FreeRice: Hack a site to feed the world

Yeah, people thought that solving world problems were that easy? Really?

"It's easy, I'll just write a perl script solving world hunger!"

Surely there is a way to let scripts actually make money, and for that money to be donated. A distributed computing app could work that angle to get good will.

You're forgetting that there are other reasons for looking at this besides supporting this idea or thinking it could work....

For instance, I upvoted it because it is still thought provoking. People trying to game a website to donate rice? They're obviously well intentioned. How does one deal with such users? What could their efforts be redirected towards?

Just make your bot mimic the activity of a real human, and it won't take any more resources than a real human. And if you're crafty enough about it, no one will ever know (much less the advertisers, who are probably both clueless and don't bother to even try to check if real humans are using the site).

The only problem is that most real humans probably earn a few grains of rice, get bored, and forget about the site. So a bot effectively mimicking a typical human user wouldn't be of much use (unless it was distributed on many different computers).

Maybe some altruistic hackers could create a virus which installed ricebots on systems it infected. Though, unfortunately, that idea would likely backfire, as the ricebots would be quickly detected and that would generate negative PR.

There's a very good game theory problem in here somewhere. How many bots can be run before the advertisers get fed up and stop donating? Somebody needs to make a model to find what the optimal bot rate is that gets lots of rice donated without drawing the ire of the advertisers.

It's my only hope of ever learning the countries in Africa.