In late 2023, a Reddit user known as "evilscientist311" conducted a comprehensive analysis of Cleo's activity patterns and interactions with other Stack Exchange accounts.
> Wild to see a story I played a major part in on the front page… The first post outlining the theory and evidence was made by me a few years ago
> I gathered enough data from stackexchange, did some data visualizations, and drafted a post outlining my analysis. However, I didn't know a place where this could have been published anonymously to a large audience, so I presented it in a meme format, listing the evidence in the comment section
Well, it does make the solutions less impressive, right? Because it's much easier to compute the inverse of an integral than an integral. What's impressive here is more in composing problems that have nice answers and can't be solved by computer algebra systems, then the sock puppet trick to conceal that you ha the answer all along.
The page states:
In late 2023, a Reddit user known as "evilscientist311" conducted a comprehensive analysis of Cleo's activity patterns and interactions with other Stack Exchange accounts.
However, I and others were on the scent at least as far back as April, 2023. See for example: https://x.com/TheDavidSJ/status/1650957407902658571
Edit the wiki and add it!
Blew up on Reddit yesterday.
> Wild to see a story I played a major part in on the front page… The first post outlining the theory and evidence was made by me a few years ago
> I gathered enough data from stackexchange, did some data visualizations, and drafted a post outlining my analysis. However, I didn't know a place where this could have been published anonymously to a large audience, so I presented it in a meme format, listing the evidence in the comment section
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1wyzrji/comm...
Were any of the 39 answers to a question that was not likely to be from a sock puppet?
Doesn’t necessarily make the solutions less impressive, but it’s kind of a relevant detail that is left out in the Wikipedia summary.
Well, it does make the solutions less impressive, right? Because it's much easier to compute the inverse of an integral than an integral. What's impressive here is more in composing problems that have nice answers and can't be solved by computer algebra systems, then the sock puppet trick to conceal that you ha the answer all along.