A little over 18 months ago I was talking to Stephen Toub (he of the Parallel Computing fame ) about parallelism and the kinds of problems it could solve. I said, naively, "could we solve the million monkey's problem ?" He said, "the what?" "You know, if you have an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of keyboards they will eventually write Shakespeare ." We brainstormed some ideas (since Stephen is a smarter than I, this consisted mostly of him gazing thoughtfully into the air while I sat on my hands) and eventually settled on an genetic algorithm. We would breed thousands of generations of (hypothetical) monkeys a second and then choose which ones would be allowed to perpetuate the species based...(read more)
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