I remember going to a hackathon[1] where the winning team developed a system like this. Their demo involved doing 10-dimensional integrals with Monte Carlo, on

I remember going to a hackathon[1] where the winning team developed a system like this. Their demo involved doing 10-dimensional integrals with Monte Carlo, on all of the audience's laptops. It was pretty cool :). [1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marissa-louie/for-the-win-at-the-berkel_b_844749.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marissa-louie/for-the-win-at-t... Given a bunch of college students could put together a credible system in ~18 hours without sleep, it's certainly not challenging technically. I suspect there are deep logistical and business reasons for why it has not caught on--you wouldn't be able to get all that much done without a ton of traffic, and it would really annoy people when they found out about it. Still, even if it isn't entirely practical, I think it's a really cool idea. Certainly the sort of thing I love seeing at a hackathon, more than the winners of some of the more recent ones I've been to. (But that, of course, is a complaint for another time and another post.)