribution of such strings. These irrational numbers are called normal. Because almost all numbers are normal, almost all possible strings contain all possible finite substrings. Hence, the probability of the monkey typing a normal number is 1. The same principles apply regardless of the number of keys from which the monkey can choose; a 90-key keyboard can be seen as a generator of numbers written in base 90.

History

Statistical mechanics

In one of the forms in which probabilists now know this theorem, with its "dactylographic" [i.e., typewriting] monkeys (French: singes dactylographes; the French word singe covers both the monkeys and the apes), appeared in Émile Borel's 1913 article "Mécanique Statistique et Irréversibilité" (Statistical mechanics and irreversibility), and in his book "Le Hasard" in 1914. His "monkeys" are not actual monkeys; rather, they are a metaphor for an imaginary way to produce a large, random sequence of letters. Borel said that if a million monkeys typed ten hours a day, it was extremely unlikely that their output would exactly equal all the books of the richest libraries of the world; and yet, in comparison, it was even more unlikely that the laws of statistical mechanics would ever be violated, even briefly. 

The physicist Arthur Eddington drew on Borel's image further in The Nature of the Physical World (1928), writing:

If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel.

These images invite the reader to consider the incredible improbability of a large but finite number of monkeys working for a large but finite amount of time producing a significant work, and compare this with the even greater improbability of certain physical events. Any physical process that is even less likely than such monkeys' success is effectively impossible, and it may safely be said that such a process will never happen. It is clear from the context that Eddington is not suggesting that the probability of this happening is worthy of serious consideration. On the contrary, it was a rhetorical illustration of the fact that below certain levels of probability, the term improbable is functionally equivalent to impossible.

Origins and "The Total Library"

In a 1939 essay entitled "The Total Library", Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges traced the infinite-monkey concept back to Aristotle's Metaphysics. Explaining the views of Leucippus, who held that the world arose through the random combination of atoms, Aristotle notes that the atoms themselves are homogeneous and their possible arrangements only differ in shape, position and ordering. In On Generation and Corruption, the Greek philosopher compares this to the way that a tragedy and a comedy consist of the same "atoms", i.e., alphabetic characters. Three centuries later, Cicero's De natura deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) argued against the atomist worldview:

He who believes this may as well believe that if a great quantity of the one-and-twenty letters, composed either of gold or any other matter, were thrown upon the ground, they would fall into such order as legibly to form the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether fortune could make a single verse of them.

Borges follows the history of this argument through Blaise Pascal and Jonathan Swift, then observes that in his own time, the vocabulary had changed. By 1939, the idiom was "that a half-dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum." (To which Borges adds, "Strictly speaking, one immortal monkey would suffice.") Borges then imagines the contents of the Total Library which this enterprise would produce if carried to its fullest extreme:

Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus' The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true nature of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn't publish, Urizen's books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves—shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies—ever reward them with a tolerable page.

Borges' total library concept was the main theme of his widely read 1941 short story "The Library of Babel", which describes an unimaginably vast library consisting of interlocking hexagonal chambers, together containing every possible volume that could be composed from the letters of the alphabet and some punctuation characters.

Real monkeys

In 2003, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon in England for a month, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website.

Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter S, the lead male began bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys followed by soiling it. Mike Phillips, director of the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned "an awful lot" from it. He concluded that monkeys "are not random generators. They're more complex than that. ... They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there."

Applications and criticisms

Evolution

Thomas Huxley is sometimes misattributed with proposing a variant of the theory in his debates with Samuel Wilberforce.

 

In his 1931 book The Mysterious Universe, Eddington's rival James Jeans attributed the monkey parable to a "Huxley", presumably meaning Thomas Henry Huxley. This attribution is incorrect. Today, it is sometimes further reported that Huxley applied the example in a now-legendary debate over Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species with the Anglican Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, held at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford on 30 June 1860. This story suffers not only from a lack of evidence, but the fact that in 1860 the typewriter itself had yet to emerge.

Despite the original mix-up, monkey-and-typewriter arguments are now common in arguments over evolution. For example, Doug Powell argues as a Christian apologist that even if a monkey accidentally types the letters of Hamlet, it has failed to produce Hamlet because it lacked the intention to communicate. His parallel implication is that natural laws could not produce the information content in DNA. A more common argument is represented by Reverend John F. MacArthur, who claims that the genetic mutations necessary to produce a tapeworm from an amoeba are as unlikely as a monkey typing Hamlet's soliloquy, and hence the odds against the evolution of all life are impossible to overcome.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins employs the typing monkey concept in his book The Blind Watchmaker to demonstrate the ability of natural selection to produce biological complexity out of random mutations. In a simulation experiment Dawkins has his weasel program produce the Hamlet phrase METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL, starting from a randomly typed parent, by "breeding" subsequent generations and always choosing the closest match from progeny that are copies of the parent, with random mutations. The chance of the target phrase appearing in a single step is extremely small, yet Dawkins showed that it could be produced rapidly (in about 40 generations) using cumulative selection of phrases. The random choices furnish raw material, while cumulative selection imparts information. As Dawkins acknowledges, however, the weasel program is an imperfect analogy for evolution, as "offspring" phrases were selected "according to the criterion of resemblance to a distant ideal target." In contrast, Dawkins affirms, evolution has no long-term plans and does not progress toward some distant goal (such as humans). The weasel program is instead meant to illustrate the difference between non-random cumulative selection, and random single-step selection. In terms of the typing monkey analogy, this means that Romeo and Juliet could be produced relatively quickly if placed under the constraints of a nonrandom, Darwinian-type selection because the fitness function will tend to preserve in place any letters that happen to match the target text, improving each successive generation of typing monkeys. 

