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Jaybaz (still not sure that’s his name!) has an interesting post on the most extreme thing that could possibly work. He brings up an interesting thing like what is the shortest method you could write and still do something useful? 10 lines, maybe 5 lines? How about a 1-line method?

I have an interesting, non-programming story about this. I was starting my first year in the MBA program at the oldest college in the US (those are some of my classmates in that picture… a few other friends and I designed the site before the IT group took it and represented it as theirs). The first day was a team-building day, entirely outside, at the ropes course. For those that don’t know what a ropes course is, it is a bunch of different obstacles made of wood and, well, ropes, and the obstacles usually require you to overcome your fear and rely on your friends. They are holding your belay line, so if they screw up, you’re toast!

Get to the point already! Ok, our final challenge was to build a boat out of wood, rope, and inner tubes and be the fastest group to paddle around a course. Restrictions were everyone had to be on the “boat”. Considering it was a couple hundred yards around the course, one team managed to finish in 2 minutes, 45 seconds. Very impressive, but they didn’t win. They were all paddling their fool head off, but they did not win.

We won (yeah, I like that part). Our official time was 1 second. Every other team worked on shaving a few seconds off someone else’s time. The most extreme thing was to finish in zero time. How? We created one big piece-of-crap boat that everyone else sat on, holding on to the pier, thus preventing the time from starting. Meanwhile, I paddled around the course very slowly, laughing at another group paddling furiously as their boat sank in the middle of the lake, connected to my group by a huge amount of rope. We were still on 1 boat, and we still paddled around the course. They let go of the pier and I touched it; total time was 1 second.

So don’t look on ideas like 1-line methods with disdain. They can sometimes lead to a spark that can drastically change what you are doing.