$23 Million Book of the Day
via TDW Geeks by jayhathaway on 4/23/11
$23 Million Book of the Day: Two large Amazon booksellers with computerized pricing algorithms recently entered a price war over a textbook about flies. The bots got caught in a loop, driving up each other's prices on The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design, to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) before someone caught it.
An evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley deconstructed the automatic pricing algorithms and concluded that one seller didn't actually have the book, so the algorithm made the price on their non-existent copy high enough to buy the book from their competitor and resell it at a profit.
The countdown to Anonymous exploiting one of these pricing bots begins now.
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