One of my favorite sites is TheDailyWTF.com, I visit there every day to hear horror stories about software gone wrong. The problems stem from either arrogant developers, arrogant consultants, or arrogant management. Sometimes all three.

Anyway, they were on vacation for the last few weeks of 2007, and re-ran some of the most classic stories. I came across one where some small software company got the brilliant idea of using a neural network to parse reports from a water plant. A neural network is a very complicated beast, with few practical uses... To put this in perspective, it would be like spending millions of dollars inventing artificial intelligence to replace your receptionist. It made utterly no sense.

The neural network consultant begged them to let him write it the standard way: find the patterns in the reports, and write a straightforward text parser... but management refused. They paid this expert an obscene amount of money, it took months, and a tremendous amount of hardware, but it finally worked...

After a few years, the software company got bought out... their new CTO was running through old projects, and confronted the neural network consultant about why he implemented such a bizarre solution. The consultant said it was a management decision, and even produced old specs on how to solve the problem the old-fashioned way. The CTO agreed, and within a few weeks they had it done the right way: faster, cheaper, and more reliable to boot.

However, the CTO realized that they had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars on this artificially intelligent beast, so they should probably try to re-use it for something... anything. In a stroke of what can only be called genius, the CTO ordered the computer to be re-programmed to write spontaneous prose:

The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.

yes... No Quack indeed...