nfq should watch one of those science documentaries that goes over the formation of the solar system.
When a human moves on its own will, it's actually because of a particular pattern of neural activity in its brain, which sends the signals to its muscles to move, which tense up through electrochemical reactions, and all these systems exist because of the air and nutrients it takes in and the growth and repairs it does to itself, etc etc. Nothing a human does is uncaused, because its environment 'caused' the human first, and anything it decides to do is a result of a particular pattern of its neural activity, which is a result of what it's experienced, how it's brain grew and formed, etc etc etc. Or would you also say that microscopic organisms responding to their environment are uncaused movers?
An argument over 'what was the first mover' is interesting, but not really scientifically relevant - it's more a question of philosophy. You can scientifically examine the properties of a bar of soap you found in your hotel room without knowing where soap is made from; what caused soap. Similarly, we can figure out how things in our universe work without knowing what makes a universe.
EDIT: Oops, lots of posts while I was waiting.
Also, this thread reminded me about things I learned in high school physics, like how you can determine escape velocity by solving for the velocity that results in a kinetic energy exactly equal to gravitational potential energy (the version with 0 at infinity). Neat!
This actually isn't true. If you take an object in an orbit with no friction and activate its thrusters momentarily it will enter the orbit that passes through the point it thrusted at and is slightly wider/narrower. However, if the thrusting is TOO strong in the outward direction it will become a parabolic or hyperbolic orbit, as it is moving away faster than the thusly weakening gravity will ever be able to grab hold of it. However, before that point, there are many many kinds of elliptical paths an orbiting object can and will orbit.
The only reason why an object that gets too close to a planet crashes is because friction in the atmosphere makes it lose speed, fall more and more vertically and then it hits the planet. If the planet had no atmosphere and no radius, then tightening its orbit would just make it a tighter ellipse - gravity + no acceleration + no friction = a path that follows a conic, which is one of: circle, ellipse, parabola, hyperbola.
If you can run it in a virtual machine you can use the 'take snapshot' ability to make savestates. Either record the footage externally and slice it by hand or have it recorded within the virtual machine as well (ouch!)
Alternatively, you can pummel the frame rate with the right tools, and get slow motion.
I don't get to write down my dreams often, I normally forget too much for it to be worth sharing, so here are some ones that I have:
(also, I wrote these for myself, so if any references need clarification let me know)
19th November 2010
11th January 2010
I've also dreamed about made-up BYOND games (BYOND is a platform for tile-based multiplayer games, look it up) (said tile based game was in a supersized mansion, it was a co-operative dungeon crawler/rpg type thing with your icon getting coloured to indicate status effects) and lots of roguelikes based off of Castle of the Winds, IVAN and angband/ToME, among many other things.
I also just realized that the cartoonish black and white look mentioned in that dream was probably based off of the Fancy Pants Adventure flash games, which would also explain the spiders.
I prefered it when you could see the description and a link to the artist's comments/forum topic/etc. It shows the kind of intelligence that's put behind each run, and what can be said about it, and will help catch people's attention - especially for ones like that really glitched soccer game, which without a description will make people think "WTF? Why a soccer game?'
My opinion is just use point.
Humans are good at, among other things, filling in detail where it is absent. HQx et all attempt to do this for the human, but lacking AI like techniques will always fall short in how much they can interpolate.
Besides, who watches TASes of video games at 8x normal size?
That said, HQx looks better than Scalex, at least for the provided screen shot.
It would be cumbersome. There's no notion of a frame in java, a key event can appear at any point during operation, and if it's multithreaded then threads can run in any order the OS decided.
The play around needed more tension. A lot of the time was spent just phasing back and forth through objects again and again - it's neat to show off, but once it's shown that it exists it would be best reserved for phasing in new ways/patterns or to escape/get into/out of danger.
I also agree with the person who said that each level should end with a mad dash to the exit, or at least the time near the flag pole should be minimized.
I do understand that making a speed run is tricky when you can't earn any points. It rules out power ups (which rules out breaking bricks), it rules out grabbing coins and hitting coin boxes, it rules out killing anything and kicking shells. Still, surely there's room to play creatively around dodging and misleading every enemy.
There was a run submitted for a game like this, for either the gameboy or the gameboy advance. I forget what the name was so I can't search for it.
EDIT: Found it: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10137
Brute force will -never- be viable for anything but the shortest term tasks.
Much much more likely are programs that are goal-driven, with an awareness of how the program works and when they have achieved it. Then you give them a list of goals and they optimize it genetically.
This has already been done by Bisquit (MM bot that drops powerups, lunar pool bot that plays the whole freaking game, solomon key goal driven bot)