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[Jordrake]

We all know that Dwarf Fortress's AI is advanced, brilliant and designed to combat any situation ToadyOne can predict.
But it isn't perfect.
Sometimes it just has your dwarves do the most illogical things. We all know of dwarves that have died because they didn't care about the fact they were on fire, or dying of thirst while out for a swim, but what's the most head-thumpingly stupid thing the Artificial Intelligence has ever done in your game?
For me, it has to the inability to choose an alternate route. Due to a failed attempt to get my fortress a never-ending supply of water from the river, the entire outside of my fortress was flooded. Thankfully, I built around this, and closed off my former main entrance. Unfortunately, there was a groundhog corpse at the edge of the map, just beyond the large body of water. Did my dwarves go around Lake Screwup to get it? Nope. They climbed straight down the slope into the water and had to give up, leaving me with a rotting useless corpse. Also, though it didn't disadvantage me, the dwarven caravan that year came up through the water too, rather than going around it. Just baffling.

[psychologicalshock]

Thing that always pisses me off is when civilian dwarves encounter some enemy and then they start running randomly around the map instead of towards the entrance to the fort  where the military and all the traps are. A lot of dwarves die like this needlessly when they could just have gone  to the entrance that's only one screen away.

[andrewas]

The worst Ive seen recently was a pair of legendary of legendary miners who decided to clean inside a new channel. Me, I would think that cleaning a magma channel in the process of filling is a bad idea, but dorfs are ... different.

[Yarn]

The worst Ive seen recently was a pair of legendary of legendary miners who decided to clean inside a new channel. Me, I would think that cleaning a magma channel in the process of filling is a bad idea, but dorfs are ... different.

"Quick! We can not let the magma get dirty, clean, CLEAN!"

[SkyRender]

 Most of the Dwarven stupidity I can prevent with clever forbidding (and it DOES prevent stupidity; you don't know how often I see "Urist McDumbass cancels action: job item misplaced" seconds after forbidding a bit of obsidian in the path of incoming magma or a full cage trap in the midst of a siege).  The thing I cannot seem to get them to stop doing is murdering each other while sparring.  Even if I give them the weakest weapons imaginable, they STILL manage to drastically wound one another, and the number of stabs to the heart or mangling of upper bodies in gore I've seen them deliver to one another is just ridiculous.  Dwarven army needs sparring dummies badly!

[darkrider2]

What annoys me is when I exploratory mine and find a vein and dig it out. Even though the tunnels are dug in squares, the dwarves have this strange premonition that they should grab the ore then go back through the same hallway they came from, despite the 50 other dwarves clogging it. If only they could grab it then go around. Like a "grab and go" system.

[Deimos56]

The worst Ive seen recently was a pair of legendary of legendary miners who decided to clean inside a new channel. Me, I would think that cleaning a magma channel in the process of filling is a bad idea, but dorfs are ... different.

You let your dwarves clean?

[XSI]

Dwarven army needs sparring dummies badly!

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Elves

As for my experience with stupid AI, dwarves running away from groundhogs. Hunter interupted by groundhog. Or when a hunter sees anything other then his target, and kills them. Once he dropped his target kill off, surely he goes back to fetch the others to prevent wasting ammo?..Nah, just let them rot.

Another thing with hunters, I've had one dive into the magma pipe to retrieve a dead imp he shot moments before, that's not the best idea a dwarf ever had.

[Azgog]

It's also amazing how dwarves have absolutely no sense of urgency and have no idea how to prioritize. I recently played one of the most catastrophic forts I've ever played; my entire military died during a goblin siege, and I was forced to shut the gates (a neat row of floodgates that are lifted up so that caravans can come in), leaving about 15 drwarves, including the mayor, outside of the gates with no way back into the fort. As they were getting slaughtered out there, I checked the forts rations to discover that I had virtually no food and the booze was running out. The food was no problem, as I had about 30 muskoxen, but all the water sources were outside so my dwarves were destined to suffer death by dehydration.

