A collection of GitHub projects that I think are great! All of them are objectively useless, but they are all fun, educational or devilishly clever.
Found via @opensource.index on Instagram
I find many fun projects from opensource.index on Instagram. It posts short, well-picked showcases of open-source projects. They are mostly useless for professional work, but almost always fun and interesting.
MCMC demo
Interactive Markov-chain Monte Carlo Javascript demos. Watch sampling algorithms like Metropolis-Hastings, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and NUTS explore a distribution in your browser, and tweak their parameters as they run. Try the live demo. Found via this opensource.index post. — Chi Feng
https://github.com/chi-feng/mcmc-demo
DOOM fire
How the fire effect in the PlayStation version of DOOM was done. It turns out to be a tiny algorithm: heat spreads upward through a pixel buffer and cools a little at random as it rises. Read the article. — Fabien Sanglard
https://github.com/fabiensanglard/DoomFirePSX
Diamond WebGL
Ray-tracing engine for real-time diamond rendering in WebGL. Pick the cut and tweak the optical properties, and watch light bounce around inside the gem, facet by facet, right in your browser. Try the live demo. — piellardj
https://github.com/piellardj/diamond-webgl
Map generators
Projects that conjure up whole worlds, coastlines, rivers and all, from nothing but code.
Fantasy Map Generator
Web application generating interactive and highly customizable maps. Generate a fantasy world in your browser, with continents, rivers, biomes, countries, cities and roads, then edit every part of it. Popular with fiction writers and game masters. Try the live demo. — Azgaar
https://github.com/Azgaar/Fantasy-Map-Generator
Generate maps
My own recipes for generating fictional maps with code, just for the fun of it. In the terrain-shaping notebook, a landscape is built up step by step in 3D, from pure noise to sine waves to Perlin noise, with a sea level that turns the high ground into islands. — skipperkongen (me)
https://github.com/skipperkongen/generate-maps
Legendary Oldies
Quine Relay
This is a Ruby program that generates Scala program that generates Scheme program that generates …(through 50 languages)… REXX program that generates the original Ruby code again. — Yusuke Endoh
https://github.com/mame/quine-relay
Stack sort
In a recent xkcd‘s alt text, Randall Munroe suggested stacksort, a sort that searches StackOverflow for sorting functions and runs them until it returns the correct answer. So, I made it. If you like running arbitrary code in your browser, try it out. — Gregory Koberger