Counting on the truth

David Jones

Nature, 1997, vol. 388, issue 6642, 523-523

Abstract: To stop liars and imitators from having their way, dominant communicators employ costlyprocesses of communication -- only by being large can male toads croak deeply to seduce theirmates, for example. Similarly, the cost of printing deters cranks from communicating with awide readership. But the Internet could change that, with fake mirror sites ofNaturepurveyingnonsense and lies, unless a new expense is introduced. Daedalus suggests a giantsupercomputer to produce a different self referential sentence every week (of the form “Thissentence contains eighteen ‘a's, five ‘b's…”) which would be easy for the reader to check buthard for the trickster to imitate.

Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/41446 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:388:y:1997:i:6642:d:10.1038_41446

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/41446

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().