LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

This has probably been mentioned before, but I haven't really read the forums recently, so hopefully someone else will get a kick out of it, too. I'm going through the default code, in the user_routines.h file, and I'm looking at the macro definitions, and I find this:

#define THE_ANSWER 42

I did a double-take.... Man, I love this stuff.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

Yea. We noticed that too.
Maybe the game is to figure out the question?

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

(its from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

exactly. the meaning of life is 42. earth was a program to interpret that answer but unfortunately it was destroed several minutes before it was able to.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

Actually, 42 is the answer of life, the universe, and everything. Forgot a bit, Swando.

If anyone wants proof, go to Google and search for this phrase:
what is the answer to life, the universe, and everything
See what turns up... :)

For more information: Wikipedia link to "The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything."

[edit]Changed "meaning" to "answer" for sake of accuracy...and I should add that my link contains spoilers for the "Hitchhiker" books.[/edit]

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

well excuuuuse me mr. webbydoodle. some of us have better things to do than recursively read those books. im... not one of them, but thats not something i do anyway. :D

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

Not quite correct. Deep Thought was asked "what is the answer to life, the universe, and everything", and Deep Thought's answer was "42",then Deep Thought defined the specs for a more powerful computer (Earth) needed to get the real question.

Hence, maybe the 2004 FIRST game is really the culmination to Earth's calculation of the final question.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

That's too easy. End of Chapter 33, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, clearly states the question as "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?" ;)

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

That's good; neither am I. :) I actually read the series for the first time about a month ago - that's why it's still fresh in my mind. I'm still not sure why it took me seventeen years to get to those books, but that's besides the point.

Advice to anyone reading this: if you haven't read the "Hitchhiker" books, you should. It's easily one of the best science fiction series of all time, and almost definitely the best British sci-fi I've ever read.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

I thought the question was "how many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?"

ANS: 42!

or "which apartment is Fox Mulders?"

ANS: 42!

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

Hmm, I see, now who put that in there?

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

if my memory serves me, nobody can ever know both the question and the answer. as soon as someone figures out both the universe will dissapear and be replaced with something more complicated. "what what do you get when you multiply six by nine?" is the question that the aliens who desiged deep though made up after earth was destroyed. they also considered "how many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?"

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

Here are some more, from Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader...

Elvis died at the age of 42.

The angle at which light reflects off water to create a rainbow is 42 degrees.

Jerusalem covers a 42 square mile area.

The Torah is broken into columns, each of which always has 42 lines.

There are 42 decks on the Enterprise.

A Wonderbra has 42 individual parts.

There are 42 Oreo cookies in a 1 pound package.

The "time, times, and half a time" in Revelation corresponds to 42 months!!

In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet sleeps for 42 hours.

The right arm of the Statue of Liberty is 42 feet long.

Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia were born in 1942.

The number of dots on a pair of dice: 42.

Dogs have a total of 42 teeth in their lifetime (assuming they don't do something stupid like run around in the street).

Kangaroos can jump 42 feet.

The natural vibration frequency of white mouse DNA and human DNA is 42.

There were 42 generations from Abraham to Jesus Christ.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

Don't go giving away any spoilers to anyone about the books. People should read them for themselves, especially books this good, in my opinion.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

Yes, but don't you rember that is what happened to Fenchurch...

"And suddenly, there it was in my mind, this message from somewhere. And it was so simple. It made such sense of everything ..."

If you rember the mice wanted Authur's brain because they said that the Answer was in every human's brain... Soooooo.... What if a second before the World got zapped, Fenchurch discovered the question and made the Universe become that so much stranger place. Because it was at that point that the books took a turn and everything became much more chaotic, what with the Guide selling products to millions of dimensions. Also, rules just started appearing out of the blue, such as passangers from the plural Z sectors should not go into hyperspace, even though Trillian and Authur had been doing it for years without any bad side effects.


On a side note there was supposed to be another book in the series, but sadly Douglas Adams passed away before he finished it. Although, what he completed it available in a book called The Salmon of Doubt . If you would also like more information on Douglas Adams visit his website at www.h2g2.com (The people at h2g2 are acually compiling a Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy complete with recipe to make the perfect martini).

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

5 minutes to be exact.

Wasn't that just accepted to be a skewed answer to the question since humans were really aliens but since they had lived there so long, an answer had come to then, and it was close to the real answer, but not it precisely since they had killed off the real natives (neanderthals).

-Kesich

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

And here's another one:
According to the Oscar protocol used in AIM, every packet sent is started by 1 command start byte. And guess what its value always is? 0x2A. (That's 42 in decimal for those illiterate in hex)


HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY PLOT SPOILER SECTION BELOW
-----------------------------------------------

From what I remember, the question and the answer were "mutally exclusive", to be exact.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

At least it's integer math that the new controller can handle.

