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Patashu wrote:
Is there any merit to picking more than one song? (If it cycles through them, doubtful. If it's RNG manipulateable, maybe you could pick a second song for the very last play to optimize input end criteria.)
First off, KEEP ON MOVIN' is the shortest song in the game -- in order to make the movie shorter we'd need to reduce the stage count. Considering that after stage 256 the score is 7.21e70 we'd need to add a lot more steps to get the multiplier up. Quick calculations give me an estimate of a few thousand extra steps, and the next shortest song with more steps is 9 seconds longer. Having said that, the multiplier doesn't change that much over stages 250-256.
As far as I can tell, the charts do indeed cycle, which doesn't help. My instincts say that it still probably wouldn't work regardless of whether it cycles or not; I've tried a couple of combinations and it seems you can get in a maximum of about 10 extra steps in exchange for each second longer, which doesn't seem to be enough.
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FractalFusion wrote:
Something I was curious about. Does this TAS stop as soon as the trip count first reaches 99?
It may be better to go one further to show that the trip count no longer increments after 99, similar to how [4769] Uzebox 2048 "maximum score" by p0008874 in 02:17.35 defines max score by overflowing to prove that the max score was reached, as opposed to stopping literally at the maximum possible number (65532).
Fun fact: The trip count no longer incrementing after 99 is an intentional troll move by Penn & Teller. I did not realize at the time I first saw the #2211: alden's SegaCD Desert Bus in 41:17:15:05.68 submission, but I realized immediately when I read something in an article similar to the following (if anyone has a more reliable source, feel free to post it):
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/desert-bus-the-very-worst-video-game-ever-created wrote:
Penn, Teller, and the game’s publisher, Absolute Entertainment, planned a lavish prize for any player that scored a hundred points, a feat that would require eight hundred continuous hours of play: a real-life trip from Tucson to Las Vegas on a desert bus carrying showgirls and a live band.
Read the first twenty words of this quote and you will immediately see why.
Sadly, according to the contest entry form (can be found in the ZIP available here), entering the contest would only have required one point.
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XTREMAL93 wrote:
Looks like datacrystal and tastools are dead.
There are some useful RAM addresses on this site https://gamehacking.org but they are mostly for cheating
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GJTASer2018 wrote:
adelikat wrote:
Avoiding this potential crash to get to that point I think is inherently interesting, especially since no human or bot has done this (yet), so it shows off something unique to TAS.
That was done using a Lua script to avoid the crash, so it doesn't count.
Since the crash is related to obtaining high scores in a single line clear, the easiest way to avoid the crash is to stop scoring Tetrises after a certain point. I think it'd be more interesting to investigate if it's possible to route around it and still score Tetrises, though. (In fact, this submission continues to score Tetrises until 6 levels after the video with the AI crashed, proving that it is indeed possible to some extent.)
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FractalFusion wrote:
Arcorann wrote:
A secret society would like to poll their 60 members on some yes/no question. They are only interested in the parity of the number of yes votes. However, they will only allow a given pollster to interview 50 members, and each pollster may only report back a number between 0 and 50 inclusive. It is believed that up to one pollster may lie or make a mistake in reporting.
* Find the smallest number of pollsters required (easy).
I can't answer the other questions as I don't understand what they are asking. However, for this, it seems the answer is 18: Group the 60 members in 6 groups of 10: A,B,C,D,E,F. Assign three pollsters each for six blocks as follows: ABCDE (x3), ABCDF (x3), ABCEF (x3), ABDEF (x3), ACDEF (x3), BCDEF (x3). You need to do x3 for each block to get the correct value. Then add up the results (# of yes votes) of the correct values for the six blocks and divide by 5 to get the total number of yes votes, and therefore the correct parity. (I don't know if the answer is changed just by only being interested in the parity.)
Let me try to clarify a few points then (looking at what I wrote again it seems I skipped a step when transferring things over):
* The pollsters don't have to interview 50 people, they can interview fewer. As a result, we only need 6 pollsters if we want the exact number of yes votes, but since we're only interested in parity the lower bound is smaller than that.
* The first question should have been "find a lower bound on the number of pollsters required". That was a mistake on my part.
* The pollsters don't necessarily have to report the number of yes votes; they may report an integer based on some other function of the votes they received (again, one pollster may report an incorrect result). The lower bound of pollsters can't be attained if they have to report the number of yes votes (why?), but can with some other function.