A different avenue for exploring the analogy between evolution and an unconstrained monkey lies in the problem that the monkey types only one letter at a time, independently of the other letters. Hugh Petrie argues that a more sophisticated setup is required, in his case not for biological evolution but the evolution of ideas:

In order to get the proper analogy, we would have to equip the monkey with a more complex typewriter. It would have to include whole Elizabethan sentences and thoughts. It would have to include Elizabethan beliefs about human action patterns and the causes, Elizabethan morality and science, and linguistic patterns for expressing these. It would probably even have to include an account of the sorts of experiences which shaped Shakespeare's belief structure as a particular example of an Elizabethan. Then, perhaps, we might allow the monkey to play with such a typewriter and produce variants, but the impossibility of obtaining a Shakespearean play is no longer obvious. What is varied really does encapsulate a great deal of already-achieved knowledge.

James W. Valentine, while admitting that the classic monkey's task is impossible, finds that there is a worthwhile analogy between written English and the metazoan genome in this other sense: both have "combinatorial, hierarchical structures" that greatly constrain the immense number of combinations at the alphabet level.

Literary theory

R. G. Collingwood argued in 1938 that art cannot be produced by accident, and wrote as a sarcastic aside to his critics,

...some ... have denied this proposition, pointing out that if a monkey played with a typewriter ... he would produce ... the complete text of Shakespeare. Any reader who has nothing to do can amuse himself by calculating how long it would take for the probability to be worth betting on. But the interest of the suggestion lies in the revelation of the mental state of a person who can identify the 'works' of Shakespeare with the series of letters printed on the pages of a book...

Nelson Goodman took the contrary position, illustrating his point along with Catherine Elgin by the example of Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote",

What Menard wrote is simply another inscription of the text. Any of us can do the same, as can printing presses and photocopiers. Indeed, we are told, if infinitely many monkeys ... one would eventually produce a replica of the text. That replica, we maintain, would be as much an instance of the work, Don Quixote, as Cervantes' manuscript, Menard's manuscript, and each copy of the book that ever has been or will be printed.

In another writing, Goodman elaborates, "That the monkey may be supposed to have produced his copy randomly makes no difference. It is the same text, and it is open to all the same interpretations...." Gérard Genette dismisses Goodman's argument as begging the question.

For Jorge J. E. Gracia, the question of the identity of texts leads to a different question, that of author. If a monkey is capable of typing Hamlet, despite having no intention of meaning and therefore disqualifying itself as an author, then it appears that texts do not require authors. Possible solutions include saying that whoever finds the text and identifies it as Hamlet is the author; or that Shakespeare is the author, the monkey his agent, and the finder merely a user of the text. These solutions have their own difficulties, in that the text appears to have a meaning separate from the other agents: what if the monkey operates before Shakespeare is born, or if Shakespeare is never born, or if no one ever finds the monkey's typescript?

Random document generation

The theorem concerns a thought experiment which cannot be fully carried out in practice, since it is predicted to require prohibitive amounts of time and resources. Nonetheless, it has inspired efforts in finite random text generation. 

One computer program run by Dan Oliver of Scottsdale, Arizona, according to an article in The New Yorker, came up with a result on August 4, 2004: After the group had worked for 42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey-years, one of the "monkeys" typed, "VALENTINE. Cease toIdor:eFLP0FRjWK78aXzVOwm)-‘;8.t" The first 19 letters of this sequence can be found in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona". Other teams have reproduced 18 characters from "Timon of Athens", 17 from "Troilus and Cressida", and 16 from "Richard II".

A website entitled The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, launched on July 1, 2003, contained a Java applet that simulated a large population of monkeys typing randomly, with the stated intention of seeing how long it takes the virtual monkeys to produce a complete Shakespearean play from beginning to end. For example, it produced this partial line from Henry IV, Part 2, reporting that it took "2,737,850 million billion billion billion monkey-years" to reach 24 matching characters:

RUMOUR. Open your ears; 9r"5j5&?OWTY Z0d...

Due to processing power limitations, the program used a probabilistic model (by using a random number generator or RNG) instead of actually generating random text and comparing it to Shakespeare. When the simulator "detected a match" (that is, the RNG generated a certain value or a value within a certain range), the simulator simulated the match by generating matched text.

More sophisticated methods are used in practice for natural language generation. If instead of simply generating random characters one restricts the generator to a meaningful vocabulary and conservatively following grammar rules, like using a context-free grammar, then a random document generated this way can even fool some humans (at least on a cursory reading) as shown in the experiments with SCIgen, snarXiv, and the Postmodernism Generator.

Testing of random-number generators

Questions about the statistics describing how often an ideal monkey is expected to type certain strings translate into practical tests for random-number generators; these range from the simple to the "quite sophisticated". Computer-science professors George Marsaglia and Arif Zaman report that they used to call one such category of tests "overlapping m-tuple tests" in lectures, since they concern overlapping m-tuples of successive elements in a random sequence. But they found that calling them "monkey tests" helped to motivate the idea with students. They published a report on the class of tests and their results for various RNGs in 1993.

In popular culture

The infinite monkey theorem and its associated imagery is considered a popular and proverbial illustration of the mathematics of probability, widely known to the general public because of its transmission through popular culture rather than through formal education. This is helped by the innate humor stemming from the image of literal monkeys rattling away on a set of typewriters, and is a popular visual gag. 

In The Simpsons episode "Last Exit to Springfield", Mr. Burns shows Homer "a room with a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters. Soon they will have written the greatest novel known to man!" Burns then chastises one monkey for typing, "It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times!"

.

In his 1978 radio play, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams invoked the theorem to illustrate the power of the 'Infinite Improbability Drive' that powered a spaceship. From Episode 2: "Ford, there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out." 

A quotation attributed to a 1996 speech by Robert Wilensky stated, "We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true." 