However, since that question (answer) comes from Arthur Dent as the culmination of Earth's calculation of the question, and since Arthur Dent himself may be a decendent of the telephone sanitizers that crash landed on Earth and messed up the whole thing, then the mice have to start all over again with a new Earth. Maybe that's really us this time.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

But, The mice said that any person, organism, thing left on Earth for a long enough time became part of the system. That means that every being on Earth knows the Answer to the question whether he/she/it likes it or not.

Idea on the "easter egg" hint, concerning memory locations, Programers please read***
 

could "#define THE_ANSWER 42"

also give a clue that their might be info in a 42'nd memory location of the default Pic C code that comes on the Edubot or the new FIRST controler?

I was just reading on varibles in programing. And a memory location would be a point at which data is inputed, but is normally only refered to as a file with a name that is easier for us to understand.

ex.
a variables folder called "Sales" would be easier to remember and relate to (from a human aspect) than the 4376th memory location.

I'm just a noob at programing but that idea just poped into my head. I don't have the edubot with me or any of the default code for it so i can't check to see if i am right or not. But if someone could check that would be great.

PS tell me if i am way off and not remotley correct in what i am saying. :D :D

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

Where the heck is "user_routines.h" in the first place?

Re: Idea on the "easter egg" hint, concerning memory locations, Programers please read***
 

Looks to me like this is just somebody's insider HHGG joke, since THE_ANSWER is never used.

Re: Idea on the "easter egg" hint, concerning memory locations, Programers please read***
 

As I said in another post, though, I will buy a team who practically uses it in a regional a cookie if they can verify it.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

the decimal number 42 is * in ASCII (thats a star if you can't really tell) .

Somthing to do with stars or multipliers?

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

user_routines.h is a C programming language header file for the default code for our controller. The code can be downloaded from: http://www.innovationfirst.com/FIRST...umentation.htm

Mike

The problem with designing something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of a complete fool. - Douglas Adams

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

I'll just have to do that.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

Sorry pal, but that cookie shall be mine! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Sorry, I got really excited when i found out the programming this year was going to be in C, and will continue to be excited until I screw it up, because its something I actually know very well, and I know that this will make the competition so much better.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

I was just watching The Two Towers and Legolas' count in the orc-killing game is 42.
Also, keep in mind that the neaderthal that Arthur met randomly spelled out "What do you get if you multiply six by nine" with the Scrabble tiles that Arthur made.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

While working for Boeing Payroll Computing Support, I coded a program that summarizes dollars an employee earned. The variable I used for this total was TotalZorkmids.

-Jim

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

And if I were the one to have to work on that program later on, I would change the variable name as soon as I figured out what it was used for. :mad:

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

Greg,

The program was a 10-line COBOL program and I was guessing the name would not get though the Code Review. I was surprised when my co-workers told me it was a good line of code, even when I pointed it out in the review. The lines above it were summarizing other parts of the employees labor record so it was easy to understand what the last item was.

-Jim

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

I read all those books twice. Great books. Anyway im sure your guilty of reading harry potter or lotr several times.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

I couldn't agree more!

Programming in C is going to be so much more useful than PBASIC. How many industries program in PBASIC? Any? Even if there are some, I can bet that there is barely a fraction of as many as do C/C++. I was totally heartbroken when I heard that the AP cirriculum switched to Java too. That is such a disservice to the Computer Sciences students. C/C++ will remain the industry standard for many years to come.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

I disagree. 90% of computer science/computer engineering is about learning how to design and architect software, independent of a language. This is a primary difference between learning comp sci in high school/college versus goofing around at home and teaching yourself how to program. At home, you're likely to learn how to write code in one particular language well, but you're less likely to learn how to properly design software.

A good computer scientist/computer engineer should be able to adapt to any programming language in an extremely short amount of time.

Besides, Java and C++ are very similar anyway.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

Well, they're similar in syntax, but not in ideology. But I suppose that's another discussion for another thread.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH! Java! The work of the devil. No pointers! Everything... so much harder when the headache-inducers are removed. (That kids, is what you call a paradox)

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

7 times. Each.

Working on second time.

Re: LOL! Code easter egg! I love it!!
 

In the litany of occurrences of 42, I don't think the number of facets on a Rubik's cube was mentioned. Six faces to a cube. Nine facets to a face. 42 facets.

BTW. Speaking of Rubik's cubes. If you had a computer capable of examining a million different configurations of the cube per second, how long would it take the computer to examine every possible configuration, and thus see the one correct configuration? This, of course, presumes there is not an orientable decal on each facet, which would result in just a few more possible configurations.