The Strangest Things People Have Done With Computers

We asked artificial intelligence what would be the strangest things done with computers. Here are some very…bizarre answers.

From the moment Charles Babbage sketched his Analytical Engine, computers have inspired equal parts rigor and mischief. Below is a tour of projects—scientific, artistic, and delightfully ridiculous—that demonstrate just how weird humanity can get when given a pile of processors and a little free time.

1. Growing a Computer Out of Living Cells

Slime-mold routing. Physarum polycephalum is a single-celled amoeba famous for solving mazes by oozing toward food in the shortest possible path. Researchers laid oat flakes on a map of Tokyo’s rail network, set a slime mold loose, and watched it recreate an optimized rail grid—no silicon required. Similar “wetware” experiments now cajole bacteria, brain organoids, and even live ants into performing logic operations. The resulting “computers” are slow, messy, and utterly alien to the blinking LEDs we’re used to—but they remind us that computation is a behavior, not a device.

2. Building Digital Brains Inside Video Games

Minecraft players have engineered fully functional 8-bit CPUs—complete with registers, an ALU, and clocks—by wiring redstone dust and torches into gigantic virtual circuit boards. Factorio, Terraria, and even Super Mario Maker host similar feats. The paradox is delicious: you need a powerful modern PC to emulate a computer less capable than a 1970s calculator, all for the joy of saying “I booted BASIC inside a block game.”

3. Automating Prayer Wheels

In Tibetan Buddhism, spinning a prayer wheel is believed to release a mantra into the world. Modern monks can now purchase wheels containing micro-SD cards pre-loaded with millions of text scrolls; the wheel’s motor “spins” the bits continuously, offering a spiritual DDoS of compassion. To outside observers it looks like religious practice, but to a systems engineer it’s mass parallel I/O with a side order of enlightenment.

4. Heating Your House With Cryptocurrency

Proof-of-work mining rigs are infamous space heaters. Some enthusiasts embraced the thermodynamics: they plumb GPU exhaust through radiators and hot-water tanks, effectively paying their electric bill twice—once in kilowatt-hours, once in freshly minted coins. A French startup even marketed a “crypto-boiler” for apartment complexes. Is it green tech or an extravagant toaster? Opinions diverge.

5. Orchestrating Symphonies on Floppy Drives

Before Spotify, there was the screech of stepper motors. Hackers discovered you can play musical scales by commanding a floppy-drive’s read/write head to seek specific tracks at audio frequencies. Stack 16 drives, add a microcontroller, and behold the Imperial March rendered in glorious 3½-inch polyphony. The same trick works with hard-disk actuators and dot-matrix printers—an accidental genre called hardware chiptune.

6. Letting Animals Trade and Tweet

• HamsterCoin: In 2021 “Mr. Goxx,” a German hamster, ran in a specially instrumented wheel that randomly selected cryptocurrency trades. For several weeks the rodent outperformed the S&P 500, proving investors can, in fact, be out-maneuvered by a pet.
• Cat-Cam Laboratories: Krzysztof Szczypiorski’s “PawKey” system trained cats to type via paw-pads and rewarded them with snacks whenever they produced English-looking n-grams. Eventually the felines spammed “rrrrrrrrrrrr” worldwide, a poetic critique of captchas everywhere.

7. Running the World’s Slowest Chess Game (With Mail)

The International Correspondence Chess Federation once staged “Computer vs. Postman,” where grandmasters entered moves into a PC that printed them on postcards. Postal workers then delivered the moves to opponents, who re-typed them. Total network latency: 3 to 5 days per half-move. The experiment highlighted how dependent computation is on I/O—and how stubbornly people will cling to tradition.

8. Brewing Beer on a Mainframe

At the University of Washington in the 1990s, students wired the campus DEC VAX to control fermentation tanks in a dorm basement. Batch parameters were set with command-line scripts; when temperatures drifted, the computer paged operators’ beepers. The resulting amber ale, “VAX Brewski,” earned extra credit in both computer-science and chemical-engineering departments and remains a legend in academic circles.

9. Encoding Data in DNA—and Playing Hide-and-Seek With It

Microsoft and the University of Washington demonstrated storing 200 MB of video inside half a teaspoon of saline-suspended DNA strands, then retrieving a single still frame with a PCR “needle.” One artist went further: she encoded a secret message in DNA, dried it onto paper, and dared bio-hackers to reverse-engineer it at a hacker-conference treasure hunt. Molecular scavenger hunts might be the strangest future for copy-protection yet.

10. Simulating a Universe to Find Ourselves

The “Digital Physics” crowd seriously wonders if reality is a computation—so they tried to falsify it. By simulating lattice universes on supercomputers and looking for tell-tale anisotropies (cosmic-ray energies that would max out at the grid spacing), they hope to detect the “pixel resolution” of spacetime. So far no luck, but the exercise lands firmly in the category: “Things we do only because we built very big computers.”

Why We Keep Getting Weirder

What drives these projects is not utility alone—it’s curiosity, play, and the itch to see whether the laws of computation bend in unfamiliar contexts. Computers began as number-crunchers, morphed into communication devices, and now invade biology, art, religion, and philosophy. Every time hardware grows cheaper or more powerful, another hobbyist points at something unlikely—a slime mold, a hamster, a prayer wheel—and whispers, Could that be a computer?

The answer, more often than not, is why not? And so the catalog of oddities keeps expanding, proving that the strangest thing about computers is ultimately us: our boundless appetite for turning the serious into the surreal, one clock-cycle at a time.