THE INTERNET VON NEUMANN EFFECT

There was a Hungarian polymath named John von Neumann (that's the American version) who made important contributions in a number of fields, including mathematics, physics and computer programming, to name but a few. His name has been given to self-replicating machines, because of the concept that we might explore the universe with automated machines which can repair or replicate themselves from matter they encounter in their travels. This brings up lots of problems, which i won't go into here. Carl Sagan came up with the idea that a truly intelligent civilization would not make von Neumann probes because of the implicit threat to the cosmos, and would destroy any such probes that it found.

Which beings me to the idea of the internet von Neumann effect. When spambots first appeared here, a year ago in May, they usually had European sounding names which they got from name generators. That entire system has broken down, though, because it was overused. As an example, such a name generator, having assigned Joekelly to one request, would eventually come up with ridiculous things like Jookelly or Joekally. You can, in fact, see that happenign with some of the almost, but not quite European sounding names that spambots are now using.

So my concept of the internet von Neumann effect is to ask how long it will take for spammers and spambots to use up every possible combination of letters and numbers in the creation of account names, to the point that no one, human or bot, can any longer register at a website. As i say, they are already showing signs of having exhauster name generators. How long until the entire system collapses?