Russian school student invents flawless computer program for copyright pro

[lovuian]

http://english.pravda.ru/main/18/90/361/16154_copyright.html

The program employs several search engines of the Internet at a time

The electronic editor has an official name "Copyright verification program." It uses the Internet for detecting manifest similarities in hundreds of thousands of texts available on the Internet.

We tested a part of a school composition on Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. Sasha Matorin, the inventor of the program, connected to the Net and received the results in a minute. The program indicated that the text's originality equaled zero. The electronic editor found a part of the text on one web site while the last sentence of the text in question was found on the other web site. The program also reported on the location of the web sites containing texts identical to "our" text.

The inventor of the program says that it employs several search engines of the Internet at a time. A text's size is virtually unlimited. A tome like Ulysses can be tested for originality. The program will automatically divide the novel into several parts to come up with a general result later on. Sasha was writing the program all summer. The work became his term paper on informatics during his final year in school.

"These days plagiarism is a commonplace phenomenon," says Sacha's teacher on informatics and a former schoolmaster Andrei Novikov. "Indeed, it is a lot easier to simply download a composition or term paper material from the Internet than spend sleepless nights working on the subject," adds he.

A computer company, a software trader, from the city of Saratov has showed interest in the young man's invention.

more...This is so cool!!!

[evlbstrd]

1. Yes!

Let the children of Republicans do their own damned work for a change!

[lovuian]

2. LOL!!! Here Here!!!

:bounce:

[ThoughtCriminal]

3. For me, google usually does the same trick

it's handy for nailing "Astroturf" letters to the editor. I guess multiple engines would improve the results. Aren't there websites that do the same thing?

[punpirate]

4. And... not long after... Microsoft...

... purchases the source code and copyrights in exchange for three pair of Levi 505s, a case of vodka and snakeskin boots.

Sasha Matorin says he got "a great deal" and expects more "good buziness from "Count Bill."

[nodehopper]

7. um...that's kind of offensive.

[punpirate]

8. Umm, reality these days...

... is kind of offensive.

Deal with it.

On edit, to whom do you think it's offensive? Who are you defending? Bill Gates, or the Russian student?

Gates has stolen everything he can, and Russian entrepreneurs have found themselves almost entirely at the mercy of Western companies. Who's offended here? You? Who do you represent? Gates, or the Russian student?

Neither, I suspect.

Cheers.

[Psephos]

14. I love the irony

Nothing personal, but you seem better able to dish it out than take it.

PS - I'm not really offended by what you said, and even if I was, so what?...but my girlfriend is a Russian, and your kind of comments seem to her the equivalent of mentioning how much African-Americans love watermelon. I guess we all have a hot button.

Peace.

[punpirate]

17. I refer, mostly, to the extraordinary...

... level of corruption--and exploitation--existing in the former Soviet Union today.

Ask your girlfriend about that.

That is what I intend by such comments. If the Russian people aren't being exploited by their own, they're being exploited by the Billy boys of the West.

Cheers.

[Psephos]

19. Substitute New Orleans for FSU, and see if it sounds a little different

It does to me. Both are places with long histories of corruption, exploitation, and rule by thuggery. A big difference, of course, is that NOLA is predominantly black.

Anyway, I'm not offended, just pointing out that comments can be interpreted in wildly varying ways depending upon who's hearing them. We seem to live in a time when the greatest offense is to offend others, which is what prompted my musings.

Peace.

[nodehopper]

20. I thought your post had unnecessary stereotypes about Russians

I speak as someone who is from Russia originally.

Also "reality these days is offensive" is a zombie response to someone taking an issue with something you say.

[vajraroshana]

5. Flawless? Call me a sceptic.......

I don't believe there's any such thing in a computer program, at least anything complex or useful.

[regnaD kciN]

6. Same here...

...particularly since the apparent goal of the program is to catch plagarism. Hey, presto! It looks over a school paper, and finds, literally, zero originality. When you get that absolute a result, I start wondering about how the "matches" are calculated.

In fact, there's an easy way to get a zero score on originality -- conduct the search on a word-by-word basis. Unless the text's author comes up with a lot of outlandish misspellings, every single word of his or her report will be "proven" to have come from another source. Now, I'm pretty sure that isn't being done in this case, but it all really depends on how small the "blocks" are that are being compared. Even if it is on a sentence-by-sentence basis, many sentences one may write have been written before by someone else, albeit in a different context. Isn't that so? (That was an example of a sentence that will be flagged as "zero originality.)

Conversely, the only way to get a reliable test of these things is by using very large blocks, such as a paragraph. But there, conversly, the opposite problem occurs, in that a real plagerist could easily fool the program by changing a few words, or even inserting a new sentence, in a block of text lifted from someone else.

[BiggJawn]

18. I see what you're saying

F'instance, if I were to write about my ex-wife, "And she was 'full of hip and gap-toothed' as Chaucer described..." How would that score, I wonder?

The quote scores zero for originality, but it was IN quotes, and authorship was assigned in the rest of the sentance.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

10. What about HAL 9000?

We know how well *that* flawless program worked out. :)

[bpilgrim]

16. they're the most difficult to debug ;->

the 'flawless' ones... but ya know how marketing likes to call'm FEATURES :evilgrin:

bookmarked non-the-less :hi:

peace

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. Ironically, the idea is far from original

Because examiners have to use programs like this already to detect plagiarism.

[Nihil]

11. Maybe they should run the program ...

... on its own source code to find out if he lifted it from somewhere?

[ozarkvet]

15. Takes a lot of time.

Currently a TA (college after Army).

We get a hard copy and a Word copy of every term paper.

My first task is to hunt for cheaters.

Out of a group of 30, you consistently end up with 5-6 that are nearly word-for-word copies --- once a copy a paper I wrote my freshman year (and published nowhere, but prepared on the school system!).

[wordout]

12. can it read files inside my members-only plagerism bbs?

[hunter]

13. Fundamentalist Preachers are the most amusing plagiarists...

Take a look at their websites -- they will often go to extreme legnths such as posting their sermons as audio or image files to hide their words from the search engines.

They don't do this to protect their own original work or to discourage those that would harass them, which is what they will claim when you call them on it. They do it to hide the fact that much of their "work" is stolen and hoarded rather than shared...

The notion that you wouldn't want to openly share a religious inspiration with others, or that you would want to claim another person's religious inspiration as your own, is quite astonishing to me.