DailyDirt: Mostly Harmless Scams…
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
There’s cheating, and then there’s cheating. There are obviously bad scams that hurt people or involve the loss of significant amounts of money or property, but some scams are hurtful on a much smaller scale. Here are just a few notable examples of some cheaters who were caught red-handed.
- Now that computers are better than humans at playing chess, it shouldn’t be too surprising that chess engines are being caught in use in human vs human tournaments. One teenager was found using the Fritz chess engine during competition, and it could mean future chess tournaments will be held without any kind of technology near the competitors. [url]
- A mid-40s software developer was caught outsourcing his job to a team of programmers in China (for about a fifth of his annual salary). And he would have gotten away with it, too, if he’d just covered his tracks a bit better. [url]
- Prof T. Mills Kelly taught a class at George Mason University that encouraged undergraduates to enter fake information into Wikipedia. Don’t believe everything you read, kids… [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.
Filed Under: cheaters, chess, fritz, outsourcing, scams, t. mills kelly, wikipedia
Companies: george mason university
Comments on “DailyDirt: Mostly Harmless Scams…”
Chess computers haven’t “solved” chess yet, so they’re not THAT good. I think Checkers has been solved, and so has Connect4.
Well, if there exists a class who’s entire purpose is to undermine Wikipedia then it’s the last time I donate until it proves it can guard against malicious input.
Re: Re:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Removal_of_false_information
Re: Re:
Today it can, but with declining number of contributors that could change.
But I cross that bridge when we get there.
Bob there was a real entrepreneur.
It rare to see a working man wanting to outsource his own job and make a profit out of it LoL
Those chess programs can’t compute millions of possible outcomes in nanoseconds. Modern CPUs execute single instructions on a scale of nanoseconds.
Computers are not better than humans at playing chess. They are better than humans at storing and cross-indexing encyclopedic knowledge of chess openings. They are better than humans at building and traversing a tree of potential moves. They have to examine every branch of that tree in order to determine the optimal move, because until they resolve the min/max they are unable to distinguish between a brilliancy and a crass beginner’s blunder. (Possibly some refined pruning of the tree has evolved to make this examination more efficient.)
Computers do not in fact play chess. Computers have no knowledge or understanding of chess. Computers understand hash trees and indexes. Humans have chess knowledge and understanding, and they use it to program chess computers.
Re: Re:
If you want to be technical, computers don’t do anything other than shuffle bytes around and compare values.
A mid-40s software developer was caught outsourcing his job...
I seem to recall hearing that Bill Gates did something similar when he was younger. Got hired to write something and then conned his friend into doing all the work.