Actually it's quite a brilliant idea. Turn something into a puzzle with multiple thousands of people working on it and someone will find the answer. That's one of those, 'Why didn't we think of it before?' moments.
It must have many applications.
On the other hand it does smack a bit of the saying about the an 'infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters'. Maybe that should be changed to laptops.
Effectively by linking thousands of human brains in a single task, you are making an organic supercomputer.
Borg anyone?
