Symbiosis

Looking at the comments to the previous post, I am surprised and impressed by some people's bloody-mindedness. Joel and Sin may be wasting their time, but it is theirs to waste and good on 'em.

Since the purpose of my little screening exercise is simply to repel boarders with as little computational fuss as possible, the details are not even logged, let alone interpreted in any way. I pretty much expected that everyone would use 3. Any arithmetic elegancies you submit instead will, alas, be lost to posterity, so I can only hope their construction affords you some fleeting entertainment in the meantime.

The current test is specifically intended not to be exclusive. I don't want to deter people, only scripts. While it is possible that there are some WT readers who are unfamiliar with the terminology of rudimentary mathematics or suffering from a condition that renders them congenitally innumerate, it seems unlikely -- this site just doesn't have that wide an audience. We're all English-speaking nerds here. (If you are a counter-example, you'd better email me, since you won't be able to comment.)

That's not to say the policy will never change, of course.

Perhaps in some future elitist mood I'll start flinging complex puzzles in the way of would-be contributors, fiendishly difficult enigmas designed to bar all but the most dedicated and brilliant from having their say. What? You can't finish Araucaria's Guardian crosswords every single time? Begone, dull wretch! I'm not interested in your opinions anyway! Each day will bring a new, even more intractable conundrum, and in the rarefied atmosphere of the comments section a last few hardy souls will sit around congratulating one another on being there at all.

Now, consider the spambots.

These are, alas, such poor and shrivelled specimens. They've had a certain amount of evolutionary success, it's true, in the environment of abundance they presently encounter, but they haven't the mettle for hard times. And this, frankly, is a bit of a shame.

Imagine if these villains of the blogiverse were imbued with the full rapacious armoury of a real pestilence, genuinely adaptive and smart, rather than being mere meretricious toys constructed by lazy, greedy, amoral losers. If blog commentability -- or any of the other mean info-avenues these scumbags stroll down -- were a highly contested resource rather than manna from heaven, think of the counter-parasitic measures we might employ. If they were that keen to co-opt our systems for evil, perhaps we could co-opt theirs for good?

Imagine the possibilities: in order to promote a sleazy porn site, they have to fold a protein, or solve an intractable differential equation, or bring peace to the Middle East. If there were really that much ingenuity on their side, instead of just the tawdriest low cunning, I'd happily cede the motherfuckers a few comments.

Bring on the new age of grid computing, I say: SPAM IS GOOD!
Posted by matt at July 11, 2006 07:02 PM