Few would have thought that when Crick and Watson discovered DNA, it would help in making a tool to fight spam. But computational biologists at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center have devised an anti-spam filter based on the way scientists analyse genetic sequences. Called after Feng Shui character Chung-Kwei, the formula automatically learns patterns of spam vocabulary and has proved to be 96.5% efficient. In tests, the filter only misidentified one message in 6,000 as spam.
