That's definitely turn off I agree, it says that the reason is if you need want to edit or upload. I agree though that for read-only you shouldn't need to auth. There TOS is are fine though if you read it. Also the person behind this a Google employee so i don't think theres necessarily anything nefarious going on. This is the OSCON talk he gave on the project a while back:
Why does running the simulation with N>6 cause a stack overflow? In this naive implementation, the deepest the recursion stack can be is N^2 cells, which for (e.g.) 7 is only 49 cells deep. That shouldn't be enough to cause a stack overflow, even in a js interpreter like this.
Knights tour was one of the earliest Java programs we wrote at the university. Fun times, even found an old jar with some cool Swing visuals: http://i.imgur.com/6Q5ODT2.mp4
If you are more inclined to Sanskrit :-)
verse 1: each syllable is placed on a square in sequence. verse 2: each syllable provides the answer to the knight's tour.
929. sThirAgasAm sadhArADhyA vihathAkathathAmathA sathpAdhukE! sarAsA mA rangarAjapadham naya
930. sThithA samayarAjathpA gatharA mAdhakE gavi dhuranhasAm samnathAdhA sAdhyAthApakarAsarA
see: http://www.ibiblio.org/sripedia/ebooks/vdesikan/rps/knight.h...