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I'm not sure this is the topic to report in, but I found something strange with the number of votes for the newly published SM64 run, that might have something to do with this new voting system:
How can a run have 78.5 votes? Is the 0.5 vote for a vote that rated only entertainment or only technical? Again, sorry if this is the wrong thread.
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mz wrote:
Also, GarlandTheGreat's run is pretty useless... He writes values to RAM whenever he feels like.
I guess I'm just not very updated, but I didn't know this. How did he do that? That's a little sad, I thought his movies were pretty good. So they're basically done by writing stuff to RAM to get good luck and such?
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I searched for Youtube and got 999 000 000 hits today and 0 hits 2001... Quite impressive. I wonder if there's any search phrase that yields 0 hits 2001 and even more hits today than Youtube did.
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Please do provide the search phrase. :) Hmm, perhaps the competition should be modified to only allow searches that yields at least 1 hit 2001. Division by zero is not always appreciated. ;)
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Nice! We could make this into a small competetion - Who can find the search with the highest (current google hits) / (2001 google hits) ratio?
I searched "Obama" and got 4420 hits 2001 and 187 million on current google, giving the ratio 42 307.
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Dear Bisqwit,
What countries have you been to, besides Finland? (I can only think of USA at the moment) Which one did you like the most? Is there any country that you would like to visit one day that you haven't already?
Awesome, finally this game is picked up again! And quite a big improvement too, I didn't think that much time could be shaved off this soon. Well, I'll definitely watch it when I get home and give some input. :)
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I might be possible to convert it back to .fcm using TAS movie editor, by splicing all the input from the .fm2 back to an .fcm, but I'm not sure it works.
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alden wrote:
Wow! Awesome. So how'd you do it? :D
If he says MS Paint I'll be extremely impressed. ;) Seriously though, they look awesome, and I am already quite impressed. :)
Oh, and I found Shadowgate, Deja Vu and Deja Vu 2 in those mosaics, yay!
Hehe, me neither. :P I read through the code, but I'm not that good a programmer so I didn't understand much of it either. But reading the comments, it seems like it could do remove input from a movie file.
Derakon wrote:
Couldn't you do something where a script would try to play through your movie, checking at each frame if removing input changes the game memory? If inputs are truly ignored, then removing them should have no effect on the game state. That would be a portable, if rather brute-force, way to clean up input files.
Yeah, this was pretty much what I was thinking too. A Lua script could be one way of doing it, but I don't know if/how a Lua script can take care of input from a movie in read-only mode. (unless that is what Bisqwit's script does)
I realize that this tool would probably make the movie-file larger in many cases, but if the goal is to produce a run with as few frames with input as possible, it would be a very useful tool.
And thanks for the .fm2 code offer alden, but I'm not a good programmer so I would probably just be confused. :)
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One tool that would be very useful would be one that can delete button input given certain conditions. Take Solstice for example, that game only accepts input when RAM address 0020 is 0. However, it's very inconvenient to manually only press buttons when it's 0, so you usually hold down the buttons all the time.
What I'm thinking about is a tool that can delete all input from a movie file when a certain RAM address has or hasn't a certain value, and that this should be done for each and every frame in the movie. I realize that information about RAM addresses isn't stored in movie files, so this tool would somehow have to play the movie file in the emulator and change it from there, or something...
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Okay, attempt number 2!
lim(x->0)x^x = lim(x->0)(1+(x-1))^x = (use the taylorserie for (1+y)^a with y=x-1 and a=x) =
1 + a1*y + ... + ai*y^ + ...
where ai = x*(x-1)*(x-2)*...*(x-i)/i which closes in on 0 when x closes in on 0 for all i. So all ai are close to 0.
y^i are all numbers that are close to -1 for odd i and close to 1 for even i (because y=x-1 closes in on -1 when x->0). Either way, they are finite and pose no problem when multiplied with a number very close to 0.
So! The sum looks something like this now:
1+ 0*-1 + 0*1 + ... + 0*(+-1) + ... = 1
so the sum, and therefor the expression lim(x->0)x^x, approaches 1.
