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Re:Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of ... by max_ on Monday July 18, 2016 @03:16AM (#12113613)
How old was gates when he wrote this thing??
Re:Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of ... by nekopa on Monday July 18, 2016 @04:09AM (#12113790)
Ah, programmers. I love how we can show the logic behind 3 correct ages for Bill when he wrote this :)
Re:Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of ... by shoo on Monday July 18, 2016 @04:24AM (#12113823)
Then we can don our statistical machine learning hat and make an ensemble model out of the three sub-models.

Unless we do something exotic we're probably going to predict 25 as the point estimate of {24, 25, 26}.

Re:Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of ... by abdulhaq on Monday July 18, 2016 @07:07AM (#12114346)
Don't forget that approx 1% of coders are running on an OS with a bug in the DST times around that time frame. That makes his estimated age as 24 years, 364 days, 23 hours and 57 minutes.
Re:Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of ... by TeMPOraL on Monday July 18, 2016 @06:47AM (#12114271)
The reasoning behind two of those answers has resolution of one year, while the third one uses day precision; it seems that all three are correct within their error ranges.
Re:Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of ... by homingbrain on Monday July 18, 2016 @05:48AM (#12114083)
However, since only one age value can be actually correct in this case, the use of logic looks less like a feature of the programmer's mind and more like a bug.
Re:Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of ... by mikeash on Monday July 18, 2016 @08:40AM (#12114688)
One of them is a case of GIGO, using "36 years ago" as input when the correct value is 35. Fixing that reduces it to two values, and the discrepancy is down to day versus year granularity.
Re:Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of ... by TeMPOraL on Monday July 18, 2016 @06:42AM (#12114253)
All three results are close to each other and to the true value, so I'd still call it a feature :).
Re:Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of ... by Artoemius on Monday July 18, 2016 @03:37AM (#12113675)
He was born on October 28, 1955. Therefore, in August 1981, when the game was released, he was 25.
Re:Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of ... by eDameXxX on Monday July 18, 2016 @03:33AM (#12113661)
Current Bill Gates age: 60. This little game was written 36 years ago.

60 - 36 = 24 <- Bill Gates age when he wrote this.

Re:Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of ... by VinzO on Monday July 18, 2016 @03:31AM (#12113655)
The game was released in 1981, so Gates was 26 years old.