The enduring, widespread popularity of the theorem was noted in the introduction to a 2001 paper, "Monkeys, Typewriters and Networks: The Internet in the Light of the Theory of Accidental Excellence". In 2002, an article in The Washington Post said, "Plenty of people have had fun with the famous notion that an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters and an infinite amount of time could eventually write the works of Shakespeare". In 2003, the previously mentioned Arts Council funded experiment involving real monkeys and a computer keyboard received widespread press coverage. In 2007, the theorem was listed by Wired magazine in a list of eight classic thought experiments.

Gulliver's Travels

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gulliver's Travels

First edition of Gulliver's Travels
Author	Jonathan Swift
Original title	Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships
Country	Ireland
Language	English
Genre	Satire, fantasy
Publisher	Benjamin Motte
Publication date	28 October 1726 (292 years ago)
Media type	Print
Dewey Decimal	823.5
Text	Gulliver's Travels at Wikisource

Gulliver's Travels, or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships (which is the full title), is a prose satire by Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, that is both a satire on human nature and the "travellers' tales" literary subgenre. It is Swift's best known full-length work, and a classic of English literature. He himself claimed that he wrote Gulliver's Travels "to vex the world rather than divert it".

The book became popular as soon as it was published. John Gay wrote in a 1726 letter to Swift that "It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery."

In 2015, Robert McCrum released his selection list of 100 best novels of all time where Gulliver’s Travels, a satirical masterpiece, is listed.

Plot

Locations visited by Gulliver, according to Arthur Ellicott Case

Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput

4 May 1699

Mural depicting Gulliver surrounded by citizens of Lilliput.

The travel begins with a short preamble in which Lemuel Gulliver gives a brief outline of his life and history before his voyages.

During his first voyage, Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and finds himself a prisoner of a race of tiny people, less than 6 inches (15 cm) tall, who are inhabitants of the island country of Lilliput. After giving assurances of his good behaviour, he is given a residence in Lilliput and becomes a favourite of the Lilliput Royal Court. He is also given permission by the King of Lilliput to go around the city on condition that he must not harm their subjects.

At first, the Lilliputians are hospitable to Gulliver, but they are also wary of the threat that his size poses to them. The Lilliputians reveal themselves to be a people who put great emphasis on trivial matters. For example, which end of an egg a person cracks becomes the basis of a deep political rift within that nation. They are a people who revel in displays of authority and performances of power. Gulliver assists the Lilliputians to subdue their neighbours the Blefuscudians by stealing their fleet. However, he refuses to reduce the island nation of Blefuscu to a province of Lilliput, displeasing the King and the royal court.

Gulliver is charged with treason for, among other crimes, urinating in the capital though he was putting out a fire. He is convicted and sentenced to be blinded. With the assistance of a kind friend, "a considerable person at court", he escapes to Blefuscu. Here, he spots and retrieves an abandoned boat and sails out to be rescued by a passing ship, which safely takes him back home.

Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag

20 June 1702 – 3 June 1706

Gulliver exhibited to the Brobdingnag Farmer (painting by Richard Redgrave)

Gulliver soon sets out again. When the sailing ship Adventure is blown off course by storms and forced to sail for land in search of fresh water, Gulliver is abandoned by his companions and is left on a peninsula on the western coast of the North American continent. 

The grass of that land is as tall as a tree. He is then found by a farmer who was about 72 ft (22 m) tall, judging from Gulliver estimating a man's step being 10 yards (9 m). He brings Gulliver home and the farmer's daughter Glumdalclitch cares for Gulliver. The giant-sized farmer treats him as a curiosity and exhibits him for money. After a while the constant shows make Gulliver sick, and the farmer sells him to the queen of the realm. Glumdalclitch (who accompanied her father while exhibiting Gulliver) is taken into the Queen of Brobdingnag's service to take care of the tiny man. Since Gulliver is too small to use their huge chairs, beds, knives and forks, the Queen of Brobdingnag commissions a small house to be built for him so that he can be carried around in it; this is referred to as his "travelling box".

Between small adventures such as fighting giant wasps and being carried to the roof by a monkey, he discusses the state of Europe with the King of Brobdingnag. The King is not happy with Gulliver's accounts of Europe, especially upon learning of the use of guns and cannons. On a trip to the seaside, his traveling box is seized by a giant eagle which drops Gulliver and his box into the sea where he is picked up by some sailors who return him to England.

Part III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan

5 August 1706 – 16 April 1710

Gulliver discovers Laputa, the flying island (illustration by J. J. Grandville)

Setting out again, Gulliver's ship is attacked by pirates and he is marooned close to a desolate rocky island near India. He is rescued by the flying island of Laputa, a kingdom devoted to the arts of music, mathematics, and astronomy but unable to use them for practical ends. Rather than use armies, Laputa has a custom of throwing rocks down at rebellious cities on the ground.

Gulliver tours Balnibarbi, the kingdom ruled from Laputa, as the guest of a low-ranking courtier and sees the ruin brought about by the blind pursuit of science without practical results, in a satire on bureaucracy and on the Royal Society and its experiments. At the Grand Academy of Lagado in Balnibarbi, great resources and manpower are employed on researching completely preposterous schemes such as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, softening marble for use in pillows, learning how to mix paint by smell, and uncovering political conspiracies by examining the excrement of suspicious persons (see muckraking). Gulliver is then taken to Maldonada, the main port of Balnibarbi, to await a trader who can take him on to Japan.

While waiting for a passage, Gulliver takes a short side-trip to the island of Glubbdubdrib which is southwest of Balnibarbi. On Glubbdubdrib, he visits a magician's dwelling and discusses history with the ghosts of historical figures, the most obvious restatement of the "ancients versus moderns" theme in the book. The ghosts consist of Julius Caesar, Brutus, Homer, Aristotle, René Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi.

