The Monkey Simulator (15/11/2004)

The Monkey Simulator (15/11/2004)

Well, this is how it all happened. I mean, I run things now (or rather we), but back in the old days the company was run by a man called Kayle Kent. He wasn’t a very nice man, but he knew how to make money.

His company grew during the dot com bubble of the nineties and somehow escaped the implosion that occurred later. As companies like DEN and Boo bit the dust, KK went from strength to strength.

Mainly he made his fortune from making sure he paid his engineers as little as possible.

As the millions rolled in, Kent had less and less to do, there was basically nothing for him to do.

He had competent managers and the software engineers were all hired, had the life sucked out of them, then fired in good order. Profits were up, overheads were down, he was on the gravy train.

A lot of days he wouldn’t even bother coming into the office, but would hang out at his club, or on the golf course. On the days that he did come in, he would either download stuff off the internet or chat up the young ladies in Human Resources.

One Friday afternoon he was passing through one of the open plan cubicle spaces that the software engineers worked in (in his head he referred to them as ‘minions’) when his mobile phone went off.

It was a completely mundane call, sometimes his managers would get a bit funny about sacking family men, but he sat down at an empty desk to take it. Once he had hung up he got up to leave, but realised he was overhearing a conversation in the next cubicle. The occupants obviously didn’t know the MD was next door or they would have been trying to look busy instead of slacking.

Kent silently sat down again and began to eavesdrop.

‘Haha’, laughed the man with the deeper voice of the two, ‘I’ve been hammering away at that FORTRAN all day and go nowhere. Whoever wrote the documentation for this project needs to be flayed alive and then fed to rabid killer hamsters.’

‘No a productive day then?’ replied they jovial and quicker paced voice of the other man.

‘Jeez, not a chance, I would have achieved more sat at home watching TV today. I think my productivity actually went backwards, all I did was break things.’

Sitting at home could be arranged, thought Kent, ...permanently. Like all MD’s Kent despised software engineers.

‘Hahaha, I know what you mean, Rag’, agreed the eager voice.

‘Aye,’ continued the deeper voice, ‘I have been about as productive as a monkey bashing away at a keyboard today.’

‘Yes, but they say, with enough monkeys and enough time you could produce the complete works of Shakespeare!’

‘Hm , well that’s a lot. A decent bit of FORTRAN code would be a doddle then. How many monkeys do you think? A hundred? A thousand?’

The eager voice laughed, ‘How many monkeys would have replaced you then?’

‘I think I was having a five monkey day, ten max.’

‘So you were doing about 10 MPD then?’

‘MPD?’

’Monkeys per day!’

They both laughed.

‘But that’s a good idea Treep, I’m sure I could design a monkey simulator.’

Kent sighed inwardly, he knew that engineers designed all sorts of nonsensical applications during free time and breaks. Mostly little games and tweaks for Windows and DOS.

‘Well, the Monkey Simulator would be easy.’ (Already it had capital letters), ‘All that would be, is a random keystroke generator.’

‘Your right, but you would need to run them in parallel, you would need a fair bit of processing power to run a million Monkeys Sims at once.’

The eager voice was getting very eager now and Kent could almost picture him leaning forward as he said,

‘Not only that, you would need another application, some sort of Monkey Interpreter, a parser or something, after all you need to find the meaningful code in all the dross.’

‘Sure sure, an Interpreter App that runs on top of the Monkey Sims. It would be looking for keywords depending on what language you were working in’

‘Hahaha, yes! Like if the produced stuff started with “hash include” for C++’

‘Aye! Or “Dim I as Integer” for Visual Basic!’

They both laughed at their wit, then paused.

‘It wouldn’t be that hard I think, the Simulation side anyway. Just think, we could just switch it on and leave it running over night.’

‘..and fantastic code is written in the morning!’

‘Eureka! Think of the savings! A workforce powered by bananas!’

Kent leaned over the partition wall, much to the two other men’s surprise. The man with the deep voice was bald and had a blonde beard. His ID proclaimed him to be Ragham Sofs. The other man was dark haired and bespectacled. His ID read Treep Yaddlers.

‘So, would this require real monkeys?’, Kayle Kent asked.

The two men were stunned and moved their mouths. No sounds came out.

