FreeRice: Hack a site to feed the world

http://giantrobotlasers.com/post/161352785/bmdesign-freerice-is-a-website-where-users-play

by ivankirigin • 17 years ago

21 12 17 years ago

"Donated rice comes from the advertisements from sponsors, therefore abuse of scripts will likely lead to catastrophe, as advertisers prefer that actual people view their advertisments. Knowing the existence of the bots, FreeRice updated their FAQ explaining the potential damage of botting"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeRice

pavel_lishin• 17 years ago

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

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

nudded• 17 years ago

In the next version of Emacs we'll just do M-x solve-hunger and be done with it!

ivankirigin• 17 years ago

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.

metachris• 17 years ago

Ridiculous how the 'rich world' is playing with lives, food and life...

paulgb• 17 years ago

Bots might work in the short run, but in the long run it just reduces the amount that advertisers are willing to pay. Dumb idea.

FreeRice is awesome though. If I'm killing time with a game online, it might as well be one that improves my French vocabulary or geography. Not to mention that it supports a good cause, even if my individual "donation" is small.

teeja• 17 years ago

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

mwexler• 17 years ago

You guys did look at the faq before voting this up, right?

http://www.freerice.com/faq.html

"Couldn't I just write a computer program to play all day and give a lot of rice that way?

There are two problems with this. First, it overloads our servers so that real people can't play and learn. Second, without real people playing and the resulting company sponsorship, no money would be generated and we could not give any rice at all."

christopherolah• 17 years ago

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?

321abc• 17 years ago

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.

kschults• 17 years ago

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.

ohlol• 17 years ago

Why does it take a game to feed people? Can't they just give it to them?

FreeRice: Hack a site to feed the world

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