On the island of Luggnagg, he encounters the struldbrugs, people who are immortal. They do not have the gift of eternal youth, but suffer the infirmities of old age and are considered legally dead at the age of eighty.

After reaching Japan, Gulliver asks the Emperor "to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed upon my countrymen of trampling upon the crucifix", which the Emperor does. Gulliver returns home, determined to stay there for the rest of his days.

Part IV: A Voyage to the Land of the Houyhnhnms

7 September 1710 – 5 December 1715

Gulliver in discussion with Houyhnhnms (1856 illustration by J.J. Grandville).

Despite his earlier intention of remaining at home, Gulliver returns to sea as the captain of a merchantman, as he is bored with his employment as a surgeon. On this voyage, he is forced to find new additions to his crew whom he believes to have turned the rest of the crew against him. His crew then commits mutiny. After keeping him contained for some time, they resolve to leave him on the first piece of land they come across, and continue as pirates. He is abandoned in a landing boat and comes upon a race of hideous, deformed and savage humanoid creatures to which he conceives a violent antipathy. Shortly afterwards, he meets the Houyhnhnms, a race of talking horses. They are the rulers while the deformed creatures that resemble human beings are called Yahoos.

Gulliver becomes a member of a horse's household and comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their way of life, rejecting his fellow humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them. However, an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilization and commands him to swim back to the land that he came from. Gulliver's "Master," the Houyhnhnm who took him into his household, buys him time to create a canoe to make his departure easier. After another disastrous voyage, he is rescued against his will by a Portuguese ship. He is disgusted to see that Captain Pedro de Mendez, whom he considers a Yahoo, is a wise, courteous, and generous person.

He returns to his home in England, but he is unable to reconcile himself to living among "Yahoos" and becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, largely avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables.

Composition and history

It is uncertain exactly when Swift started writing Gulliver's Travels (much of the writing was done at Loughry Manor in Cookstown, County Tyrone, whilst Swift stayed there) but some sources suggest as early as 1713 when Swift, Gay, Pope, Arbuthnot and others formed the Scriblerus Club with the aim of satirising popular literary genres. According to these accounts, Swift was charged with writing the memoirs of the club's imaginary author, Martinus Scriblerus, and also with satirising the "travellers' tales" literary subgenre. It is known from Swift's correspondence that the composition proper began in 1720 with the mirror-themed Parts I and II written first, Part IV next in 1723 and Part III written in 1724; but amendments were made even while Swift was writing Drapier's Letters. By August 1725 the book was complete; and as Gulliver's Travels was a transparently anti-Whig satire, it is likely that Swift had the manuscript copied so that his handwriting could not be used as evidence if a prosecution should arise, as had happened in the case of some of his Irish pamphlets (the Drapier's Letters). In March 1726 Swift travelled to London to have his work published; the manuscript was secretly delivered to the publisher Benjamin Motte, who used five printing houses to speed production and avoid piracy. Motte, recognising a best-seller but fearing prosecution, cut or altered the worst offending passages (such as the descriptions of the court contests in Lilliput and the rebellion of Lindalino), added some material in defence of Queen Anne to Part II, and published it. The first edition was released in two volumes on 28 October 1726, priced at 8s. 6d.

Motte published Gulliver's Travels anonymously, and as was often the way with fashionable works, several follow-ups (Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput), parodies (Two Lilliputian Odes, The first on the Famous Engine With Which Captain Gulliver extinguish'd the Palace Fire...) and "keys" (Gulliver Decipher'd and Lemuel Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World Compendiously Methodiz'd, the second by Edmund Curll who had similarly written a "key" to Swift's Tale of a Tub in 1705) were swiftly produced. These were mostly printed anonymously (or occasionally pseudonymously) and were quickly forgotten. Swift had nothing to do with them and disavowed them in Faulkner's edition of 1735. Swift's friend Alexander Pope wrote a set of five Verses on Gulliver's Travels, which Swift liked so much that he added them to the second edition of the book, though they are rarely included.

Faulkner's 1735 edition

In 1735 an Irish publisher, George Faulkner, printed a set of Swift's works, Volume III of which was Gulliver's Travels. As revealed in Faulkner's "Advertisement to the Reader", Faulkner had access to an annotated copy of Motte's work by "a friend of the author" (generally believed to be Swift's friend Charles Ford) which reproduced most of the manuscript without Motte's amendments, the original manuscript having been destroyed. It is also believed that Swift at least reviewed proofs of Faulkner's edition before printing, but this cannot be proved. Generally, this is regarded as the Editio Princeps of Gulliver's Travels with one small exception. This edition had an added piece by Swift, A letter from Capt. Gulliver to his Cousin Sympson, which complained of Motte's alterations to the original text, saying he had so much altered it that "I do hardly know mine own work" and repudiating all of Motte's changes as well as all the keys, libels, parodies, second parts and continuations that had appeared in the intervening years. This letter now forms part of many standard texts.

Lindalino

The five-paragraph episode in Part III, telling of the rebellion of the surface city of Lindalino against the flying island of Laputa, was an obvious allegory to the affair of Drapier's Letters of which Swift was proud. Lindalino represented Dublin and the impositions of Laputa represented the British imposition of William Wood's poor-quality copper currency. Faulkner had omitted this passage, either because of political sensitivities raised by an Irish publisher printing an anti-British satire, or possibly because the text he worked from did not include the passage. In 1899 the passage was included in a new edition of the Collected Works. Modern editions derive from the Faulkner edition with the inclusion of this 1899 addendum. 

Isaac Asimov notes in The Annotated Gulliver that Lindalino is generally taken to be Dublin, being composed of double lins; hence, Dublin.

