"Forgoes time-saving damage"
This one I don't really get. Is there any reason for a run to avoid taking damage when taking damage would make the run faster?
As for games where taking damage does not help completing the game faster, "forgoes time-saving damage" does not mean that (and that kind of game wouldn't need a category tag anyways).
I thought that the basic idea of "one movie file plays n games" is that you can take game 1 and play the movie file with it (and it completes it), and then you can take game 2 and use the same movie with it (and it also completes it), and so on, which is cool. (The publications simply show all the game being played simultaneously.)
With your idea the same movie file could not be used to play different games (at least not without modification).
Is this right? With this formula I get 36 rectangles on a 4*4 grid while you get 30, but after drawing up the grid myself, I see that you can indeed put 36 and not 30 rectangles on a 4*4 grid, so my formula might actually work.
Assume we have a rectangular grid consisting of m vertical lines and n horizontal lines. All the vertical lines are of equal length and arranged horizontally, at equal distances from each other. Likewise all the horizontal lines are of equal length and arranged vertically, at equal distances from each other. The length of the vertical lines is the distance between the outermost horizontal lines, and vice-versa. The two sets of lines is superimposed so that the four outermost lines coincide at their endpoints, and thus they form a large rectangle (with all the other lines inside it). No line goes outside of this rectangle.
In other words, the grid contains m x n line intersections (and consequently there are (m-1) x (n-1) small empty rectangles inside the grid). For example, a standard Go board has a 19 x 19 grid (19 vertical lines and 19 horizontal lines, totaling 361 intersections).
(While the idea is quite simple, I tried to be as unambiguous as I could above, which is why the description became somewhat lengthy.)
Let's define the smallest possible grid to be 2 x 2 (because it's the smallest that can be formed with lines of non-zero length).
Such a grid forms many rectangles. A 2 x 2, rather obviously, forms only one rectangle. However, a 3 x 2 forms 3 rectangles (the two small rectangles and a third one, which is formed by the outermost lines). A 4 x 2 grid forms 6 rectangles (3 small rectangles, 2 medium-sized and 1 encompassing the whole grid). Likewise a 3 x 3 grid forms 9 rectangles and a 4 x 4 grid forms 36 rectangles. And so on.
So the task is simple: Write a function f(m,n) which tells how many rectangles can be found in an m x n grid. (Explain how you came up with the function).
(Edit: Corrected the number of rectangles in a 4x4 grid.)
If that is implemented, should the award icon include the year when the award was given? (That way if the same person gets the same award again, it can be distinguished.)
While technically speaking the very first Kirby game (Kirby's Dream Land) was for the Gameboy, I have the feeling that Kirby is best known for Kirby's Adventure for the NES, so it might be a bit confusing.
Wouldn't the quintessential Gameboy game be Tetris? (After all, it was the single game which helped sell millions of units.)
Really? If there's someone with time on their hands to do lots of trophies, wouldn't it be cooler to have a character relative to the system the award is for?
Do all the different consoles have some distinctive mascot or popular game character which was introduced in that precise console?
We have NES - Mario, Genesis - Sonic, but what about all the others?
Maybe the tags should be divided into two types: Descriptive tags and category tags.
For example, "uses death as shortcut" would be a purely descriptive tag. In other words, it tells that in this particular game dying can be used as a shortcut (and the run then obviously does so). It doesn't necessarily mean that this is a category and that a no-death run would be another. It simply describes a feature of this run which might be interesting.
Other examples of descriptive tags would be "takes no damage", "manipulates luck", "abuses programming errors in the game" and the different "genre" tags.
Category tags would include tags like "pacifist version", "kills: 100%", "items: 100%", etc.
Good response. My underlying point is: Why have a special "lots'o'luck manipulation" tag if it will just provide something else for people to argue over? One simple tag of "Manipulates luck", without trying to classify the various levels of manipulation, works just fine.
My original suggestion was to have one tag only: "Manipulates luck". Its meaning would be heavy luck manipulation and it wouldn't be granted to runs which have no or only light luck manipulation. This would make the tag actually useful.
I later added the idea of having two tags, "heavy luck manipulation" and "light luck manipulation" as another possibility (so as to possibly being able to distinguish runs with no luck manipulation at all (by some definition) from those which do manipulate luck, albeit not heavily).
I saw many examples, but didn't see any sort of definition, or how you would differentiate "moderate" luck manipulation vs. "heavy". Basically, how would you describe heavy luck manip without bring entirely subjective?
How do you define which submissions are publish-worthy and which aren't? How do you define which games are good choices for TASing and which aren't? How do you define when a submission is entertaining enough to be published? What were the principles used to differentiate between the glitched and non-glitched versions of Super Metroid or Pokemon?
Can you define those things without being entirely subjective?
That's what we have publishers, judges, or whoever is in charge of applying tags to publications, for. They decide, using their experience and expertise of the subject, which runs use sufficiently heavy luck manipulation to deserve the tag. There may be guidelines and rules of thumb for this, but ultimately it's the decision of a judge ("judge" in the sense of someone who judges whether a submission applies for a certain tag or not).
