Reddit reviews The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design
We found 5 Reddit comments about The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
It can be hilarious when bots encounter other bots. My favorite, which I think will be hard to top, was when two pricing bots on Amazon got into a loop.
Bot 1 was from seller 1, a long time book seller who had a near perfect rating based on a very large number of customer reports. Bot 2 was from seller 2, a newer seller with a very good reputation but based on much fewer reports.
When people see a book at both a high reputation/high feedback seller and a almost as high/much less feedback seller, they will often buy from the first even if the price is a little higher there.
A clever high reputation/high feedback seller can take advantage of this to get a cut of sales on books that he does not have. Find a lower reputation seller listing a book you don't have, and list it on your store, pricing it at their price plus shipping plus a profit for you. For instance, if they are selling it for $20, and it costs $3 to ship it from them, you might price it at $25. Many people will buy directly from the other seller, to save $5, but some will prefer to go with the safe choice and will buy from you. When that happens, you simply buy it for $20+$3 from the other seller and ship it on to your customer.
Seller 1's bot implemented this. It looked for suitable books and listed them on seller 1's site at a higher price than they were at the other sites. It would list them on seller 1's site at 1.27059 times the price they were on the other sites.
Seller 2's bot looked for other sellers selling the same books, and tried to undercut them on price, setting the price to 0.9983 times what it was at the other sites.
When seller 2 listed an obscure book on fly genetics, bot 1 discovered it and listed it for seller 1. Bot 2 noticed that, and adjusted the price. Bot 1 noticed and adjusted.
The price reached $23.7 million (plus $3.99 shipping) before the sellers caught on and stopped their bots.
Here is an article about this particular bot fight.
Looks like its still going on for that book, although not as bad
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0632030488/sr=/qid=/ref=olp_tab_new?ie=UTF8&colid=&coliid=&condition=new&me=&qid=&seller=&sr=
Some of the reviews are gold 5/7
not anymore
That's a wonderful question, but the answer is very complex. In case you're not happy with the summaries you get (oh brave souls that attempt it), here's a standard textbook that tries a book-length answer for a fruit fly. It's a great book, guaranteed to blow your mind about both how complex the processes are, and how incredible it is that we know so much about them.
http://www.amazon.ca/Making-Fly-Genetics-Animal-Design/dp/0632030488