You know Markov chains is 70-ies technology, for more info monitor Stanford Uni webpage although perhaps it will disclouse parts of the secret, basically artificaly intelligense and neurological network.
Spinning others articles is not a very good way to go, even if the search engines will swalow it fully (it the spinning with a Markov is done effectivly) and index you sites with out problem, the content will be of "hardly understandeble if at all".. An article as a structure, you may change it a little but that wont help you, google would find it.. so you need to change the structure and this is when you loose the "readable" part of it when the words are spunn. Try just changing place of the sentences in this post and you will see what I mean, then add to that that words are altered and you are way off... If someone wants automated content and almost readable (I normally say that it might look like a non native english, in bad need of some gramatik schooling) they need to produce the seed articles them self, and then add LOOOONG varables of single words, this would give a readeble article that the search engines will love... but the next problem is the other webmasters.. some check what sites rank better then them and when they find your site you are out.. Black hat sites "normally" have a lifespan of 3-30 days, but that is part of the calculation.. Its done every day over and over again like someone else said in the thread.
I dont understand how Google can know an article is based from another article if the content generator rewrites text to such high quality it is as good as almost written text. If you include 100 random factors a 100 times for every sentence, that leaves out 10 000 different ways a sentence can be constructed. If a page has 100 sentences that leaves Google 1 million different combination for one page to check. How are they going to check every site if one new site is built every day and grows organically to 3000 pages. That would be doom for Google (or any other search engine that lists result from traditional SEO methods).
Here's a good place to start understanding how they might accomplish that. Keep in mind that Google has dozens of huge datacenters, running huge clusters of computers - they've got a lot of computing power.. It also helps that they have many intelligent people working for them.