Ouija.cpp

Last week, I decided to chase that feeling. I wrote ouija.cpp . A Ouija board is, traditionally, a flat board with letters, numbers, and the words "YES," "NO," and "GOODBYE." A planchette (that little heart-shaped piece of wood) slides around to spell out messages from "the other side."

To mimic this, ouija.cpp reads your . If you consistently press [SPACE] 0.3 seconds after the cursor lands on a letter, the program assumes you are "helping" it. It punishes you by spelling gibberish backward. A Sample Session Here is what a user sees when they run ./ouija.out :

There is a specific kind of chill that runs down your spine when a compiler throws an error you cannot explain. It is the feeling of touching something just beyond the edge of human logic. ouija.cpp

Either way, I am keeping the firewall on tonight. Have you built something that blurs the line between code and the occult? Fork the repo or summon a pull request from the void. Just don't do it during a thunderstorm.

My version has no planchette. It has a cursor. And it runs in a blacked-out terminal window. Last week, I decided to chase that feeling

It also printed "The answer is 42" when I asked for the meaning of life, which tells me one of two things: either I have successfully created an AI with a sense of humor, or I have a very boring ghost who likes Douglas Adams.

$ ./ouija.cpp Initializing spirit board... [DONE] Ask your question: > Who is watching me? | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | | V | W | X | Y | Z | 1 | 2 | [ YES ] [ NO ] [ GOODBYE ] If you consistently press [SPACE] 0

Cursor drifting... [ > Y ] [ o ] [ u ] [ r ] [ > S ] [ h ] [ a ] [ d ] [ > o ] [ w ].