your combos are so big!
1. 3 E tanks is minimum since MB2 hits with the rainbow beam doing 300 damage, when having Varia suit on. Without Varia that would be 600 damage.
2. It was pretty much the next room layout and sometimes the next room after that which affects the strategy I use in each situation. Often times I need to maintain the shinespark because there is not much room in the next room to gain speed and to get another shinespark charge whitout losing time. I didn't test every possibile scenario in every situation and there is possibility of error there somewhere. I don't think I understand the last question, sorry...
... not really worth doing.
It really depends on the floor. For some floors, like E7, E24, and all of Master, the score strategy is the same as the time strategy, so going for time would entail going for score. However, other floors such as E9 and E42 would change dramatically. The main issue with a high score run lies in the fact that Floor 9 has more than 100 bananas, so you could theoretically just loop that floor infinitely, collecting every banana and then dying. If you wanted to do a score attack TAS, you would have to put a "no death" restriction on it, which is totally reasonable. It's certainly something that's been considered, but given all of the possible categories that could be TASed (for example, SMB2 Expert through Master Extra No Warp has some very cool TAS strategies), it would take a lot of time and effort for a group of TASers to put them all together (probably a lot longer than it took for us to put this TAS together, even with a larger group of players, and not many players have computers that they can use to TAS), so we're focusing on the main categories.
Suppose there existed a program that answers this question: Given a natural number (in base 10) and a set of mathematical operators, does there exist a closed-form expression that uses those operators (and numbers in base 10) that is equal to that input number, and that uses less symbols than the input number? (I'm counting each digit as a symbol, as well as each individual mathematical operator.) I'm wondering what the computational complexity of that program would be.
Sounds exactly like the newest Numberphile topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9qU20VmvaU
At this point you can do some simple plugging and chugging with n as a whole number until the end result is also a whole number. The smallest value of n that seems to work is 3. This means that Charlie saw 10 fish when he woke up (he tossed 1 and took 3), Bill saw 16 fish when he woke up (he tossed 1 and took 5), and Alex saw 25 fish when he woke up (he tossed 1 and took 8)
