BBC Technology, Jo Twist

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.

Chung-Kwei grew out of another algorithm called Teiresias which the researchers were using for pattern discovery in computation biology sequencing, specifically, in protein annotation. The algorithm helped in automatically determining the properties of a protein, like function and structure, directly from a string.

Instead of looking at strings of protein, Chung-Kwei uses Teiresias to identify strings of character sequences which appear in spam, but never in non-spam mail.