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Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

41 points reverseCh | 2 comments | 20 Oct 24 11:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.461s | source

I recently came across the concept of "useless" programs - pieces of code that serve no practical purpose but are fun, creative, or challenging to write. These could be anything from elaborate ASCII art generators to programs that solve imaginary problems. I'm curious to hear about the most interesting or creative "useless" programs the HN community has written. What was your motivation? What unexpected challenges did you face? Did you learn anything valuable from the experience? Some examples to get the ball rolling: 1. A program that prints the lyrics of "99 Bottles of Beer" in binary. A text-based game where you play as a semicolon trying to find its way to the end of a line of code. A script that translates English text into Shakespearean insults. Share your creations, no matter how quirky or impractical. Let's celebrate the joy of coding for coding's sake!
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chubot ◴[20 Oct 24 16:15 UTC] No.41896364[source]▶
I learned in college Geometry class that you can transform a square to an equilateral triangle in 11 cuts or so

So I wrote a matlab program to draw the shapes, and cut them out, and it works

It’s mathematically exact, not just approximate

Still surprises me after 20 years, so I want to find this old program again lol

replies(2): >>41896417 #>>41897664 #
1. quuxplusone ◴[20 Oct 24 18:59 UTC] No.41897664[source]▶
The dissection of a square into an equilateral triangle (or vice versa) is sometimes known as the haberdasher's problem, and can be done in three straight-line cuts.

https://mathworld.wolfram.com/HaberdashersProblem.html

replies(1): >>41899026 #
2. chubot ◴[20 Oct 24 22:30 UTC] No.41899026[source]▶
Hm interesting, I thought it was 11 pieces, not 11 cuts, but that one looks like 4 pieces, which is surprising

Now I am more curious to find this program

Either I didn't do it optimally, or there is some variation like a triangle/rectangle/square

I think there are some problems that have 3 shapes, or it could be triangle/pentagon or something