DARPA funded the project, and DARPA fund lots of projects. I think a debate about whether DARPA is good or bad is pretty out-of-scope for this particular work: we made a game that might show how software verification could be crowdsourced.

The games do try to be fun, that's why none of them are "look at this loop and write an invariant". Xylem dresses up the problem statement as logic puzzles that surround the growth of exotic plants. I don't have an iPad to play the final version of Xylem on, but we tried hard to come up with a compelling game.

I don't believe the expected player base really cares about whether the project was funded by DARPA or not. I understand if you don't, but I think you would also have to stop using the Internet if you have such an issue with DARPA funded projects :)

I worked on Xylem when I was a grad student at UCSC. I was not on the team when it launched, so my info may be out of date.

What players are being asked to do is find loop invariants for code. The invariants are hard for a computer to come up with (and be useful), but are easier to check given certain bounds. So there is no predetermined win state, each answer is checked server-side to see if it holds up within the bounds (or, if the answer is already known, the cache hit is returned). If the invariant is complex and holds, it gets scored highly. If it's trivial and holds, it gets a lower score. If it doesn't hold, the instance where it doesn't hold is returned to the player.

Does this help?

I'd like to see you have the balls to actually mention which university you seem intent on slagging off for some bizarre ego-trip on Slashdot, of all places.

If you're going to go into such a vitriolic rant, I think you owe that university, and us, that much.