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What is the most stuiped(thats intentionally, or maybe not) program you have written?

Started by The C modest god Jan 14, 2006 at 8:36 AM 87 replies 11.4k views

Original Post

Jan 14, 2006 at 8:36 AM

A friend of mine bugged to write a program that would predict results. He thought that he could guess future random results by the previous results. I told him that its stuiped and you cant get better then 50% chance of guessing a toss of a coin based on previous results, but he is a very stubborn person. So I have written a program that would try to guess what are the future random results based on the past results. At first I made only a couple of hundreds attempts of guessing random results, so I got a bit above 0.5 correct guess. So he got excited, but then I did a couple of tens of thousands and then I got a closer result to 0.5. Anyway, it was really stuiped. So what are the stuiped programs you wrote? [Edited by - The C modest god on January 15, 2006 11:20:34 AM]

kSquared

Jan 14, 2006 at 8:51 AM

Quote:
At first I made only a couple of hundreds attempts of guessing random results, so I got a bit above 0.5 correct guess. So he got excited, but then I did a couple of tens of thousands and then I got a closer result to 0.5.

Well, if your friend was trying to guess your attempts to come up with random sequences of {0,1}, then he's not so far off the mark. Humans are terrible at generating random numbers.

kryat

Jan 14, 2006 at 9:03 AM

speaking of random numbers.

once when i was a teen, i tried to make a compression algorthm based on seeding the a random number generator and searching for patterns in the random number stream, and then compress a file using Seed/Start offset/length.

it didn't really work very well.

ToohrVyk

Jan 14, 2006 at 9:12 AM

A tuned down verson of the GNU find command (in that it only enumerated the subdirectories and their contents, without any additional options).

Only 2 years later did I find find and felt pretty dumb.

bytecoder

Jan 14, 2006 at 9:16 AM

I've never really made any "stupid programs." Probably the closest thing to it is a routine that reverses a string for the sole purpose of writing backwards in #gamedev without having to do any work.

def str_reverse(string):  l = list(string)  l.reverse()  return "".join(l)

necromancer_df

Jan 14, 2006 at 9:18 AM

I made a program to calculate the number of beer cans required to build a pyramid (actually a tetrahedron cos it was for a triangular arrangement instead of square) of a given height, specified in number of cans.

shmoove

Jan 14, 2006 at 9:46 AM

I wrote a program to calculate the chances of Israel of making it into the next World Cup. It's stupid because Israel doesn't have any chances of making it into any World Cup.

shmoove

Drakain Zeil

Jan 14, 2006 at 9:53 AM

I've made a bunch of pointless eye-candy things before, useless, but still some what interesting when you're bored.

jfclavette

Jan 14, 2006 at 9:54 AM

My maze generator was interesting, but ultimately pointless.

fnm

Jan 14, 2006 at 9:59 AM

back in school, when the c++ teacher asked us to choose a semester end project, a guy came up with the idea to make a program that will ask the user to type in the numbers of cow legs, and then output the number of cows.

_the_phantom_

Jan 14, 2006 at 10:02 AM

i wrote a program which rearranges the bits in a file and stops the file being compressed...

Rixter

Jan 14, 2006 at 10:03 AM

Back in my QBasic days I made a program that randomly generated a universe. All in numbers of course, so randomly decide how many galaxies there were, how many solar systems, how many planets, how many inhabitable planets, how many had life, and how many of those had intelligent life. All in "real time" of course.

I can't remember why I did it, but I'm sure I had some massive plans for a game or something that required it.

Samith

Jan 14, 2006 at 10:08 AM

The program that finds the first 50 million prime numbers (and outputs them in decimal and binary in a text file) was a pretty useless one.

stylin

Jan 14, 2006 at 10:17 AM

Quote:
Original post by fnm
back in school, when the c++ teacher asked us to choose a semester end project, a guy came up with the idea to make a program that will ask the user to type in the numbers of cow legs, and then output the number of cows.

[lol] Now that's funny.

bjle

Jan 14, 2006 at 10:29 AM

I didn't make it, but I successfully encouraged someone to make a special relativity simulation:
You input your speed, and it displays it back at you. If it was more than the speed of light, it displays "too fast" instead.

martiandragon

Jan 14, 2006 at 10:41 AM

I made a useless program on my calculator to output the Fibonnacci sequence. It just ran, much too fast to read, until it got to something greater than 10^100 and came up with an error. I also made one to generate nonsensical but pronouncable words, but I ended up using that some in making an alien language for my game, so it served a purpose after all.

And yes, programming a TI-83 is the extent of my programming ability.

Justaddwater

Jan 14, 2006 at 11:54 AM

Quote:
Original post by shmoove
I wrote a program to calculate the chances of Israel of making it into the next World Cup. It's stupid because Israel doesn't have any chances of making it into any World Cup.

shmoove

hehe

King of Men

Jan 14, 2006 at 12:14 PM

Dunno about useless, but it's certainly highly specialised : I made a program to stitch together screenshots from Crusader Kings so you get a jpg file where you can see the whole map at once. Saves me doing the edge-matching by hand.

cowsarenotevil

Jan 14, 2006 at 12:15 PM

Quote:
Original post by kSquared
Quote:
At first I made only a couple of hundreds attempts of guessing random results, so I got a bit above 0.5 correct guess. So he got excited, but then I did a couple of tens of thousands and then I got a closer result to 0.5.

Well, if your friend was trying to guess your attempts to come up with random sequences of {0,1}, then he's not so far off the mark. Humans are terrible at generating random numbers.

Well, he mentioned a coin flip, so that's not likely.

Anyway, I just use digits of pi when I need to come up with "random" numbers. I've got it permanently stuck in my brain, so I figure I may as well use it.

indieSoft

Jan 14, 2006 at 12:30 PM

I don't know if it's stupid, but I made something pointless.....

PIXELWORLD

[Edited by - indieSoft on January 14, 2006 5:30:46 PM]

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