Legend has it that the British government in colonial India was concerned about the increasing number of venomous cobras in Delhi.
The British government thought of a bounty scheme.
For every dead cobra that someone presented to the authorities, he/she was given a monetary reward.
In the beginning, this was a successful strategy as a large number of snakes were killed for the reward.
Soon, a few enterprising people realized that it was easier to breed cobras than to look for them in the wild.
So, they bred huge populations of cobras and killed a few every now and then to earn the rewards.
When the British government became aware of this, it scrapped the bounty scheme.
The cobra farmers now had no incentive to breed cobras, so they set all cobras free causing a huge increase in the population of the wild cobras.
Such an outcome where an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse is called a Perverse Result. It is a much-discussed ‘unknown unknown’ in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
