Sounds like you need to work on that time preference. Have you considered setting up an accountability system or self-blackmailing to make sure you're not having too much fun?
Yes, with the possible exception of moral patients with a reasonable likelihood of becoming moral agents in the future.
Meat tastes nice, and I don't view animals as moral agents.
Define "optimal". Optimizing for the utility function of min(my effort), I could misuse more company resources to run random search on.
In which case, best I can do is 10 lines
MakeIntVar A
Inc A
Inc A
A=A+A
A=A*A
Inc A
A=A+A
A=A*A
Inc A
A=A+A
Well, that does complicate things quite a bit. I threw those lines out of my algorithm generator and the frequency of valid programs generated dropped by ~4 orders of magnitude.
Preliminary solution based on random search
MakeIntVar A
Inc A
Shl A, 5
Inc A
Inc A
A=A*A
Inc A
Shl A, 1
I've hit on a bunch of similar solutions, but 2 * (1 + 34^2) seems to be the common thread.
Define "shortest". Least lines? Smallest file size? Least (characters * nats/char)?
Square error has been used instead of absolute error in many diverse optimization problems in part because its derivative is proportional to the magnitude of the error, whereas the derivative of the absolute error is constant. When you're trying to solve a smooth optimization problem with gradient methods, you generally benefit from loss functions with a smooth gradient than tends towards zero along with the error.