Robot Amazons

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.