Major themes

The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver by James Gillray (1803), (satirising Napoleon Bonaparte and George III). Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gulliver's Travels has been the recipient of several designations: from Menippean satire to a children's story, from proto-science fiction to a forerunner of the modern novel. 

Published seven years after Daniel Defoe's wildly successful Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels may be read as a systematic rebuttal of Defoe's optimistic account of human capability. In The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man, Warren Montag argues that Swift was concerned to refute the notion that the individual precedes society, as Defoe's novel seems to suggest. Swift regarded such thought as a dangerous endorsement of Thomas Hobbes' radical political philosophy and for this reason Gulliver repeatedly encounters established societies rather than desolate islands. The captain who invites Gulliver to serve as a surgeon aboard his ship on the disastrous third voyage is named Robinson.

Scholar Allan Bloom points out that Swift's critique of science (the experiments of Laputa) is the first such questioning by a modern liberal democrat of the effects and cost on a society which embraces and celebrates policies pursuing scientific progress.

A possible reason for the book's classic status is that it can be seen as many things to many different people. Broadly, the book has three themes:

• A satirical view of the state of European government, and of petty differences between religions
• An inquiry into whether men are inherently corrupt or whether they become corrupted
• A restatement of the older "ancients versus moderns" controversy previously addressed by Swift in The Battle of the Books

In storytelling and construction the parts follow a pattern:

• The causes of Gulliver's misadventures become more malignant as time goes on—he is first shipwrecked, then abandoned, then attacked by strangers, then attacked by his own crew.
• Gulliver's attitude hardens as the book progresses—he is genuinely surprised by the viciousness and politicking of the Lilliputians but finds the behaviour of the Yahoos in the fourth part reflective of the behaviour of people.
• Each part is the reverse of the preceding part—Gulliver is big/small/wise/ignorant, the countries are complex/simple/scientific/natural, and the forms of government are worse/better/worse/better than England's.
• Gulliver's viewpoint between parts is mirrored by that of his antagonists in the contrasting part—Gulliver sees the tiny Lilliputians as being vicious and unscrupulous, and then the king of Brobdingnag sees Europe in exactly the same light; Gulliver sees the Laputians as unreasonable, and his Houyhnhnm master sees humanity as equally so.
• No form of government is ideal—the simplistic Brobdingnagians enjoy public executions and have streets infested with beggars, the honest and upright Houyhnhnms who have no word for lying are happy to suppress the true nature of Gulliver as a Yahoo and are equally unconcerned about his reaction to being expelled.
• Specific individuals may be good even where the race is bad—Gulliver finds a friend in each of his travels and, despite Gulliver's rejection and horror toward all Yahoos, is treated very well by the Portuguese captain, Don Pedro, who returns him to England at the novel's end.

Of equal interest is the character of Gulliver himself—he progresses from a cheery optimist at the start of the first part to the pompous misanthrope of the book's conclusion and we may well have to filter our understanding of the work if we are to believe the final misanthrope wrote the whole work. In this sense Gulliver's Travels is a very modern and complex novel. There are subtle shifts throughout the book, such as when Gulliver begins to see all humans, not just those in Houyhnhnm-land, as Yahoos. However, a feminist perspective of Gulliver's Travels argues that it is misogyny, and not misanthropy, that is shown in Gulliver.

Throughout, Gulliver is presented as being gullible; he believes what he is told, never perceives deeper meanings, is an honest man, and expects others to be honest. This makes for fun and irony; what Gulliver says can be trusted to be accurate, and he does not always understand the meaning of what he perceives. 

Also, although Gulliver is presented as a commonplace "everyman", lacking higher education, he possesses a remarkable natural gift for language. He quickly becomes fluent in the native tongue of any strange land in which he finds himself, a literary device that adds verisimilitude and humour to Swift's work. 

Despite the depth and subtlety of the book, it is often classified as a children's story because of the popularity of the Lilliput section (frequently bowdlerised) as a book for children. One can still buy books entitled Gulliver's Travels which contain only parts of the Lilliput voyage.

Misogyny

A well-known underlying theme in Gulliver's Travels is misogyny. Swift uses satire to openly mock misogyny throughout the book, with one of the most cited examples of this coming from Gulliver's description of a Brobdingnagian woman:

"I must confess no Object ever disgusted me so much as the Sight of her monstrous Breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious Reader an Idea of its Bulk, Shape, and Colour.... This made me reflect upon the fair Skins of our English Ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own Size, and their Defects not to be seen but through a magnifying glass...."

This open critique towards aspects of the female body is something that Swift often brings up in other works of his, particularly in poems such as The Lady's Dressing Room and A Beautiful Young Nymph Going To Bed.

A well known criticism of Swift's use of misogyny by Felicity A. Nussbaum proposes the idea that “Gulliver himself is a gendered object of satire, and his antifeminist sentiments may be among those mocked.” Gulliver’s own masculinity is often mocked, seen in how he is made to be a coward among the Brobdingnag people, repressed by the people of Lilliput, and viewed as an inferior Yahoo among the Houyhnhnms.

Another criticism of Swift's use of misogyny delves into Gulliver's repeated use of the word 'nauseous,' and the way that Gulliver is fighting his emasculation by commenting on how he thinks the women of Brobdingnag are disgusting. 

"Swift has Gulliver frequently invoke the sensory (as opposed to reflective) word "nauseous" to describe this and other magnified images in Brobdingnag not only to reveal the neurotic depths of Gulliver's misogyny, but also to show how male nausea can be used as a pathetic countermeasure against the perceived threat of female consumption. Swift has Gulliver associate these magnified acts of female consumption with the act of "throwing-up" — the opposite of and antidote to the act of gastronomic consumption."