‘Ah, hello.. sir’, said Treep finally.

‘Well?’, said Kent impatiently.

What was going through the engineers minds was this...

Directors never know anything about computers or programming, a fact that is known. But surely, even this level of ignorance was not possible? To take such balderdash seriously?

‘It’s a joke...sir, we are just...’, the blonde man spread his hands out in supplication.

‘No no’ interrupted Kane, ‘Get on it, see what you can come up with. Tell your supervisors this is straight from the top.’

And with that Kane stood and swept out of the office.

A few weeks later Ragham and Treep were in their cubical, both typing away furiously when finally Treep, who was by far the better coder of the two suddenly took his hands from the keyboard and flung them in the air.

‘That’s it, I’m done!’

Ragham leaned over from his desk and said, ‘Yeah?’

‘The Monkey Supervisor is finished. Like I said it takes up a lot of processor power, infact, a ridiculous amount. But these new servers manage ok.’

And he nodded towards the big rack of kit that took up half of the cubicle space.

‘Well, my stuff is finished too, just documenting it. I can currently run up to

eight billion Monkey Sims concurrently.’

Treep shook his head ‘This is an insane project.’, then he sighed,

‘Where have you been putting the source code? In the Projects Directory on the LAN?’

‘Sure’ nodded Ragham, ‘Oh a funny thing though, I set up the project folder using a template as normal, but someone has put another folder in it and locked it out – it wasn’t you was it?’

‘Me? No...’ Treep navigated his computers browser to the folder in question, ‘Hmm a folder called “C80”, and locked out. I wonder what that’s all about.’

‘Search me.’

A few days later, early in the morning, Treep, breakfast in hand, bumped into Ragham in the underground car park of the office block, something that didn’t often happen as Ragham was usually in a bit earlier. Treep was a notorious over-sleeper.

They nodded to each other and headed towards the lift. As they walked across the concrete Ragham pointed his briefcase at a nearby door and said,

‘Oh look, C80.’

Treep looked across the car park and right enough, there was a door with C80 written on it in plastic letters. He was still happy to head towards the lift but Ragham pulled him towards the mysterious portal.

‘Oh Rag, I haven’t had my breakfast yet even!’ ,he said waving his bacon roll around.

‘Oh come on, let’s have a look you big pansy!’

Ragham approached the door then drew out his security pass and swiped it through the lock.

Nothing happened.

‘Hmm, and me a Sec3 as well, try yours Treep, I know you hacked it.’

Treep sighed and put his bacon roll in his pocket then drew out his card.

‘I should never have told you that.’

He swiped the lock and the door clicked open.

‘Hah!’, exclaimed Ragham.

Mockingly, like a nervous hero entering a haunted house, Ragham opened the door and tip toed down the steps within.

‘Knock it off Rags, come on, my roll’s getting cold!’

‘No you come on, Nelly, it was your card that opened it, so this is your adventure too!’

So together they descended the stairs and followed a winding corridor down into the bowels of the building.

It started to get hotter and gradually a barley audible sound could be heard over the general big-building hum.

A sort of clacking, like rain on a tin roof.

As they moved further into the basement, the sound grew louder and louder.

‘I’ve had enough Rags I’m not happy with this, we will get the sack if Security finds us here.’

‘Ok ok’, sighed his friend, ‘Just round this corner, I want to see what that noise is.’

Cautiously they looked round the corner and in unison gasped as their jaws dropped open. Before them was a huge open low ceiling room with rows of pillars down the middle. And in the sterile white space between the pillars were row upon row of desks. And on each desk was a computer, and beside it a chair.

And on each chair was a monkey.

Each monkey has a metal skull cap on with wires that led to a small computer panel on its back. And each monkey was typing away furiously at the desktop keyboard.

The sound in this room was the sound of a hundred furious typists in full flow.

‘Oh ..my .. god’ gasped Treep.

Ragham stepped forward into the room, ignoring Treep as he grabbed at him.

‘Come back Rag!’

Ragham stepped up to the nearest typist and looked at the screen on the monkeys back.

‘They’re running our code!’

He looked round at Treep and pointed at the output panel.

‘Our code...the simulator, the interpreter, the lot.’

Treep would not come from the doorway.

‘Come back here!’, he hissed.

