To get a glimpse of innovation in the bot world, the best place to look, as usual, is in the realm of adult entertainment.

"The adult industry will likely be married to spam and its attendant distribution methods long past the evolution of man into beings of pure energy," jokes Domenic Merenda, vice president of business development for Edge Productions, a company that operates adult-media properties.

Merenda says his company doesn't resort to spam but admits to having "rubbed elbows with the kingpins." The experience has given him a chance to divide so-called porn bots into three major categories: lead-generation bots, URL-proliferator bots and address-harvesting bots.

Of the three categories, lead-generation programs tend to be the most sophisticated and most expensive. Unleashed on X- and R-rated chat-room logs, they run through transcripts, seeking out the names and addresses of the most active participants. Once acquired, these contacts become fodder for third-party vendors eager to advertise webcams, escort services and other variations on the adult-entertainment theme.

Aside from the obvious legal issues, such programs face a growing hurdle: Many of the most active participants in public chat-rooms nowadays are other bots masquerading as human users, often for commercial purposes.

To cut down on this practice, many chat-rooms now use CAPTCHA, an automated tool developed by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University. Short for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart," CAPTCHA is the chat-room equivalent of an immune system T cell. It asks registrants to prove their non-bot status by identifying a randomly generated word. Instead of displaying the word as normal text, however, it displays it as a distorted image, usually with a patterned background, a format that can befuddle even the most sophisticated optical character recognition systems.

"We settled on something humans could do, but machines can't," says Luis von Ahn, a Carnegie Mellon grad student and CAPTCHA project member.

Like the helper T cell, however, CAPTCHA is far from perfect. In 2002, less than a year after the Carnegie Mellon group delivered a working prototype of the CAPTCHA system, programmers at the University of California were already claiming the ability to crack CAPTCHA-generated images in Yahoo's e-mail account-registration system. Porn marketers, meanwhile, have recruited eager users to beat the system. To gain entry or special privileges on many sites, users identify CAPTCHA images piped in by bots currently attempting to register fresh accounts.

If such ploys seem slightly Darwinian, maybe that's because the people charged with designing them see the Internet in survival-of-the-fittest terms.

When the referrer-log spam phenomenon first attracted attention two years ago, Francois Lane, owner of the Canadian marketing firm Mastodonte Communication, took credit for the outbreak while at the same time disavowing any sense of guilt.

"I'm not too worried about my reputation," Lane wrote in response to blogger complaints. "Marketing is all about being innovative, different, adaptive, taking risks and knowing how to use the technology. I'm trying to be all that."

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