Wonderful idea. I like the fun aspect of it.

I thought of something similar a while back. Might take a fair bit of coding though. It might be called The Mandelpot. It's like a treasure hunt for pots of gold (acctualy bitcoin prizes), randomly distibuted through an online rendering of the mandelbrot set. You would have to zoom in a bit to find the smaller bitcoin 'pots of gold' and explore the set even more carefully to find biger prizes. The colective prize money would replaced regularly as it is won, but randomly split so that the smaller chunks appear closer to 1:1 scale (say at a minimum of 100:1 for 100 satoshis), while a larger chunk would be calculated to be hiden deeper (say 1,000,000:1 for a 0.1 bitcoin prize). You can explore the set for as long as you please, but when you login you agree to have your GPU/CPU harvested for some machine cycles to generate bitcoin. So it's actualy a casual bitcoin mining farm also. While you are exploring you might notice various sponsorship ads swimming into view amidst the sweeping tendrills of the mandelbrot set. Also some of the pots might have a generous vouchers of genuine discount/gifts/introductory offers from the sponsors, rather than straight out bitcoin prizes.

I think this could be made so that bots have no better chance of finding the pots than the humans, but as long as they are there, they too have to contribute machine cycles to play, so they would contribute to the prize pool as much as (or more than) they are harvesting from it. The more hashing power you have the more quickly you can zoom, scroll, render and such, so it should possible to ballance the odds if done properly.

If somebody wants to code this up, I'd likely to be quite willing to put a reasonable sum of bitcoin in to help launch it. What would the coding for something like that be worth?

-DiamondPlus