Did you hear the one about how a country found a way to get its citizens to work for free by disguising it as a game? Oh wait, that's actually happening. DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the arm of the US Department of Defense responsible for new and experimental technologies, has come up with a handful of bug-finding tools to verify the mind-bogglingly huge amount of code the agency generates, and they're disguised as casual video games. One such game, called Xylem: The Code of Plants, is available right now on the iPad.
Xylem tasks you with analyzing new species of flora discovered on a mysterious island. By describing the growth patterns of each plant with a mathematical formula, players are actually building pro
