Robot Amazons

[danalwyn]

Interesting note for the day: It seems that Berkeley's Michael Eisen managed to get a glimpse at the way independent booksellers use bots to set book prices on Amazon. This particular tale involves two faulty algorithms and a book on fly genetics that managed to make it all the way to a price of $23,698,655.93 before being caught, and it's yet another example of how everything is being done not by a computer but by a bored, frustrated computer programmer who doesn't always cover all the angles.

Comments

[silverjackal]

So that explains those prices! I'd seen something similar before, and just assumed that the computer had made some sort of error where it took an identification number for a price, because the item was not worth several hundred thousand.

[danalwyn]

It makes sense if you think about it; all those places just can't have someone do pricing for all those books. You just wonder who sat down and was paid to code all that.