White Screen & Denise O'Leary

My edits at Uncommon Descent obviously aren't welcomed anymore. What a pity: Now there are at two active threads over there discussing Dawkins's and Dembski's weasel algorithms (as described earlier in A Story of Two Weasels, The Latching Weasel, and Dawkins's weasel: it isn't that bad)

Denise O'Leary asked:

Make the code for the program public. Perhaps Richard Dawkins himself or his friends at RichardDawkins.net can finally provide this code (apparently a program written in BASIC).

I tried to enlighten her. After all, the program is now over 20 years old, and may be rotting in a heap of 5 1/4" floppies...

Dawkins describes his algorithm in the following way:

It again begins by choosing a random sequence of 28 letters, just as before:

WDLTMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P

It now 'breeds from' this random phrase. It duplicates it repeatedly, but with a certain chance of random error - 'mutation' - in the copying. The computer examines the mutant nonsense phrases, the 'progeny' of the original phrase, and chooses the one which, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. [...] the procedure is repeated.

This is enough to replicate his program:
1. chose random string
2. copy string n times with mutation. NOTE: at this step you don't know which letters are correct in place, so no letter is safe from being mutated!
3. chose best fitting string. NOTE: best fitting seems to be generally understood to be the string with the most correct letters, the fitting is expressed by a number between 0 and 28
4. Stop, if the number of correct letters is 28, otherwise
5. goto 2

The parameters which you can chose is the number of copies n, and the probability that a letter in a string is mutated, p. You may even chose another procedure of mutation - but keep in mind the NOTE of step 2.

It's really basic to realize steps 1 - 5 in the programming language of your choice...

While the edit above made it through Uncommon Descent's gates, I'm not allowed to post the follow-up:

Just to elaborate: The interesting part is what Atom describes as oracle, i.e., the application of the fitness function. In Dawkins description we read

The computer examines the mutant nonsense phrases, the 'progeny' of the original phrase, and chooses the one which, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase

An oracle - a black box - which accomplishes this just hints to one string when presented with a population of strings. No further information has to be exchanged. It is not necessary to know how the oracle defines the best string: It could just hint you to the one with the greatest number of correct letters - or perhaps the one which shares the longest substring with the target phrase.

And that's rather a pity: W. Dembski is a guy who is interested in information, and the amount of information which is transferred from a environment into the algorithm. He should be interested in the flow of this information: How is this information exchanged?
The answer: Via the conversation with the oracle. Could his partition search algorithm work with an oracle a described above? No, as it is not enough to name the best string, the position of the correct letters in the string has to be named, too.
Does Dawkins's algorithm work with such an oracle? Obviously...