I made a FreeRice.com bot... should I put it in my application?

Colleges & Universities Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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<p>FreeRice.com donates 10 grains of rice for every answer you pick correctly.
I made an autobot for the multiplication subject that automatically picks the correct answer. I’ve donated over 50,000 grains of rice that way.</p>

<p>you can check out a video of it right here: <a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7onQYVM-V4[/url]”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7onQYVM-V4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Should I put that on my app? It’s not illegal (i checked), but would that be considered morally wrong?</p>

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<p>I wouldn’t do it. The Free Rice site, under FAQ, covers the issue of writing a computer program to play, and why you should not. They give two reasons:

  1. People who are using the site manually see the advertisements. The advertisers want this, and that is why they are willing to pay, so that Free Rice can give rice away.
  2. The servers might become overloaded.
    So you would be demonstrating that you are doing something that a charity asks you not to do? Where is the benefit in that?</p>
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<p>In C#?</p>

<p>Ouch.</p>

<p>Also, remember how context is everything? :P</p>

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<p>I wouldn’t. It’s at least a moral gray area. Also, 50,000 grains of rice cost less than 2 dollars, so it’s not even that significant a donation. It’s a cool project, but it probably doesn’t belong on your application.</p>

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Yes :slight_smile:
Glenn Beck: “Context is everything”</p>

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<p>I think this is a very neat thing to put on your application.</p>

<p>I remember reading once that a kid put a robotic bartender for his home-bar on his application.</p>

<p>He got in, it must have impressed someone. Admissions overlooked the fact that he made a robot to serve him and his friends alcoholic beverages, they saw ingenuity not immorality.</p>

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<p>I think that’s pretty cool. And it seems like a mildly MIT-lish thing to do, given [Victoria</a> Secret competition gets hacked | The Daily Pennsylvanian](<a href=“http://thedp.com/node/57754]Victoria”>http://thedp.com/node/57754) . I would include it. Of course, with what QuantMech said, it might have done more harm than good.</p>

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<p>I agree. It seems risky.</p>

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<p>That may not be the full intention of the OP, he could’ve just been curious to see whether he could write a small program to traverse the site’s structure. If he sells it that way, I’m sure that it’ll only improve his chances.</p>

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Pretty much what I was doing. Although I did steal the pleasure of donating 75,000+ rice for one night because I left the program running by accident.</p>

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<p>If you did it just as a test or demo, resilient193, I don’t see any harm in it. But I’d probably emphasize that once you found that it worked, you went on to something else, preferably something harder.</p>

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<p>It happens to all of us, I once accidentally left a Captcha OCR running for an entire day :/</p>