A few years ago I was involved in an HCI research project applying this kind of idea to automated UI analysis - by taking strings of user input (in this case, c

A few years ago I was involved in an HCI research project applying this kind of idea to automated UI analysis - by taking strings of user input (in this case, computed optimal key sequences performing some number entry task) and randomly inserting errors of various kinds into the sequence (transposition, deletion, repetition, etc.) - then playing back the key sequence and measuring the degree of error (which is quite easy in number entry). We applied the technique to explore a space of possible designs and draw conclusions about their relative resilience to error. I think it's a neat technique which deserves to be more widely used. Here's a short paper we wrote about it. Its message is somewhat muddied (IMO) by a parallel story about "differential formal analysis" (which basically means several researchers did basically the same thing and we found it interesting which bits we had in common and which bits differed, in our results), but it's short enough that it's readable, I think... http://ewic.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_hci12_full_paper4.pdf http://ewic.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_hci12_full_paper4.pdf