When I saw the title, I assumed this would be about Zachtronics games or Human Resource Machine (And it's sequal, 7 Billion Humans) But yeah, I've definitely h

When I saw the title, I assumed this would be about Zachtronics games or Human Resource Machine (And it's sequal, 7 Billion Humans) But yeah, I've definitely had projects I've written purely for fun, or as a "I wonder how well I could code this..." Sometimes, my project has been "This shouldn't work, but I want to see if it somehow does". An example of this was trying to use a neural network that would figure out a single bit of a private key given a Bitcoin address. I generated a testing set of 1000 public/private key pairs, then would do a loop of generating a training set of 1000 key pairs, training until it could predict the last bit correctly 75% of the time, and then testing on the testing set, then generating another training set and beginning the loop again. I let it run for a full week before terminating it. I think the best it got was 57% accuracy, and really, that was a fluke. It typically was 47-53% accurate, which is what I would expect. I never got better than a coin flip.