Alas, the flies are not floating on the surface. They are deeply mixed in, almost as if the machine that generated the soup wanted desperately to appear to be doing an excellent job making fly-free soup.

… while not having a real distinction between flies and non-fly ingredients.

No, I think it would be far easier to pick 100 flies each from a single bowl of soup than to pick all 1000 flies out of a 50 gallon drum.

You don’t get to fix bugs in code by simply pouring it through a filter.