Long-time readers will know of my obsessive-compulsive war against spam; a war I’m guaranteed to lose over time, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying to win a few battles. Anyway, I wanted to share my latest small victory with fellow users of the WordPress blog software. I’ve discovered a plugin called Hashcash that, when combined with Akismet, stops 99.9% of spam from getting through. Better yet, neither plugin presents a significant burden to readers (unlike my old captcha plugin), and the combined false-positive rate appears to be extremely low as well. The only downside to Hashcash is that it blocks comments from non-Javascript-friendly browsers, but few enough people fall into that trap that I’m OK with it.

Unfortunately, as Hashcash becomes more popular, it is inevitable that someone will find a way to circumvent it, and their solution will spread quickly amongst spammers. But in the meantime, kudos to the author of the plugin — I recommend that other users of Wordpress check it out.

Jeff Orkin, the brain behind the exceptional AI in F.E.A.R (and current PhD student at MIT) is working on a cool new project and needs your help:

The Restaurant Game is a research project at the MIT Media Lab that will algorithmically combine the gameplay experiences of thousands of players to create a new game… Everyone who plays The Restaurant Game will be credited as a Game Designer… Designers will be ranked based on how well they play their assigned roles… There will be only one Lead Designer… This project attempts to address two frustrations I experienced as a professional game developer. 1) Convincing human social behavior is difficult to model with existing hand crafted AI systems. 2) Play testing by people outside of the development team typically comes too late to have a major impact on the final product.