A new Date("byAnyOtherName")
Computational Crimes
Oops! All JavaScript
Color Me Impressed
Language Barriers
100
new Date("49") > new Date("50")
True
Date parses "49" to assume you mean 2049, however once you hit 50 it rolls over to the 1900s so "50" returns 1950 which actually comes before 2049.
100
This bit twiddling hack was used to speed up lighting calculations in Quake 3 by hijacking the IEEE floating point standard.
Fast Inverse Square Root
100
Evaluate:
{} + {}
NaN
Object plus an object is factually "not a number" so it makes sense.
100
In the color printing acronym CMYK, C stands for cyan, M stands for magenta, Y stands for yellow. What does the K stand for?
Black
White commons from the card backing itself, making it important to color correct based on what card base you are using.
100
This programming language is known for it's characteristic use of significant whitespace and is objectively awful and I hate it.
What is Python?
200
new Date("99") > new Date("100")
True
See this one is also true because "99" is obviously 1999, but when you hit "100" it breaks the size 2 check which switches full stated year format. Since it's not long enough it conveniently adds a leading zero for the year 0100. 1999 > 0100.
200
It turns out our eyes are vastly less sensitive to chroma compared to luminance. JPEG compression takes advantage of this by throwing away this amount of color data without us noticing.
75%
Cb and Cr are typically sampled at 4:2:0 resulting in 4 pixel downsampling. This removes 75% of the data for two of the channels. Y is sampled at 100% resulting in a total data compression of 50% before any other techniques are used.
200
Evaluate:
"b" + "a" + - + "a" + "a"
'baNaNa'
200
A visual effect where color fringes are added around objects to emulate the fact that different wave lengths of light focus at different points. It is used in modern games to bring in artsy flair by emulating poor photography.
What is chromatic aberration?
200
This language has accidentally won several Esoteric Language competitions only to be discovered that it was not a custom purposefully built bad language but was in fact production code from a mainstream language.
What is JavaScript?
300
new Date("0 1 1")
Sat Jan 01 2000 00:00:00 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)
There are no days that start with zero in them or months, so it helpfully parses it as an offset to the year starting at 2000 (+0)! After that it switches to "YYYY MM DD" formatting.
300
You're not bad at cards! Turns out 1 in 400 games of Klondike Solitare are invalid. What is the time complexity to evaluate an illegal game of Klondike Solitaire?
O(1) you only have to look through the deck once which is 52 / 3 checks.
300
Evaluate:
[[1, 2, 3] + [4, 5, 6]] + []
'1,2,34,5,6'
Adding two arrays converts them into strings with commas that get concatenated giving ['1,2,34,5,6']. ['1,2,34,5,6'] + [] concatenates a second time but this time with empty string which can be used to unwrap the array.
300
Color spaces such as RGB and HSV suffer from issues with gradients not correctly blending in gamma space. This alternative color space provides smooth gradients by converting all colors into a uniform color space to preserve perceptual uniformity.
Oklab color space (okLCH)
300
This langauge was invented in the early 2000s when its inventor Anders Hejlsberg looked at Java and remarked "Yeah something like that, but better."
What is C#?
600
new Date("how about maybe 1?")
Tue May 01 2001 00:00:00 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
The "may" in "maybe" is parsed as the month May. Since we have a named month in the time that means the code falls through to the timezone code and uses your local time zone. The parser then fails to find the year "b" so it skips the rest of the text for number parsing. 1 is less than 10 but since we already have a month it switches to day parsing since 1 < 32. Then because we parsed a day the year is defaulted to 2001 which is used for all string dates when no zero is found in the string. :)
600
In 2014, chess was solved for all games with 7 pieces with the final table taking 140TB of data. Using a syzygy tablebase the size has been reduced to total lookup table size to this number (+/- 20%).
What is 16.7 TiB
(Double points for exact, 13-19 TB accepted)
600
parseInt(1 / 1999); -> 0
parseInt(1 / 19999); -> 0
parseInt(1 / 199999); -> 0
parseInt(1 / 1999999); -> ??????
5
praseInt() always converts it's inputs into strings for evaluation, hence the parse part. The function terminates early as soon as it encounters a non-number. All of the other floats are evaluated at 0.xxx05xxxx which parses as "0", but once you hit e-7 the string switches to exponent notation which puts a "5" in front of the string: "5.00000250000125e-7"
600
DAILY DOUBLE BUFFERED
What is my favorite color?
600
In a 2019 paper it was discovered that 93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Programs in this language.
What is Perl?
https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/
800
new Date("May 4 UTC+60:60")
Sun May 01 1960 05:00:00 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
It parses the date just fine and even the UTC+! You can have +60 hours but you sadly cant have 60 minutes, so it backtracks to the "+" but drops the ":" in the second pass. Since we have a stand alone "60" and that's greater than "50" that means the year must be 1960! Also the +60 hours is the future time we want and we need to adjust that into local time zone so the actual date needs to roll back a total of 67 hours to the local date of May 1st. :)
800
"The association for computational heresy" hosts this annual event for advancing computing tomfoolery.
SIGBOVIK
Go check out other random dumb papers here: https://sigbovik.org/2025/proceedings.pdf
800
Evaluate:
([] + !"" / [])[!""+!!""]+([] + !"" / [])[(!""+!!""<<!"")+!""]+([] + {})[(!""<<!""<<!"")+!""]+([] + !"")[(!""<<!"")+!""]+({}+"")[((!""<<(!""<<!""))<<!"")-!""]+({}+"")[!""+!""+!""]+({}+"")[!""-!!""]+({}+"")[!""<<!""]
'nice job'
This took like 5 minutes to construct since I'm bad at JavaScript. :(
800
Used in the simulation of smoke, this noise technique uses multiple stacked octaves of progressive noise to create a richer result.
Fractal Brownian Motion
800
The following is a valid code in this two-dimensional, toroidal language. (Bonus +200 points for the output)
0voa ~/?=0:\
voa oooo'Buzz'~< /
>1+:aa*1+=?;::5%:{3%:@*?\?/'zziF'oooo/
^oa n:~~/
What is ><>? (Fish)
Program: Fizz Buzz