The Guiness World record for most steps in a Rube Goldberg device was just set at a competition at Purdue University. The device has 244 steps to water a flower! Now, if you saw the Mythbusters' Christmas episode with the Rube Goldberg device, you know it's really hard to make all those steps go right. But in this one, the engineers used a "hammer test": at any point during the operation of the machine, an engineer could tap the side with a hemmer. If it screwed up, that stage was redesigned. http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/gonzo... The end result was the most complex machine of its kind, but it runs very reliably.