Virgil Griffith

Virgil Griffith (born 1983), also known as Romanpoet, is an American hacker, known for his involvement with a 2003 lawsuit with the Blackboard Inc. company and his creation of the WikiScanner. He has published papers on artificial life and is currently a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology. According to the New York Times, he is the Internet Man of Mystery. Griffith was born in Alabama in 1983 and graduated from the Alabam... more

Virgil Griffith (born 1983), also known as Romanpoet, is an American hacker, known for his involvement with a 2003 lawsuit with the Blackboard Inc. company and his creation of the WikiScanner. He has published papers on artificial life and is currently a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology. According to the New York Times, he is the Internet Man of Mystery. Griffith was born in Alabama in 1983 and graduated from the Alabama School of Math and Science in 2002, and then attended the University of Alabama, studying cognitive science in New College. He was a member of the Mallet Assembly. He transferred to Indiana University in 2004, but returned to graduate cum laude from Alabama in August 2007. Griffith is now a graduate student studying computation and neural systems. He is affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute as a visiting researcher. Griffith has given talks at the hacker conferences Interz0ne, PhreakNIC, and HOPE. It was at Interz0ne 1 in 2002 that he met... less