Edit: There is now an improved online-version.
I am not entirely sure where to post it, but I figured since it is a blueprint for mean dares and punishments, here may be the right place.
These days I came across a thread for line-writing punishments which for some reason I found quite intriguing, especially seeing the variant where you have to use a different color for every letter. The pointlessness of the task combined with the ridiculous but beautiful aspect of being able to only write one letter at a time has something humiliating on it.
However, this got me thinking: The common variant of cycling through the colors (for instance pink → yellow → green → pink → yellow and so on) allows you to create a queue of your pens by putting them next to each other with the leftmost always being the next one and putting every pen back as the new rightmost. It is already quite a slowdown, but still somewhat efficient.
The first possible fix is to prescribe an order in which the colors appear multiple times in a chaotic way (yellow → pink → red → yellow → blue → red →pink → blue → repeat). Since such an order is both harder to memorize and you cannot use the above method to always take the right next color, picking the next pen must now be done in a conscious way, making it a lot harder.
It is however still possible to make it harder: If the order is completely random and comes from an external list, you cannot possibly learn it by hard and you are now also forced to check the external list every time. In other words: give each color a number and throw a dice until you have a different color than the one before. While this is very slow if you do it live, it is impossible to verify that the color-order is correct or even created with a dice. Therefore pass the person who does the writing a list yourself (you could throw a dice yourself, but just using a computer is much easier).
Still… it's not like this would be mentally challenging…
And this is where the programmer in me came through: Why not generate random small calculations that evaluate to the desired color (for example: 11 * 3 - 31 would be color two. The great thing is that this is trivial to do with a very small program whose output is even in a format that allows pasting into some other programs that will then calculate all the results for verification.
So, here is how the output looks:
(-19) * (-13) + (-243)
(7) * (-4) + (31)
(-10) * (-13) + (-126)
(-12) * (-20) + (-238)
(6) * (2) + (-8)
(-19) * (5) + (97)
(6) * (14) + (-83)
(1) * (-20) + (22)
(-5) * (-3) + (-14)
(5) * (-3) + (18)
this evaluates to this:
4 3 4 2 4 2 1 2 1 3
Now for the bad news: This is a pure command-line program and I can only offer you the
code (C++11), so for people who are not technic-savvy people this might not be very useful (you can however create it with a dice if you want, though this will likely be more work for the creater than the writer), but it is possible to just give them a list of calculations created by the program.
To get the correct results, simply paste the list into the command-prompt of your favorite languages interpreter, since almost every one of those ill accept the format (If you are using Forth, that is your problem).
Maybe someone can also create executables or even a nicer interface?