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Submission 5085 (the NetHack April Fool's' Day TAS) is showing a syntax error. I don't think it was doing that on the old site. Also, the category is cut off.
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Interesting puzzle from a book I first read many years ago, but only really appreciated when revisiting it recently. It goes like this:
A secret society would like to poll their 60 members on some yes/no question. They are only interested in the parity of the number of yes votes. However, they will only allow a given pollster to interview 50 members, and each pollster may only report back a number between 0 and 50 inclusive. It is believed that up to one pollster may lie or make a mistake in reporting.
* Find the smallest number of pollsters required (easy).
* Find a strategy where each pollster can report a number and the correct result can be guaranteed.
* Find the smallest N such that a pollster can report back only a number between 0 and N inclusive and the correct result can be guaranteed.
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Some of these are nitpicks and some of these are just bugs.
* The date format keeps changing (I've seen the new site use m/d/yyyy and d/m/yyyy). I'm not quite sure why yyyy-mm-dd was abandoned in the first place. Moreover, I can't find any way to change the time format display from 12 hour to 24 hour.
* On the userfiles page, in the left column there's no space between usernames and the latest times (i.e. "Abbie(latest: 11/21/2020 5:22 PM)").
* I saw the timezone issue mentioned on the tracker, but I'd like to point out also that I can't distinguish Australia/Sydney and Australia/Brisbane in the current list; both are currently listed as "(UTC+10:00) Australian Eastern Standard Time", but Australia/Sydney has DST and Australia/Brisbane doesn't.
Otherwise, the redesign seems to be going well.
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You're right, forgot about ball savers. That throws a wrench into the calculations because in order to get a game over we have two options:
* waste time while waiting for the ball savers to expire, which takes 60 seconds each time -- leading to about 2 minutes of basically nothing, or
* drain balls mid-run, which makes the run look sloppy.
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ThunderAxe31 wrote:
Samsara wrote:
Samsara wrote:
EDIT: Not to mention this pinball submission that similarly does not end the game, and was rejected for doing so despite accomplishing its goal.
Well, it's true that both this submission and that movie get to a stuck game state after finishing playing back, but it's slightly different. I don't think that movie could be considered entertaining, and on the other hand it couldn't be considered as proper full-completion either, as the movie rules don't consider valid the goal of maxing out the score counter. This submission instead is much more straight-forward in what it does.
Apart that, causing an intentional game over would be pretty trivial to perform, while also detract entertainment by introducing repetitiveness.
I should have clarified that it wasn't PURELY rejected for not ending gameplay and there are other problems with it, but it was explicitly mentioned in the submission text that not ending gameplay was one of those problems, and given that this submission is in a similar state I don't see why the same wouldn't apply here.
What I was trying to say there, is that if we extend the movie from this submission in order to manually trigger a game over, it would lose all chances to be entertaining, and thus it would be doomed (as it's forgoing a known skip glitch).
Is the skip glitch even faster? Looking at the clip it takes 40-45 seconds to skip the bonus stage, but this is more or less the same time as it takes in the TAS we have here.
Deliberately draining two balls takes less than 20 seconds -- the TAS is over 8 minutes, I don't think that has much of an effect on entertainment.
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As it happens, Larry Bundy Jr just released a Fact Hunt video about this:
Link to video
The five games mentioned:
* Anthem (PS4) (corrupts hard disk data, requires rebooting the console into Safe Mode to fix)
* Age of Empires: The Age of Kings (NDS) (cartridge can be bricked by entering a name shorter than four characters)
* Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor (PC) (deletes the wrong folder on uninstall)
* Mighty No. 9 (Wii U) (not actually a brick, just a hardlock)
* Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest (SNES) (already mentioned above, requires battery removal or save deletion to fix)
It looks like #2 is closest to what OP is looking for.
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Warp wrote:
FractalFusion wrote:
Yes, "parabolaness" is preserved under all (bijective) affine transformations; a parabola remains a parabola when you apply uneven x/y scaling or any isometry (rotation, reflection, translation), and since those operations generate the affine transformations, a parabola remains a parabola under any affine transformation.
If applying an affine transformation (which may include uneven scaling) to a parabola gives another parabola, and given that all parabolas are similar (something that can be proven with a bit of elementary algebra), that ought to mean that any affine transformation done to a parabola can be replaced with a similarity transformation that gives the exact same resulting parabola. Is that so?
Is there a formula or algorithm to deduce the equivalent similarity transformation from a given affine transformation?
