Plagiarism Counter-Attack

E-mail describing Project
from an e-mail i sent to my brother 

To      : troq
Subject : plagiarism: an ongoing battle

whilst looking through my web logs, i saw a robot from slysearch.com, 
which has links to plagiarism.org, which has links to
http://www.turnitin.com/  of which 
http://www.turnitin.com/report/new/sample.html  was especially interesting
to me.
  
they match any given essay to essays catalogued in various websites and   
match any part of those essays.  i don't know if they do, but it seems    
that it might be useful to use some of the techniques your crew uses to   
also match for partially changed sentences.
  
but i don't so much care about that.  instead, what i'd like your 
professional opinion on:  how difficult (!) would it be to take any given
essay and "transform" it into a different essay?  i'm thinking the minimal
would be to change words to other words via thesaurus lookup, but 
preferable would be to change phrases to other phrases, and best would be
to switch whole sentences into new sentences of similar concepts.
  
maybe, for any given sentence, build a matrix of the words used in their  
structure used, do a thesaurus lookup to replace each word possible, then 
use heuristics plus the original matrix to rebuild a new sentence?  i 
imagine this also requires the "miracle happens here" step, but you'd know
better.

typing one-handedly*,
  
-f
http://www.blackant.net/

* when i originally wrote this, i had broken my hand in a biking accident.