You might find mlatu-6[0] interesting- it’s convertible to SKI calculus but concatenative (like Forth) rather than applicative. It’s actually a subset of Mlatu, a language I created for similar reasons to explore “how low can you go.”
Quadtrees are also quite useful for generating fractals.
A very related project of mine, Lambda Screen [0], explores this by encoding these functional quadtrees directly in lambda calculus and rendering the structure based on Church booleans being true (white) or false (black).
With fixed point recursion, this allows for very tiny definitions of IFS fractals. For example, fractals like the Sierpinski triangle/carpet only require ~50 bit of binary lambda calculus [1] [2]!
Back in 1999-2000 there was an "International RoShamBo Programming Competition" [1] where computer bots competed in the game of rock-paper-scissors. The baseline bot participant just selected its play randomly, which is a theoretically unbeatable strategy. One joke entry to the competition was carefully designed to beat the random baseline ... by reversing the state of the random number generator and then predicting with 100% accuracy what the random player would play.
Edit: the random-reversing bot was "Nostradamus" by Tim Dierks, which was declared the winner of the "supermodified" class of programs in the First International RoShamBo Programming Competition. [2]
In the last few months I've seen many advertisements for a device they call the "Super Box" - it's essentially an (Android based?) IPTV device with every channel imaginable. The people I know with them paid around $300 and there isn't a monthly fee.
I have a hunch they're trading free TV for becoming a residential proxy unknowingly. Would love to capture network traffic from one and see what's really going on.
The fact that people are willing to buy these super sketchy devices and plug them into their networks without a second thought is kinda scary.
"The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. "That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate."
The short summary of this hypothesis is that the ocean develops hypoxic zones, anaerobic bacteria boom, and eventually the ocean starts releasing masses of poisonous H2S gas that wipes out most life on land (and strips the ozone layer for good measure).
They speculate that this might have been a mechanism behind the "great dying" at the end of the Permian. I'm sure the thinking has advanced in the last 20 years, but whenever people ask what the worst-case scenario for global warming could be, my mind drifts back to this.
[0]: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Mlatu-6