There is a robot competition at a si-fi convention that I go to every year, and my dad competed in it. He put a sonar type thing on the robot that made it back up whenever it got too close to driving of the edge. Unfortunately, he messed up and made it a bit too sensitive and it mistook some writing on the middle of the plywood that the competition took place on as the edge and backed up whenever it tried to go over it. We lost.

Once, for a CS class project that involved writing team logic for a soccer simulation, this troper created a second team which was the embodiment of Artificial Stupidity as a joke. The team in question ran towards the ball and kicked it in whatever direction they were facing-- even if they were facing the wrong goal. He named it "Team Sea Slug"... after Osaka-san's team from ''AzumangaDaioh'', naturally.

In the early days of PC computing, there was a text-based game where the computer would ask you a series of questions to try to figure out what kind of animal you were thinking of. When you loaded the game, it had a set number of questions already programmed into it. The game also had the ability to store new information, which made it seem pretty smart. If it didn't know the kind of animal you were thinking of, it would say something like, "I give up. What kind of animal are you thinking of?" Then it would ask you to provide a question that would help it guess this animal in the future. A friend of mine had a copy of this game and let me play it. After about an hour with it, I'd managed to load it with enough questions and animals that it didn't even make sense any more. In addition to the regular questions it had, like "Does the animal have feathers?" or "Can the animal swim?" it now had things like, "Is the animal uglier than your mother?"

Sounds like an early, broken version of Akinator, but with animals instead of characters.

This troper once had a CS class project that involved writing an AI algorithm for a Battleship game. As a part-joke, part-test, he added an additional AI that would roll to randomly pick a square to guess on each turn, re-rolling if it got a space it had already tried (and only because the engine wouldn't allow it). In other words, it wouldn't even attempt to guess adjacent spaces after scoring a hit.

Bastard Lego Mindstorms. Tried to program the thing to run an obstacle course. It spun in place until it lost parts.

This Troper once got bored while playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl and decided to have a 3 against 1 match pitting me, playing as Kirby for that challenge that requires you to do so, and 2 AIs playing as Lucas and the Pokemon Trainer against Sonic on Green Hill Zone. About halfway through the fight, the Lucas AI grabbed a Cracker Launcher and SHOT AT THE FLOOR UNDERNEATH HIM AND ME. This caused the floor of the stage to collapse prematurely and nearly sent us both to our deaths. I got away due to Kirby's amazing jumping ability, but Lucas fell. Now, I can't decide if the AI was just being stupid, or if Lucas got jealous of me using Kirby instead of him (Lucas is my main, but I had to play as Kirby for the challenge) and tried to kill Kirby out of rage...

This troper plays a lot of RiseOfNations. At one point, he built a fort near an enemy border ForTheLulz and garrisoned it with the max number of troops so that it could rapid-fire arrows. Then he researched the max attrition damage, so the enemies lost 16 health every second they spent in his territory without a Supply Wagon. He was just doing it to see a bit of scout pwnage, but oh no...they sent out forces of ''archers and pikemen'' with no siege backup and no supplies, to futilely poke at a fort that was machine-gunning them with arrows. Then when their forces shrank from ~30 people to about 5, they turned to run...and immediately dropped dead from attrition damage. FacePalm.

Genis: I'm going to hit you with my supar powerful KENDAMA *Mithos uses rejection* OW OW OW OW!!! FacePalm.

Koga's Skuntank in Pokémon Soul Silver - what the hell? You ''know'' what moves I have and you ''know'' what I put in...''why'' in the ''hell'' would you use ''Dig'' against a Camerupt who you ''know'' has ''Earthquake''?

while playing SidMeiersAlphaCentauri as the Mainfold Caretakers i was on one continent and the usurpers were on another with a small island in between. i was having trouble attacking the usurpers due to them having a massive air force. They did something strange with it though. Any planes they were not using they would send into the sea and then would return to the same base on the next turn for no reason. I manged to take that base with paratroopers and watched as the usurpers entire air force crashed into the ocean.

djkates here. A few years back, I was taking an introductory programming course. (The course used Java, if you were wondering.) At the end of the course, we had an extra credit assignment to make a Tic-Tac-Toe AI. The amount of extra credit was determined by having the [=AIs=] play against each other in a round-robin tournament, with each match-up consisting of two games (each AI going first once). In decreasing order of priority, the determining factors for who would win each matchup were winning games, average amount of time spent making a move, and the file size of the compiled code (smaller = better). In the end, 10 students, myself included, submitted [=AIs=] for this assignment. Now, as you probably know, there is an optimum strategy for Tic-Tac-Toe -- implemented properly, a player using this strategy will never lose a game, and they will win if the opponent makes any mistake. Out of the 10 students who submitted [=AIs=] for the assignment, 3 of us (including me) made one that correctly implemented the optimum strategy, so by comparison, the other 7 would all be displaying ArtificialStupidity. (Incidentally, I ended up winning. Although my code had a larger compiled file size than the others who got the AI right, probably in part because I commented my code extensively and Java does include comments in its compiled code, it won against the others that got it right on the time tiebreaker. I guess I did a little better at decreasing overhead time.) Since this was a few years ago and I no longer have the code from the other students' submissions (we were given access to the compiled versions of everyone's code after the tournament concluded, but the hard drive where I had downloaded that code has since died), I don't remember all the specifics and can't check, but I do remember a few.

Those of us who decided to enter were given a sample source code file so that we could make our AI compatible with the program that would run the game. Said sample file would make a random legal move when called, with no attempt at strategy. One person actually entered this in the tournament.

Another person was attempting to implement the proper strategy, but his code would misread the board state, so it ended up making the wrong moves.

I can't be 100% sure, but I seem to recall a third student whose AI somehow managed to crash the program on occasion. I have no idea how.

This ''WorldOfWarcraft'' playing troper ran across a bot not too long ago that seemed really, really badly programmed, seemed like it would target anything nearby and get right up to its face to attack it, players included, it attacked me and I killed it no problem, it respawned and I decided to have a little fun with it...with a nearby cliff, use your imagination.