If you are a computer science teacher or professor, one of the problems you might have is when your students copy code from each other. Or if you are investigating someone’s code and you want a trustworthy way to compare codes. MOSS, a code similarity check tool developed by a Stanford student, might help you out here.
MOSS stands for Measure Of Software Similarity. It compares two pieces of code and will make a judgment on whether any code looks similar or not. MOSS is also very conservative on marking similarities, so the actually copied portion of code might be more than the percentage MOSS marked.
To get started, go to This Link and follow the steps to request an account. After that, it will reply to you with a script that you can use to communicate with the server. You can also use different flags to customize its behavior.
In conclusion, MOSS is a useful tool to help professors to check plagiarism in their students’ homework, and definitely an interesting piece of technology.