So I began building a channel from an underground lake to the main hall of my fort, away from all the nasty shit like giant toads and lizardmen. The channel was near completion, I had installed a floodgate and ordered it to be rigged to a lever. I had only one mechanic left, who started to work on the gate. He worked for a while, until he suddently decided to leave the job and go on a break.

Now, as he mechanic was lounging in the refuse, vomit, blood and corpse-littered main hall of the fort, eight dwarves died of thirst. He eventually finished linking the floodgate and there was water, but apparently the eight deaths were too much for the dwarves who already had their friends die outside, which sparked a massive tantrum spiral. More and more dwarves began going berserk and started killing all the damn muskoxen queued for slaughtering, effectively destroying the fort's only food supply.

I'm not sure, but I sincerely hope that the mechanic was among the last dwarves who died of starvation. That way he would have been there to see the apocalyptic results, the otherworldly madness caused by his righteously-placed break.

[Kagus]

And this, my friends, is why the Dwarven Short-term Service Draft was conceived.

Dwarves don't draft civilians because there's a war on, they draft civilians because they don't want them to have any free time.

[andrewas]

You let your dwarves clean?

Not since the death of the !!McMiner!! brothers, no.

[Nobbins]

I once drafted all seven of my peoples, so they could withstand a kobold siege without running away. Turns out, five of them got thirsty at once, and I had no spare booze. So they rush out to the local brook, and the kobolds are between them and the brook, so I facepalm as they rush into the siegers. Anyways, they were so hellbent on getting a drink that they ran /through/ the damn kobolds without attacking them, sustaining various sword and bolt related injuries, which triggered them being in "Rest" mode.

Now here's where shit gets bad. They're all really good friends, so once about four of them die, the two back at base tantrum, and one of them kills the other. So I have two people left, and one is still trying to get a drink, and the other decides to go join him, getting slaughtered. The guy finally makes it to the river and drinks, then rushes back through the kobolds to pickup equipment, and the kobolds shoot him down. I was thinking "You have to be shitting me."

D=

[Azulth]

I sent a mason to lock up the clown pit, but he was too busy grabbing narrow socks from the last siege.

Didn't end very well, that one.

[smjjames]

You let your dwarves clean?

Not since the death of the !!McMiner!! brothers, no.

I don't generally have the cleaning problem since I always clear out the magmaducts for the smelters and forges so that the liquid watevers don't get stuck in your stockpile screen, even after they suppousedly evaporate. I do get two or three 'liquid' stuck in the stocks screen from the bits of magma pipe that I channel to open it up, but thats preferrable to 100 something 'liquid' stuck in the stockpile menu.

Other times I run into the illogicalness are freaking out at otherwise harmless animals (mountain goats, deer, marmots, groundhogs....), some of the more potially dangerous animals, sure, but still....

[uberubert]

I always facepalm a little bit every time a dwarf takes his time walk a long way towards a task, turn around 2 tiles before reaching it only to get a drink. THEN he does the same again, and turns around 2 tiles before reaching it to get some food. THEN AGAIN, same thing, turns around before reaching it to go sleep xP.

However, I had the opposite thing happen recently. My sheriff, as the only alive dwarf left with any form of fighting skills, rushed the last few goblins that were rushing inside my fort.(bridge-lever pulling malfunction) As he was running towards the goblins, he took an arrow which broke his foot, but kept going for them.
He reached the marksgoblin and gave 'im a solid beating and killed him before the nearby meleegoblins could gather their thoughts. Then he proceeded to beat the nearest meleegoblin to death before chasing the last ones off, thus single-handedly saving the fort with a broken foot (yellow wound) yay!
While he was resting up his foot, I redecorated his office with a much nicer table and chair, gave him a extra coffer and armorstand. He recovered 2 seasons later, now running around with a missing finger.