(And no, "it could cause controversy" is a moot argument. Rejection of submissions causes controversy all the time (and sometimes even accepting submissions for publication does.) That doesn't stop the system from working just fine.)
This speaker in the video makes the fallacious assumption that born-again believers are believers because of their upbringing in a christian family. But the fact is that some of the most influential and fundamental christian believers are actually those who have been brought up in _anything but_ christian family: These come from muslim backgrounds, these come from families where their parents have practised witchcraft or voodoo and they've been sacrificed to the devil at their birth and have had to live in gangs with the "strongest survives" mentality; these come from places where being caught of owning a Bible may mean spending the rest of their lives in a prison, if they aren't murdered first, and so on. I'm talking about people like Nicky Cruz here.
As a side note, that in itself doesn't really prove anything. There are many people who have been raised in bible-believing Christian homes and then as adults have converted to buddhism, shintoism, islam, hare krishna and other religions. In this light it's not surprising that someone brought up in one of those religions, or some form of cult, would later convert to Christianity (or any of the other religions for that matter).
What Dawkins says is true for the majority of people: They tend to follow the religion they were brought up with (which is the sole reason that all the world's religion still exist in the first place). Individual exceptions don't change this fact.
"manipulates luck"
Get rid of it. If you have one movie that does manipulate luck, and another which doesn't, they shouldn't be separate categories, and the one which doesn't would simply be sloppy TASing. Therefore it isn't significant enough to warrant a category.
I don't think you understand. "Manipulates luck" is not used to distinguish between different movies of the same game. It's used (at least in theory) to tell people if some run heavily manipulates luck. Since not all games lend themselves to this, not all movies can get it.
Thus for example a TAS of Super Mario Bros does not get the tag because there's no heavy luck manipulation possible in the game, but a TAS of Simon's Quest does get the tag because there's heavy luck manipulation.
"aims for fastest in game time"
Keep it. It distinguishes itself from other categories of the game, and generally, there is a good reason to aim for this.
Such as? Personally I can't think of any good reason why there should be two movies of any game, one aiming for real-time and another for in-game time.
"Abuses programming errors in the game"
Get rid of it. Although this distinguishes itself form glitchless runs, there is again, no restriction here.
Don't get rid of it. Change its meaning to "heavy bug abuse". Again, it would depict a characteristic of the run, compared to other, more typical runs.
You guys are arguing terminology, when it already exists as AND, OR, NOT, and XOR.
Except that they don't really work.
"AND" would mean that if a keypress exists in the movie at a certain frame and it's also pressed at that frame, it's preserved, else removed. I don't think anyone suggested such a mode, nor do I see it as very useful. (It would mean that if you press a key, your keypress will be basically ignored if it wasn't already in the movie at that point. Also any existing keypress in the movie will be removed if you don't press it.)
"NOT" is not a binary operator and thus wouldn't be a comparison between what is in the movie and what is being pressed. It can only be applied to one of them. If applied to the movie, it would mean that all keys which are not pressed are added, and vice-versa (in other words, if at some point of the movie the only key which is being pressed is B, that frame would be changed so that all keys except B are pressed.)
I fail to see the utility of a "XOR" mode, which would mean that if the key you press already existed in the movie, it's removed, else it's added. Maybe if the pressed keys are shown visually (eg. on a piano roll style view or whatever) it might be usable.
I'm not so sure "invert" is such a good term. It sounds like it would invert everything you do, ie. if you press right, it actually presses left, and so on. (Yes, it doesn't make any sense, which is my point, really.)
How about "remove" instead? Any key you press will be removed from the movie if it was there at that frame.
Speaking of multi-tracking, how about having a "piano roll" view of the keypresses, similar to what eg. midi sequencers or movie editing software use? That way you would not only be able to easily scroll through the entire movie and see which keys are being pressed at which point, but you could also easily edit key presses (add, remove) with the mouse, if so desired.
Not exactly correct. NP-hard means there's no known algorithm for solving all possible inputs in a reasonable amount of time. There are always special cases (e.g., euclidian tsp) that can be solved efficiently on large inputs in a reasonable amount of time, even on conventional computing devices.
Are you sure that the optimal solution for an euclidean TSP can be found in polynomial time? Or simply a solution which is "good enough"? Remember that we are talking about absolute optimal solutions here.
The wikipedia article doesn't make it completely clear, as it just says "in general, for any c > 0, there is a polynomial-time algorithm that finds a tour of length at most (1 + 1/c) times the optimal for geometric instances of TSP in O(n (log n)^O(c)) time". I understand that to mean that finding the optimal solution is still NP-hard. It's just that a very close-to-optimal solution can be found in polynomial time.
The traveling salesman problem is NP-hard, but finding the shortest path in a graph is not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortest_path_problem
The difference between TSP and the shortest path problem is that the latter doesn't have to find a route through all nodes, only a route from node A to node B.
What makes finding an optimal solution to a game hard is not the complexity of the algorithm, but the size of the graph. Even though the shortest path searching algorithm might be polynomial-time, the size of the graph is exponential (each node splits into n new nodes, so the number of nodes grows exponentially as you advance), so it doesn't really help.
