VincentYu comments on Holden Karnofsky's Singularity Institute critique: other objections - Less Wrong

3 Post author: ciphergoth 11 May 2012 07:22AM

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Comment author: VincentYu 11 May 2012 03:38:30PM *  14 points [-]

A variant of this contest with less catastrophic unfriendliness actually ran for a few years. The (now defunct) Underhanded C Contest (description below from the contest web page):

The Underhanded C Contest is an annual contest to write innocent-looking C code implementing malicious behavior. In this contest you must write C code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. To be more specific, it should do something subtly evil.

Every year, we will propose a challenge to coders to solve a simple data processing problem, but with covert malicious behavior. Examples include miscounting votes, shaving money from financial transactions, or leaking information to an eavesdropper. The main goal, however, is to write source code that easily passes visual inspection by other programmers.