Quantity is a quality of it's own. I think getting large number of people to try something is a good way to move forward. Sure it is not efficient, but fairly reliable.

You mean like a large number of people with no qualification and experience went looking for the Boston bombing suspect?

I'll leave it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22214511

I would argue that this is more of a mob lynching, rather than constructive combined effort.

To look for models that work, look no further than open source. Projects with high amount of interest quite often do better.

i assure you it was intended to be a constructive combined effort. i only skimmed the article linked but it doesn't seem to reference the fact that the kid who was falsely identified was found dead, presumably by his own hand. "hell is full of good meanings, but heaven is full of good works", as they say.

on a lighter note, if you consider an open source project "crowdsourced" then i posit the current collaborative academic efforts to decode the manuscript are "crowdsourced" as well.

Which kid is that? The one that was already missing before the bombing?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-26/falsely-accused-bombin...

yes. he was missing, then falsely accused, then found dead.

Your original post could be construed as suggesting that he killed himself due to the false accusations.

he was a depressive runaway and a racist internet lynch mob was threatening to kill his family for something he didn't do.

i suggested a correlation, i didn't propose it as fact. i'm curious as to what scenario you consider more probable?

It seems entirely possible that he was dead at the time that the lynch mob was hurling accusations at him, unless I'm missing something.

you're right. i was considering the events in the order they were revealed, not necessarily the event they occurred. i'm not sure which it is now.

Au contraire. It is efficient but fairly unreliable :)

I would beg to differ. It is not efficient from standpoint of labor allocation. Not experienced people are rarely efficient at completing complex tasks. On the other hand once problem captures imagination of the significant portion of population amount of progress made goes way up.

It depends on the problem. There are problems that are higly parallelizable and problems that are not. There are problems where expertise is paramount and problems where it is not. What you said is true but what I said is also true, if you stretch enough the definition of "fairly unreliable" :)