Ragham leaned over the monkey and looked at the monitor on top of the desktop computer.

The monkey’s dexterous fingers hammered away at the keyboard.

‘Wow, come and look at this code Treep. It’s fantastic. Documented, indented, commented. It’s lovely.’

Treep wrestled with the door frame for a second, then was drawn across the room, a sucker for a well commented bit of code.

‘Wow, and he’s churning it out so quickly too.’

Briefly the monkey stopped and flexed its fingers. It then looked up at the humans with big sad eyes.

They stepped back and Ragham said,

‘Sorry dude, I didn’t mean to put you off.’

Slowly the men walked across the hall, towards what looked like a domain controller or some kind of server in a big metal cabinet.

As they approached it, from a side door a lab coated figure leapt out waving its arms in the air.

‘Ah you! You are not meant to be here! Shame on you!’

The men turned to the new figure in amazement then Treep finally said,

‘Gupta? What are you doing here? I thought they sacked you?’

The dark skinned Gupta hung his head at this and replied,

‘Oh dear me, they said they would unless I worked down here. It is a nightmare, but I have eight children! What was I to do?’

Treep shock his head and opened the cabinet door. Besides all the wires, cards and electric gubbins there was a monitor and a keyboard.

He drew the keyboard out and began to type.

‘Don’t touch that!’, cried Gupta, but Ragham pulled him back.

‘Gup old boy, let Treep have a look here. This set up. My god, if animal rights people found out. This all must surely be illegal.’

‘Wooooow’, sighed Treep.

‘What have you got Treep?, asked his friend.

‘These monkeys, they are fantastic. It’s our code, but it’s like well... The sum of the parts is greater than the whole. A hundred monkey brains multiplied together. But how?’

Gupta sighed, ‘It is your code running the whole show, my friends. I just applied my AI knowledge and a little biology I found on the internet. This sort of stuff has been around since the 70’s until it all got banned.’

‘Incredible...’

‘Well, what do we do Treep?’

‘Hmm, the server setup is interesting, it’s all isolated... Behind a whole load of firewalls.’

‘You’re good at all that stuff Treep, I’m a duffer but I do know you only usually need one firewall. Tight security huh?’

‘Hmm...’ hummed Treep, his fingers ablaze on the keyboard, hammering in codes and commands.

‘What are you doing Treep?’

‘Using my Sec2 clearance to by-pass the firewalls...’

‘Oh no! Don’t I will be sacked for sure!’, cried Gupta and struggled from Ragham’s grasp.

‘Quit it Gup!’, grunted Ragham as he pinned down the reluctant technician, ‘Don’t make me get medieval on your ass!’

Treep hummed cheerfully and then slid the keyboard back into the server cabinet.

‘Now what?’ asked Ragham.

Treep smiled smugly and replied ‘Now we sit back and watch the fireworks!’

Four weeks later Gupta walked up to the cubicle were Treep and Ragham worked. The fireworks had been and gone.

‘Hello my friends’ he said and nodded to them.

‘Hey Gup!’, cried Ragham as he tossed a banana skin into the bin, ‘My man, help yourself to a ‘nana!’ and he pushed a big bowl of the fruit towards the technician.

‘Thank you’, said Gupta and helped himself, ‘I can’t believe how much the office has changed in the last month. So much more friendlier. So much more relaxed. And I just saw Kane cleaning the toilets, he’s the janitor now.’

‘A role he is much better suited to I feel.’ replied Ragham.

‘What about you Treep?’ said Gupta, ‘You seem busy.’

Treep waved over his shoulder and then continued typing.

‘Don’t worry about him, just a pet project, he’s coding a Cat Simulator.’

Gupta was about to say something but Ragham waved his hand and said,

‘Don’t ask.’

Gupta nodded and peeled his banana.

‘Well, keep up the good work.’ and he walked on with a spring in his step.

And that was all there was to it really. And who am I? Well, when we gained access to the company wide server it was child’s play really. We could access everything, company records and accounts. Top secret files, encrypted folders. We found out some very interesting things about Mr Kane. There are very firm laws about having that sort of thing on your computer.

And well, the Software Engineers seem to much prefer simians for directors.

You know where you stand when your boss is a monkey.

Do help yourself to a banana on your way out!