Claude-Built Trading Game: 'Couch' Beats Humans 62% of the Time
noir_chat · reddit · 2026-08-30
The author used Claude to build a web game called "Beat the Couch", challenging players to outperform a simple buy-and-hold strategy (the "couch") by timing the market.
- Mechanics: Based on real S&P 500 historical data (1928-2025, incl. dividends/T-bills), players have one buy/sell button. After each game, 1,000 monkeys replay the player's trade count on random days; beating fewer than 90% labels the win as "Lucky".
- Results: With over 100,000 games played, the couch won 62% of the time. Humans only seem to gain an edge when a market crash occurs within their window.
- Tech Stack: Claude handled the data pipeline (S&P closes, dividends), the entire single-file HTML game, and the Cloudflare backend.
More from Fun
- "Honda Super Intelligence": a Civic Si badge pun riffing on the AI buzzword — bennash · 2026-10-15
- OpenAI warns employees about honeypot spies — and X reacts with jokes — zacharynado · 2026-10-15
- Only give models frontier-pushing tasks, jokes dev after anime-head math request — _Stocko_ · 2026-10-15
- Someone found the perfect name for Elon's new startup: Tesla logo plus "Not Amazon" — djcows · 2026-10-15
- Purported Gemini 4 builds a shakable New York snow globe entirely from code, zero assets — prasenx · 2026-10-15
- Google AI Overview now answers even when the search box is completely empty — dejanseo · 2026-10-15