Wikipedia's page on parabolas gives the expression for the vertex and focus of the parabola obtained by transforming the unit parabola using a given affine transformation. The vertex and focus of the unit parabola are (0,0) and (0,1/4) respectively, so all that is required now is to solve for the similarity transformation for those two points, which is relatively straightforward.
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Looks correct to me (though note that a "pattern" would mean any periodically repeating sequence). I don't know whether there is an intuitive explanation that doesn't involve using the diagonal argument, and I suspect there wouldn't be because the diagonal itself is involved in the statement of the claim.
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With regards to the non-proof Warp posted, I'll write out the key steps of the diagonal argument as applied to real numbers (handwaving the issue of binary expansions ending in all 1s):
1. If the set of real numbers is countable, we can construct a bijection to the natural numbers.
2. Since every real number corresponds to an infinite binary sequence (binary expansion), we can construct a corresponding list of infinite binary sequences.
3. Using this list we construct an infinite binary sequence that is guaranteed to not be in the list.
4. Since every infinite binary sequence corresponds to a real number we have constructed a real number not in the bijection, which is a contradiction.
As stated above by both p4wn3r and FractalFusion, replacing "infinite binary sequence" with "finite string" changes step 3, which causes the argument to stop working. I'm not sure if there's anything else that needs explanation at this point.
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c-square wrote:
Another consideration in general is that JPC-rr is built off of version 1 of JPC. The latest version of JPC is v2.4, and it's likely several emulation issues have been resolved in the newest build. If someone wants to upgrade v11.9-alpha to use JPC v2.4, I think that would make a good candidate for a new major version (JPC-rr v12).
The latest version is in fact v3.0, released in 2015. It can be obtained from the project's Github page (Sourceforge has it as well).
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Easiest way to download videos from most video sites nowadays is using youtube-dl. There's a GUI for it that's fairly easy to use. You might need to retry the download a few times, it has a tendency to disconnect midway.
There are a few other programs I've used that should work as well, like Freemake Video Downloader.
EDIT: correct program - 4K -> Freemake
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Mitjitsu wrote:
In case anyone is interested behind the development of the Saturn port. Here's the hidden .txt I extracted from the Saturn disc a few years back. In it they admit the games short comings and the constraints they were under. I ran it through a Google translate so the translation might be butchered.
[MOD EDIT: Please do not copy-paste a gigantic block of text like this directly into a post - please use Pastebin or similar. Also, please do so in the correct game topic, not a submission topic. -Mothrayas]
There's a full transcription and translation on TCRF for those interested.
As for the run itself, it certainly looks impressive, and I like how the comparison encode shows the increased optimisation on nearly every screen (as well as the increased load times due to the change of emulator).
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FractalFusion wrote:
and one which is literally titled "草" (which I have translated as "lol")
The video is of the Grass course from Kirby Air Ride. Presumably they titled it like that for a pun (for those who aren't aware "草" literally translates to "grass", but became synonymous with laughing as an abbreviation of a string of "w" characters due to it looking like grass; "w" is itself an abbreviation for warai/笑い meaning laughter).
Well, as the submission page that you posted in your previous post shows, the submission entry itself was only added in 2007 (and by then-NesVideoAgent, not Yy). The associated forum topic shows it first appearing in 2004. Then the publication itself was also created in 2004. Obviously the movie itself was then backdated to 2000, but I don't know where that was sourced from. Only Bisqwit may know.
I don't know why the submission finder shows its submission date as 2000. It should technically display 2007.
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Traditional order-of-operations guides say nothing about implicit multiplication. If converted to a regular multiplication i.e. 6/2*(2+1) most would agree the answer is 9 (multiplication and division have the same precedence and are evaluated left to right). However, some treat implicit multiplication as an operator with higher precedence than regular multiplication, resulting in 6/(2*(2+1)) = 1. Since there is no convention regarding implicit multiplication either answer could be taken as correct.
By the way, if you enter the expression in Windows Calculator it simply refuses to accept the 2 before the brackets unless you put in a multiplication sign, thus avoiding the ambiguity entirely.
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zeromus wrote:
That won't work. The memory card file is read once only when the game boots. You need to use a PSX memory card manager tool to combine save files from several bizhawk saves into one memory card.
You would name the file what the file needs to be. It creates the file it needs to have. Think about it.
To add to this, if you're using MemcardRex it isn't even necessary to rename anything - the program will automatically recognise the format (I don't know about other editors). All you have to do then is transfer the saves from each file to the Metal Gear Solid file.