EDIT: If you don't like it that a is not fix, which it usually is in the taylor serie, just divide the problem into lim(a->0)lim(y->-1)(1+y)^a, making a fix while you compute (1+y)^a and then making a approach 0 afterwards.
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I'm sensing a bug in the program, button A held down for 7701 frames in a 4409 frames movie is very impressive. :)
Here's the movie if you want to run some tests on it or so.
Otherwise a very nice program, keep up the good job.
EDIT: I just tested, and this bug is present in all versions up to 0.3.
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I was thinking something like this: Let
y=lim(x->0+) x^x
and let z := ln(y) = lim(x->0+) x*ln(x) which I happened to remember that it approaches 0.
so y = exp(z) approaches exp(0)=1 so the answer is that y approaches 1.
This is probably not the right way of solving it, but it worked. :)
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Topic revival! Here are some interesting problems for you to solve:
A number is algebraic if it is the solution to the equation an*x^n + a(n-1)*x^(n-1) + ... + a1*x1 + a0 = 0, where a1, a2, ... an are integers, not necessarily positive. If the number is not algebraic it's called transcendental.
If a statement below is true, prove it. It it's not true, prove why this is not the case, or at least provide an example where it doesn't hold:
1) A finite linear combination of algebraic numbers are always algebraic. What happens if you have an infinite number of algebraic numbers?
2) A finite product of algebraic numbers are always algebraic. What happens if you have an infinite number of algebraic numbers?
3) Same as 1) but for transcendental numbers.
4) Same as 2) but for transcendental numbers.
5) It is possible to create a function f(a1, a2, ... ,an) that takes a finite number of algebraic numbers to a transcendental number, without f involving any transcendental numbers.
(Note that I do not know the answers to these questions myself, I have just recently been introduced to these terms in school, but it would be interesting to see if any of those statements are true).
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Here's my setup:
R1: Pause game.
R2: Save state.
L1: Frame advance.
L2: Load state.
All other commands are managed with the keyboard (I have E for load state and Q for savestate, and select state using 1-9). I use S for frame display, D for input display, tab for turbo mode and Y for auto-hold.
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Warp wrote:
Initially I bought the gamepad because it was so cheap and I thought it would be cool to play some (s)nes games with it. However, I have noticed using it more and more, so I upgraded it to this:
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/gaming/pc_gaming/gamepads/devices/264&cl=us,en
Feels a lot sturdier. The old one feels like a toy in comparison.
When I first started TASing, I used that kind of gamepad. But then I TASed so much that it eventually broke. So I went out and bought a new one, and then that one broke too. Now I recently bought my third one, so hopefully it will give me many more hours of TASing time. (I'm not at all saying that this gamepad breaks easily, my previous ones lasted many hundreds of hours before breaking.) I used to use the program that came with the CD to assign hotkey commands to the gamepad, but today I use Joy2Key instead.
So yeah, a good buy indeed.
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I took the liberty of providing a link to all currently published runs that need a new or better description (I.e. the ones that had a TODO about the description in the description). Obviously this will change over time, but I think it's a good starting point for today:
Here is the link.
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alden wrote:
Yes, thank you, I forgot to mention that. There are lots of older ones too though :)
Perhaps it's possible to divide the TODO-list into two sections - one for currently published movies and other pages (high priority) and one for obsoleted movies (low priority). I guess this could be done automatically with a script or something. Having obsoleted runs without a description (or something else that needs to be done) isn't that high priority in my opinion.
How can a run have 78.5 votes? Is the 0.5 vote for a vote that rated only entertainment or only technical? Again, sorry if this is the wrong thread.
I'm sensing a bug in the program, button A held down for 7701 frames in a 4409 frames movie is very impressive. :)
Here's the movie if you want to run some tests on it or so.
Otherwise a very nice program, keep up the good job.
EDIT: I just tested, and this bug is present in all versions up to 0.3.