This commentary of Deborah Needleman Armintor relies upon the way that the giant women do with Gulliver as they please, in much the same way as one might play with a toy, and get it to do everything one can think of. Armintor's comparison focuses on the pocket microscopes that were popular in Swift's time. She talks about how this instrument of science was transitioned to something toy-like and accessible, so it shifted into something that women favored, and thus men lose interest. This is similar to the progression of Gulliver's time in Brobdingnag, from man of science to women's plaything.

Comic Misanthropy

Misanthropy is a theme that scholars have identified in Gulliver's Travels. Arthur Case, R.S. Crane, and Edward Stone discuss Gulliver's development of misanthropy and come to the consensus that this theme ought to be viewed as comical rather than cynical.

In terms of Gulliver's development of misanthropy, these three scholars point to the fourth voyage. According to Case, Gulliver is at first averse to identifying with the Yahoos, but, after he deems the Houyhnhnms superior, he comes to believe that humans (including his fellow Europeans) are Yahoos due to their shortcomings. Perceiving the Houyhnhnms as perfect, Gulliver thus begins to perceive himself and the rest of humanity as imperfect. According to Crane, when Gulliver develops his misanthropic mindset, he becomes ashamed of humans and views them more in line with animals. This new perception of Gulliver's, Stone claims, comes about because the Houyhnhnms' judgement pushes Gulliver to identify with the Yahoos. Along similar lines, Crane holds that Gulliver's misanthropy is developed in part when he talks to the Houyhnhnms about mankind because the discussions lead him to reflect on his previously held notion of humanity. Specifically, Gulliver’s master, who is a Houyhnhnm, provides questions and commentary that contribute to Gulliver’s reflectiveness and subsequent development of misanthropy. However, Case points out that Gulliver's dwindling opinion of humans may be blown out of proportion due to the fact that he is no longer able to see the good qualities that humans are capable of possessing. Gulliver’s new view of humanity, then, creates his repulsive attitude towards his fellow humans after leaving Houyhnhnmland. But in Stone's view, Gulliver’s actions and attitude upon his return can be interpreted as misanthropy that is exaggerated for comic effect rather than for a cynical effect. Stone further suggests that Gulliver goes mentally mad and believes that this is what leads Gulliver to exaggerate the shortcomings of humankind. Over time, though, Gulliver is able to get used to humanity again.

Another aspect that Crane attributes to Gulliver’s development of misanthropy is that when in Houyhnhnmland, it is the animal-like beings (the Houyhnhnms) who exhibit reason and the human-like beings (the Yahoos) who seem devoid of reason; Crane argues that it is this switch from Gulliver’s perceived norm that leads the way for him to question his view of humanity. As a result, Gulliver begins to identify humans as a type of Yahoo. To this point, Crane brings up the fact that a traditional definition of man – Homo est animal rationale (Humans are rational animals) – was prominent in academia around Swift’s time. Furthermore, Crane argues that Swift had to study this type of logic in college, so it is highly likely that he intentionally inverted this logic by placing the typically given example of irrational beings – horses – in the place of humans and vice versa.

Stone points out that Gulliver's Travels takes a cue from the genre of the travel book, which was popular during Swift's time period. From reading travel books, Swift’s contemporaries were accustomed to beast-like figures of foreign places; thus, Stone holds that the creation of the Yahoos was not out of the ordinary for the time period. From this playing off of familiar genre expectations, Stone deduces that the parallels that Swift draws between the Yahoos and humans is meant to be humorous rather than cynical. Even though Gulliver sees Yahoos and humans as if they are one and the same, Stone argues that Swift did not intend for readers to take on Gulliver’s view; Stone states that the Yahoos’ behaviors and characteristics that set them apart from humans further supports the notion that Gulliver's identification with Yahoos is not meant to be taken to heart. Thus, Stone sees Gulliver’s perceived superiority of the Houyhnhnms and subsequent misanthropy as features that Swift used to employ the satirical and humorous elements characteristic of the Beast Fables of travel books that were popular with his contemporaries; as Swift did, these Beast Fables placed animals above humans in terms of morals and reason, but they were not meant to be taken literally.

Character analysis

Pedro de Mendez is the name of the Portuguese captain who rescues Gulliver in Book IV. When Gulliver is forced to leave the Island of the Houyhnhnms, his plan is "to discover some small Island uninhabited" where he can live in solitude. Instead, he is picked up by Don Pedro's crew. Despite Gulliver's appearance—he is dressed in skins and speaks like a horse—Don Pedro treats him compassionately and returns him to Lisbon. 

Though Don Pedro appears only briefly, he has become an important figure in the debate between so-called soft school and hard school readers of Gulliver's Travels. Some critics contend that Gulliver is a target of Swift's satire and that Don Pedro represents an ideal of human kindness and generosity. Gulliver believes humans are similar to Yahoos in the sense that they make "no other use of reason, than to improve and multiply...vices"  Captain Pedro provides a contrast to Gulliver's reasoning, proving humans are able to reason, be kind, and most of all: civilized. Gulliver sees the bleak fallenness at the center of human nature, and Don Pedro is merely a minor character who, in Gulliver's words, is "an Animal which had some little Portion of Reason."

Cultural influences

Gulliver and a giant, a painting by Tadeusz Pruszkowski (National Museum in Warsaw).

From 1738 to 1746, Edward Cave published in occasional issues of The Gentleman's Magazine semi-fictionalized accounts of contemporary debates in the two Houses of Parliament under the title of Debates in the Senate of Lilliput. The names of the speakers in the debates, other individuals mentioned, politicians and monarchs present and past, and most other countries and cities of Europe ("Degulia") and America ("Columbia") were thinly disguised under a variety of Swiftian pseudonyms. The disguised names, and the pretence that the accounts were really translations of speeches by Lilliputian politicians, were a reaction to an Act of Parliament forbidding the publication of accounts of its debates. Cave employed several writers on this series: William Guthrie (June 1738 – November 1740), Samuel Johnson (November 1740 – February 1743), and John Hawkesworth (February 1743 – December 1746). 

