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by GMoromisato
1087 days ago
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A long time ago, the math column in Scientific American decided to run a contest. It asked readers to send a post card with the biggest number they could think of. Whoever came up with the biggest number would win $1 million--divided by the winning number. The editor of the magazine almost stopped the contest because he worried that someone might actually win real money and the magazine would be on the hook. But the author reassured him: human nature being what it is, the winning number is going to be not only larger than 1 million, but much larger than you can imagine. And so it was. The winning number was (IIRC) some tower of exponentials that would take most of the universe to write out as decimal digits. The SciAm budget was safe. If readers had coordinated somehow, they could have won a million dollars from SciAm and divided it among themselves. They might have made a hundred dollars each. But the author knew that such coordination would be impossible. Human nature would not allow it. Someone, somewhere, was going to send in a ridiculously large number to win. Classic Prisoner's Dilemma. The GitHub case is the same. Human nature being what it is, someone, somewhere is always going to try to push the limits. As the developer of a SaaS development platform, this is something I'm taking to heart. |
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They could have been in quite some trouble!