The Bayes algorithm was core of one of my first shared software projects - a local spam filter plugin for the blog engine serendipity. The surprising thing back

The Bayes algorithm was core of one of my first shared software projects - a local spam filter plugin for the blog engine serendipity. The surprising thing back then was how well it worked in practice, the surprise now is that it still works just fine. It's used to filter blog comments since over a decade now. And I mean that with the surprise. It was tought to us as the simple method used before, and I was just testing whether it maybe can still be of use a bit. Mainly because it was easy to understand, it just counts, and I liked the position with the a priori probabilities. «Definitely still useful» was not the expected outcome.