The astronomers of Laputa have discovered "two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars". This may have influenced Voltaire, whose 1750 story Micromégas also refers to two moons of Mars. In 1877, Asaph Hall discovered the two real moons of Mars, Deimos and Phobos; in 1973 craters on Deimos were named Swift and Voltaire, and from 2006 numerous features on Phobos were named after elements from Gulliver's Travels, including Laputa Regio, Lagado Planitia, and several craters.

The term Lilliputian has entered many languages as an adjective meaning "small and delicate". There is even a brand of small cigar called Lilliput. There is a series of collectable model houses known as "Lilliput Lane". The smallest light bulb fitting (5mm diameter) in the Edison screw series is called the "Lilliput Edison screw". In Dutch and Czech, the words Lilliputter and liliput(á)n respectively are used for adults shorter than 1.30 meters. Conversely, Brobdingnagian appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as a synonym for very large or gigantic.

In like vein, the term yahoo is often encountered as a synonym for ruffian or thug. In the Oxford English Dictionary it is considered a definition for "a rude, noisy, or violent person" and its origins attributed to Swift's Gulliver's Travels. 

In the discipline of computer architecture, the terms big-endian and little-endian are used to describe two possible ways of laying out bytes in memory. The terms derive from one of the satirical conflicts in the book, in which two religious sects of Lilliputians are divided between those who crack open their soft-boiled eggs from the little end, and those who use the big end, the "Big-endians". 

Dostoevsky references Gulliver's Travels in his novel Demons (1872): 'In an English satire of the last century, Gulliver, returning from the land of the Lilliputians where the people were only three or four inches high, had grown so accustomed to consider himself a giant among them, that as he walked along the Streets of London he could not help crying out to carriages and passers-by to be careful and get out of his way for fear he should crush them, imagining that they were little and he was still a giant....'

Reception

The book was very popular upon release and was commonly discussed within social circles. Public reception widely varied, with the book receiving an initially enthusiastic reaction with readers praising its satire, and some reporting that the satire's cleverness sounded like a realistic account of a man's travels. James Beattie commended Swift’s work for its “truth” regarding the narration and claims that “the statesman, the philosopher, and the critick, will admire his keenness of satire, energy of description, and vivacity of language,” noting that even children can enjoy the novel. As popularity increased, critics came to appreciate the deeper aspects of Gulliver’s Travels. It became known for its insightful take on morality, expanding its reputation beyond just humorous satire.

Despite its initial positive reception, the book faced backlash. One of the first critics of the book, referred to as Lord Bolingbroke, criticized Swift for his overt use of misanthropy. Other negative responses to the novel also looked towards its portrayal of humanity, which was considered inaccurate. Swifts’s peers rejected the novel on claims that its themes of misanthropy were harmful and offensive. They criticized its satire for exceeding what was deemed acceptable and appropriate, including the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos’s similarities to humans. There was also controversy surrounding the political allegories. Readers enjoyed the political references, finding them humorous. However, members of the Whig party were offended, believing that Swift mocked their politics.

British journalist William Makepeace Thackeray described Swift’s novel as “blasphemous,” citing its critical view of mankind as ludicrous and overly harsh. He concludes his critique by remarking that he cannot understand the origins of Swift’s critiques on humanity.

In other works

Sequels and imitations

• Many sequels followed the initial publishing of the Travels. The earliest of these was the anonymously authored Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput, published 1727, which expands the account of Gulliver's stays in Lilliput and Blefuscu by adding several gossipy anecdotes about scandalous episodes at the Lilliputian court.
• Abbé Pierre Desfontaines, the first French translator of Swift's story, wrote a sequel, Le Nouveau Gulliver ou Voyages de Jean Gulliver, fils du capitaine Lemuel Gulliver (The New Gulliver, or the travels of John Gulliver, son of Captain Lemuel Gulliver), published in 1730. Gulliver's son has various fantastic, satirical adventures.
• Donald Grant Mitchell retold part one of the novel in the form of a short story for children, published in St. Nicholas magazine in 1874.
• Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy wrote two science fiction novellas that continue the adventures of Gulliver: Voyage to Faremido (1916) is an early examination of artificial intelligence, with a pacifist theme, while Capillaria (1921) is a satire on the 'battle of the sexes'.
• Soviet science fiction writer Vladimir Savchenko published Gulliver's Fifth Travel—The Travel of Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships to the Land of Tikitaks (Russian: Пятое путешествие Гулливера – Путешествие Лемюэля Гулливера, сначала хирурга, а потом капитана нескольких кораблей, в страну тикитаков), a sequel to the original series in which Gulliver's role as a surgeon is more apparent. Tikitaks are people who inject the juice of a unique fruit to make their skin transparent, as they consider people with regular opaque skin secretive and ugly.
• Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon (ガリバーの宇宙旅行 Garibā no Uchū Ryokō, Gulliver's Space Travels) is a 1965 Japanese animated film, portraying an elder Gulliver taking part in a space travel, joined by a boy, a crow, a talking toy soldier and a dog. The film, although being a children's production generally fascinated by the idea of space travelling, portrays an alien world where robots have taken power. Thus it continues in Swift's vein of critical approach on themes in current society.
• Hanna-Barbera produced two adaptations of Gulliver's Travels, one was an animated TV series called The Adventures of Gulliver from 1968 to 1969 and another was a 1979 animated television special titled Gulliver's Travels.
• American physician John Paul Brady published in 1987 A Voyage to Inishneefa: A First-hand Account of the Fifth Voyage of Lemuel Gulliver (Santa Barbara: John Daniel), a parody of Irish history in Swift's manner.
• In 1998 the Argentine writer Edgar Brau published El último Viaje del capitán Lemuel Gulliver (The Last Voyage of Captain Lemuel Gulliver), a novel in which Swift's character goes on an imaginary fifth journey, this time into the River Plate. It satirises ways and customs of present-day society, including sports, television, politics, etc. To justify the parody, the narrative is set immediately after the last voyage written by Swift (precisely, 1722), and the literary style of the original work is kept throughout the whole story.

