[humorix] Monkeys Still Unable To Produce Shakespeare -- Or Perl

[James Baughn <jbaughn@xxxxxxx>]

Monkeys Still Unable To Produce Shakespeare -- Or Perl

UPPER PODUNK, SOUTH DAKOTA -- It seemed like a simple experiment.  Put a 
million monkeys in front of a million Linux boxes and see how long it 
would take for them to generate a Shakesperian play or a useful Perl 
script.

So far, the project has been a bust.  "First, our budget was slashed and 
we were only able to obtain 12 monkeys," explained scientist Wey Stotime 
of the University of Northern South Dakota.  "And now, after six months 
of banging away on keyboards and making assorted grunting sounds, our 
monkeys haven't generated anything worthwhile."

Stotime was dead sure that the monkeys would be able to prepare a valid 
Perl script within a matter of days.  "I mean, the monkeys have no 
trouble producing line noise, and we all know that Perl is 
indistinguishable from line noise. Ergo, we should be seeing perfectly 
good Perl scripts by now."

Preliminary analysis of the monkey's output suggests that the creatures 
haven't been able to fully utilize the shift key.  The dean of the 
university's Primate Research Center Sponsored By IBM offered a simple 
explanation: "Without holding the shift key all the time, it's 
impossible to produce the punctuation characters necessary for Perl 
code.  The monkeys are quite good at yielding [a-z0-9], but we need 
[~!@#$%^&*|()>_+\"]."

In the next round of the experiment, Stotime hopes to install special 
keyboards that will make it easier to type punctuation symbols.

"We're going to replace the space bar with the dollar sign and Caps Lock 
with that strange "equals-tilde" symbol that Perl loves so much. Now our 
monkeys will produce Perl scripts in no time!  We won't have any clue 
what the scripts do until we actually run them, but that's pretty much 
true for most Perl code."

UPDATE: Just as this story went to press, we received word that 
Microsoft plans to sue the Primate Research Center Sponsored By IBM for 
patent infringement.

"We have been successfully using the Million Monkeys Algorithm(tm) for 
the last seven years," explained a Microsoft press release.  "This was 
the method used to develop the DRM subsystem in Windows Vista, the 
world's most talked-about operating system.  We will vigorously fight to 
protect our intellectual property."


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