483 rerecords is very low for a movie of this length. Either the game is incredibly trivial to play or you're not trying as many possibilities out to see what's fastest as you could be.
Can someone explain to me what the relevancy is of file extensions for emulator replay files?
Bisqwit wrote:
Did you not also realize that on TASVideos site, that movie files are actually identified by their filename extension, and that by committing the extension .gz exclusively to one movie file format, you are in effect depriving any other emulator the right to use .gz to signify that the movie file is compressed?
Decision problems involving probability distributions are usually very hard to solve and, IIRC, no consensus has been reached yet.
An example that illustrates the non-triviality of these puzzles is the "Two envelopes paradox".
Suppose that you have to choose between two envelopes, one contains X dollars and the other 2X dollars. After choosing an envelope with A dollars, you're given the chance to switch to the other one. To see if it's worthy, you assume that there's 50% chance the other one will have A/2, and another 50% that it'll have 2A. Summing, your expected gain will be 5A/4, thus it's better to switch. However, since that's true for every value, switching before even choosing the envelope would rise your expected value, and this is absurd.
These problems introduce a concept called "expectation", which is hard to formalize in mathematics. By picking a large value, you may think "it's unlikely that the other envelope contains an even larger sum". Basically, in an infinite distribution, the probability of the numbers appearing is not the same. This may influence your players' problem.
I lack the mathematical background to offer a reasonable solution to this problem, I suggest that you look at other paradoxes of probability and decision theories and their proposed solutions and see if it helps you.
EDIT: Wow, it seems Tub posted something similar while I was writing, lol
It's not a paradox, it's like the 'case of the missing dollar' where mathematical concepts are misused to create an apparent contradiction.
I'd solve it something like this:
Pick an envelope. It either has X or 2X, so its expected value is 1.5X.
The other envelope will either have X or 2X, making its expected value also 1.5X.
The 'trick' employed is to consider the case of the two times your amount and 0.5x your amount being irrespective of what amount you picked. Imagine a problem where this actually happened: Two envelopes either had A or 2A in them. When you pick one, the other one updates to randomly have either 2x (your amount) or 0.5x (your amount). Now it WOULD be advantageous to switch. BUT in the case of this problem, if the other envelope offers 2x it's 2x of 1x, and if it offers 1x it's 1x of 2x, essentially cancelling it out.
You don't need to cheat to increase the rank - after every consecutive play, the rank starts at a higher value. So you'd play and die until the rank is as high as you like then start the movie from there.
Here's my thought: "This TAS achieves a perfect game with X hours to spare" sounds more impressive than 'this TAS achieves a perfect game as well as getting X more of Y, Z and Q to spend the rest of the hours'
