To celebrate Programmer’s Day 2004 I joined in with the festive silly program making by creating something that would simulate the Infinite Monkey Theorem. To do this you need to generate a large number of sequences of letters very quickly. Being programmer’s day I thought I’d use the most powerful tool I had available and write the program in assembly.
The program I came up with asks for a short word to enter. It will then type out a random word of the same length and compare it with the given word. It does this millions of times a second until it finds a match. Quite pointless I’m sure you’ll agree but it is a good demonstration of how fast things can be done when using really low level instructions.
A couple of years later I updated the program to work with multi-core processors. The program now runs using multiple threads depending on the number of cores it detects on the system running it. This should speed up the search significantly though as of Jun 2007 I still haven’t got my own multi-core system to test it on!
Click here to download v2.0 released 16/07/2006.