www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html
The Moss Logo A System for Detecting Software Plagiarism -------- What is Moss? Moss (for a Measure Of Software Similarity) is an automatic system for determining the similarity of C, C++, Java, Pascal, Ada, ML, Lisp, or Scheme programs. To date, the main application of Moss has been in detecting plagiarism in programming classes. Since its development in 1994, Moss has been very effective in this role. The algorithm behind moss is a significant improvement over other cheating detection algorithms (at least, over those known to us). No recent reports of problems with the network-based script have been reported. The network-based moss does not use email for transporting submissions and replies, and instead a direct network connection is made to the server. This design is both more efficient and easier to install and use (especially on Windows systems). By default, when you register for moss you receive a submission script for the network-based Moss.
The service has been designed to be very easy to use--you supply a list of files to compare and Moss does the rest. To use the Windows submission script you will need to replace the script you receive via email with the Windows version (see instructions for downloading scripts below). In response to a query the Moss server produces HTML pages listing pairs of programs with similar code. Moss also highlights individual passages in programs that appear the same, making it easy to quickly compare the files. In the past, access has been restricted to instructors and staff of programming courses. This is no longer the case, and anyone may obtain a Moss account. Moss is, however, not to be used for commercial purposes.
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