For an experiment like this it's important to have small, self contained code fragments. It wouldn't be fair to expect someone to decipher the whole Linux kernel source in a short amount of time, for example. Given a sufficiently small chunk of code, almost everything looks synthetic. I imagine many real life application have sections that take two arrays, find the numbers within a certain range and then take the intersection like this program does.
I read somewhere once that we tend to think of our mind in terms of whatever the current most complex technology is. At one point we thought of the brain as a fantastically complicated plumbing system, and later as a telephone switchboard. I wonder if in another decade or so will the idea that our brains work like computers seem as wrong as the idea that they work like plumbing systems.
It looked like a commercial eye tracker to me, so we wouldn't be able to open source it. However, a quick Google search revealed some things that might be promising.
This is actually one of the things that's driving Mike's research. When the latest programming paradigm comes out, usually people argue it's better based on the code being shorter or prettier. Judging programming styles based on beauty is inherently subjective, so Mike is trying to find some quantitative basis for comparing programming systems.
It's interesting that you mention Singularity, as it turns out that Singularity has been a major influence on Rust. For example, the current communication is very similar to the channel contracts used in Singularity.
I heard that Rust was meant to capture the spirit of the language. It was meant not to have a lot of knew ideas (although, as it turns out, language design always leads to new ideas). We have a sort of informal rule to not include research that's less than 10 years old, so we can build off of ideas that have had a chance to prove themselves. We're bending that rule a bit now, of course. The idea was that Rust would codify and provide language support for patterns that have worked well in making large software like Firefox fast and safe.