Disclaimer: IANA AI Researcher

I wonder if you could build some kind of distributed neural net on top of twitter or another social network. Find some way to get nodes with very little computation power hidden within a free app, webpage, screensaver or something[1], and use twitter as a communications channel instead of IRC or whatever. The social graph stuff is already built in.

Twitter seems to be terrible at detecting and banning bots - I wonder how fault-tolerant something like this would have to be. After all, the bots would be following generally good heuristics of communicating with one another, albeit probably not in natural language. They would probably have insane login patterns, however.

[1] Or a botnet, if you're feeling evil.