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I think the problem is the testing methods they may use to verify the service. They pass it the same text, it comes back as 100% plagiarized. Cool. They pass
by bena 8y ago
I think the problem is the testing methods they may use to verify the service.
They pass it the same text, it comes back as 100% plagiarized. Cool.
They pass it text that is close, but clearly just slightly modified original text. Comes back as plagiarized. Cool.
They pass it text that isn't close at all. Comes back as not plagiarized. Cool.
It works. Right?
Nope. We forgot to check if there are any cases where two different texts will show as being plagiarized despite knowing they've been independently created.
We also didn't check to see if a text that was essentially plagiarized can return a result of not plagiarized.
And I think those checks fall into the halting problem. You only need to find one case to throw the entire system into doubt. But to make sure there are no cases, you have to check every piece against every other piece.
And if you have false positives and false negatives, you can either double check every result. In which case, you might as well not use it. Or you give up on one the case of false negatives. If a plagiarized paper passes the system, oh well. Focus on checking every paper that gets tagged as plagiarized. Double check them and make sure it truly is plagiarized.
- jerf 8y ago"And I think those checks fall into the halting problem." Metaphorically, if you mean that there isn't going to be a concrete metric that really determines whether two bits of text are "similar" with bright shining line, sure. If you mean halting problem literally, no, this isn't affected by the halting problem. String similarity evaluation won't be strong enough to invoke the properties that result in a halting problem. For any two strings, you can certainly terminate in a reasonably period of time, and have the "correct" answer as defined by whatever the local meaning of "answer" is. (Barring a particularly perverse implementation of a string similarity algorithm probably explicitly constructed just to screw with my statement here, that for some reason starts executing the string as instructions directly or something.)