Monkeys in the Machine

To be, or not to be ...

To be, or not to be, that is the question— Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?

Infinite Monkey Theorem

“For years there has been a theory that millions of monkeys typing at random on millions of typewriters would reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. The Internet has proven this theory to be untrue.” For years, I thought it would be fun to try to solve the problem posed by the Infinite Monkey Theorem. The thing is ... I didn't quite know where to start.

Genetic Algorithms

Start with a known text of fixed length
Generate a random set of random "attempts"
Rank the "best" vs the "worst" attempts
Use the best attempts to create a new set
Lather, rinse, repeat

Monkeys v1

createRandomPopulation();

while ( bestFitness() !== 0 ) {
    breedNextGeneration();
}

println( 'done!' );

Monkeys v1 will overtax your machine

It's is single-threaded
The iterations above expand to a monolithic application of several thousand lines
Any other operation has to wait before it can do anything else

Parallel Programming

Start with a kernel - core functionality
Iterate, iterate, iterate

Monkeys v2

createRandomPopulation();

while ( bestFitness() !== 0 ) {
    breedNextGeneration();

    // Do something else perhaps?
}

println( 'done!' );

Monkeys v2

createRandomPopulation();

function breedMonkeys()
{
    selectParentsForNextGeneration();
    yield breedNextGeneration();
}

while ( bestFitness() !== 0 ) {
    breedMonkeys();

    // Do something else perhaps?
}

println( 'done!' );

Monkeys v2 will work… kinda

It's still single-threaded
With several thousand iterations, this will still take a long time
The solution isn't optimized for your hardware.

Parallel Programming

Start with a kernel - core functionality
Iterate, iterate, iterate
Not all iterations need to be synchronous

Monkeys v3

createRandomPopulation();

$collectors = [];
foreach( $threads as $thread ) {
    array_push( $colletors, runInThread( $thread, 'breedSome' ) );
}

$once = breedSome();

foreach( $threads as $thread ) {
    $once = array_merge( $once, $thread->result() );
}

println( 'done!' );

Monkeys v3 is the optimal solution

Can use all of the processing power of your machine
Doesn't block other operations
Completely clean global scope per thread

Walkthrough

Full code is available on GitHub

So What?

Practical Applications

"Big data" processing
File transcoding
Remote integrations
Map/Reduce or Remote/Slow

Thank You

Eric Mann / @ericmann / Tozny

Monkeys in the Machine Presented by Eric Mann / @ericmann

Monkeys in the Machine

ericmann

Monkeys in the Machine

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