Adaptations

Comic book cover by Lilian Chesney

Music

• In 1728 the Baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann composed a 5-movement suite for two violins based on Swift's book. Telemann's piece is commonly known as Gulliver's Travels, and depicts the Lilliputians and the Brobdingnagians particularly vividly through rhythms and tempos. The piece is part of Telemann's Der getreue Musik-meister (The Steadfast Music Teacher).
• The ambient band Soufferance based and themed their 2010 concept album on the book. Titled "Travels into Several Remote Nations of the Mind", the album featured a single, 65 minute song, bearing the title "The Thoughts and Memoirs of Mike Lachaire, First a Strange Individual, and then a Philosopher", referencing the full title of the original book.

"Polygondwanaland" 13th studio album by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard draws many connections among thematic interpretations thought the book and album.

Film, television and radio

Gulliver's Travels has been adapted several times for film, television and radio. Most film versions avoid the satire completely.

• Guliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants (1902): A French silent film by Georges Méliès, a pioneer of early film. Gulliver is played by Méliès himself in this version.
• Gulliver Mickey (1934): is a black and white Mickey Mouse short, produced by Walt Disney and released by United Artists in 1934.
• The New Gulliver (1935): this Soviet retelling of the travel to Lilliput was lauded for the ground-breaking animation work by director Aleksandr Ptushko.
• Gulliver's Travels (1939): Max Fleischer's animated feature-length classic of Gulliver's adventures in Lilliput. This was the first full-length animated cartoon after Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The film was spun off into two cartoon short series: the Gabby cartoons about a Lilliputian sidekick of the film, and the Animated Antics cartoons starring Sneak, Snoop and Snitch (the three villains) and Twinkletoes (the carrier pigeon).
• The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1960): a loose adaptation starring Kerwin Mathews and featuring stop motion effects by Ray Harryhausen.
• The Adventures of Gulliver (1968): a 17-episode animated television series by Hanna-Barbera which loosely adapts the novel's Lilliput chapter.
• Case for a Rookie Hangman (1970): A satirical movie by the Czech Pavel Juráček, based upon the third book, depicting indirectly the Communist Czechoslovakia, shelved soon after its release.
• Gulliver a törpék országában (1974): Directed by András Rajnai for Hungarian Television (MTV), this show deals with the trip to Lilliput.
• Gulliver's Travels (1977): Part live-action and part-animated. Stars Richard Harris.
• Gulliver's Travels (1979): An animated TV movie adaptation of the first two parts made in Australia. It was produced by Southern Star Group for Famous Classic Tales, with the voice cast being Julie Bennett, Regis Cordic, Ross Martin, Don Messick, Hal Smith, John Stephenson, and Janet Waldo.
• Gulliver az óriások országában (1980): The second adaptation by András Rajnai for Hungarian Television (MTV), this hour-long show is an adaptation of Gulliver's voyage to Brobdingnag.
• Gulliver in Lilliput (1981): BBC Classics Television. Stars Andrew Burt and Elisabeth Sladen.
• Gulliver's Travels: It was produced by Saban Entertainment. It was aired from September 8, 1992 to June 29, 1993. It is an adaptation of the Gulliver's Travels novel by Jonathan Swift, and spanned a total of 26 episodes.
• Gulliver's Travels (1996): Live-action, 2 part, TV miniseries with special effects starring Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, also featuring a variety of film stars in cameo roles. This version includes all four voyages.
• Crayola Kids Adventures: Tales of Gulliver's Travels (1997): Live-action direct-to-video film starring children with Adam Wylie as Gulliver.
• Jajantaram Mamantaram (2003): Live-action Indian children's film, starring Javed Jaffrey.
• Gulliver's Travels (2010): Modernized, live-action version of Gulliver's adventures in Lilliput, starring Jack Black, also featuring Billy Connolly, James Corden, Amanda Peet, Chris O'Dowd, Catherine Tate, Jason Segel, Emily Blunt and Olly Alexander.
• Gulliver's Travels was produced by Golden Films. This is an animated short version of the story. It is part of a larger series known as "Enchanted Tales."

Bibliography

Editions

The standard edition of Jonathan Swift's prose works as of 2005 is the Prose Writings in 16 volumes, edited by Herbert Davis et al.

• Swift, Jonathan Gulliver's Travels (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008) ISBN 9780141439495. Edited with an introduction and notes by Robert DeMaria Jr. The copytext is based on the 1726 edition with emendations and additions from later texts and manuscripts.
• Swift, Jonathan Gulliver's Travels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) ISBN 9780192805348. Edited with an introduction by Claude Rawson and notes by Ian Higgins. Essentially based on the same text as the Essential Writings listed below with expanded notes and an introduction, although it lacks the selection of criticism.
• Swift, Jonathan The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009) ISBN 9780393930658. Edited with an introduction by Claude Rawson and notes by Ian Higgins. This title contains the major works of Swift in full, including Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Tale of a Tub, Directions to Servants and many other poetic and prose works. Also included is a selection of contextual material, and criticism from Orwell to Rawson. The text of GT is taken from Faulkner's 1735 edition.
• Swift, Jonathan Gulliver's Travels (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001) ISBN 0393957241. Edited by Albert J. Rivero. Based on the 1726 text, with some adopted emendations from later corrections and editions. Also includes a selection of contextual material, letters, and criticism.