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Could Wikipedia Become a Supercomputer?
An anonymous reader writes "Large websites represent an enormous resource of untapped computational power. This short post explains how a large website like Wikipedia could give a tremendous contribution to science, by harnessing the computational power of its readers' CPUs and help solve difficult computational problems." It's an interesting thought experiment, at least — if such a system were practical to implement, what kind of problems would you want it chugging away at?
Sure, it would come up with a solution pretty quickly, but then that solution would get edited, then the edit would be attacked by the supercomputer's moderating subroutine, then there would be a flame war on the discussion page occupying a large percentage of the total cycles. Then the solution would be locked and you couldn't see it or see a graph of it because there was no graph of it in the public domain.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Q: Will wikipedia become a supercomputer?
A: It turns out that there are stupid questions.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.