Huh?
I really think this thread deserves more attention.
I totally didn't check it because its name doesn't indicate that somebody has actually managed to get a TAS running on real hardware at all, and I haven't read the front page in a while. This is amazing!
If somebody did this for, say, the Wii, would that be the end of SDA? xD
Kick-ass bass tutorial (might be a little random)
Link to video
Some acoustic pwnage (might sound a bit odd due to bad mic on the camera)
Link to video
Man, I seem to be kind of addicted to spamming this thread. :(
Has anybody on this planet ever tried to make a bot that actually somewhat emulates a human being playing a game? That is, not restrict the bot to some algorithm they've developed to beat the game, but to make the bot learn by itself through trial and error? It would be ridiculously difficult and probably take forever to program something like that, but I'd find it very exciting.
F.e. in Super Mario Bros. the bot's goal could be defined as to increase Mario's x position. It'd learn the fastest method to do that and what in-game factors other than button presses have an impact on his position all by itself. Once a bot like that would be done, it should be able to play other games with slight modifications too.
I know, there's probably nobody who wants to torture themselves so much as to actually write a bot like that, but I guess it'd be the only way to enable it to discover at least some of the glitches that normally only a brute-force approach would come across. It would require quite an impressive AI though.
I know. But if they got part of the obsoletion chain, those runs would be easier to find and there'd be more motivation to produce them. That's my basic argumentation. Maybe we could have something like an obsoletion tree with alternate branches? Nah, that would be way too weird, wouldn't it?
I'd code it like this:
weapon_names = {"Arm Cannon","Atomic Fire",...}
Then use "if next_weapon > max_weapon" or "if next_weapon > table.maxn(...)" or "> #weapon_names"
Keep in mind that in lua arrays (which really are tables) start with 1 as their lowest index (which really is a key) per default though.
Nice work.
[URL=http://www.sendspace.com/file/9l42jm]Here[/URL]'s part of a melody I came up with while falling asleep in a loop. For me, when I take the time to transcribe these melodies that sound so amazing to me at the time, they just turn out to be pretty average stuff. I still like that melody, but it's nothing special. It's not 100% what I've dreamt, but pretty close.
There are a lot of fast algorithms which will create pseudo random input, but it's extremely hard to create a shuffling algorithm that will give an even probability for all of the distinct possibilities.
I've once developed an algorithm for converting a random number from 1-n, with n being the number of possible random distributions, to the xth possible random distribution. Maybe it'd be useful here? If it is, then I'll dig it up. It should be completely unbiased.
lol, I'm the same, Ferret Warlord. Except that I've actually realized over time that those songs aren't even worth being remembered because I can come up with equally good ones at any time and that they aren't really all that great. It's nice to know my brain isn't actually just being lazy while I'm sleeping though. xD
Yes. I practice playing the guitar for several hours every day and have been playing for a few years now. I still don't feel good enough to actually record anything though. I prefer to get good first, so once I'd record something there'd actually be some value to it. I also try myself at composing every now and then.
With the few TASes I had started and never finished, I also had the feeling that they just wouldn't be good enough and thus found myself unable to complete them, so I can agree that music and TASing are very linked in some way (they are both forms of art that require lots of theoretical knowledge and technical precision in the final product, after all). ;p
Actually, a possible explanation for why the Occam's Razor principle works is because simple ideas are more likely to get accepted by the average human being, thus they spread easier through our social networks and get more easily accepted as truth. It doesn't mean this world has to be simple, it just means that science is likely to approximate the actual truth in minimalistic steps rather than by following totally wild theories. Simple ideas don't have to be more true from an objective point of view, they're just more likely to find broad acceptance. The concept of truth is just a way to sync up our understanding of the world and I don't know that objective (from a non-human perspective) truth actually exists. Whenever we make claims about this world, they are so inseperatebly linked to our "humanly biased" perception of it that I see truth as something very relative. It may very well be entirely constructed.
Edit:
@Warp: I essentially agree with everything you've said below. The only point at which I start to disagree is when the concept of truth comes into play. Yes, it is more reasonable to make less random assumptions and it's more useful for us. But I disagree that we can find out absolute truths about reality using that principle. Absolute truth is only certain to exist within abstract systems, but there won't ever be any sort of guarantee that they correspond with actual reality. There can only be reassurance (by experiment) that they correspond with human experience.
When it comes to conspiracies etc I'm interested in all points of view, but I never believe in any of them. I felt my doubts about whether actual truth exists were very relevant to that, so I brought that up. I agree that applying the Occam's Razor principle is most useful, but not to find out the actual and objective truth about anything. I agree it's not reasonable to randomly assume any conspiracy to be true, but I think it's not reasonable either to completely rule out the possibility, just because it seems unlikely.
As for your example, I'd take
3) I don't know.
(of course I'd still consider 2 to be much more likely than 1)
3 is not a useful conclusion at all, but the only way not to make any false assumptions and to stay open-minded in the long run.
Science is imo more concerned with making useful conclusions and with finding out "what works" than with finding out the actual truth about things. The latter is pretty much impossible.
Warp wrote:
Also, in practice, the simpler explanations have usually proven to be more correct than the complicated ones.
This might be nit-picking, but they haven't proven to be more correct, there's only overwhelming evidence for it. The difference between a proof and evidence is that a proof makes the claim about something being true, thus ruling out contradicting explanations. I don't consider repeated experiments to be a valid source of truth. They cannot prove anything, just provide further evidence, just make something more likely. But even with that, one has to be very careful. F.e. it's important to ask if all paramaters have been sufficiently varied during repetitions of the experiment. (This can help make alternative explanations less likely. Changing some random parameters can cause an experiment to stop bringing the expected results, if the proposed explanation was wrong.)
A human bias can never be ruled out because that's a parameter we aren't able to vary. So I'm very careful with claims of something actually being true.
Zeitgeist takes a look at things from a very unique, but limited point of view. It can really open your eyes and be very educating, as long as you don't blindly believe everything they say, just because it sounds like it could make sense. Opposing views often make just as much sense.
The problem with debunkings of anything is that it's perfectly possible to "debunk" something using credible sources, even if what you debunk is actually completely true. Debunkings are just collections of counter-evidence.
Why do they keep jutting their chins forward like that? Is it like that horrible song Whip My Hair except it's in Japanese and called Jut My Chin?
For a serious reply:
The white guy in that video is Ken Shimura, a famous Japanese comedian in his role as Baka Tono (the idiot feudal lord). He joined the girl group Mini Moni (a subgroup of the famous girl group Morning Musume, featuring only their tiniest members) in this song that revolves (like almost all of Mini Moni's songs) around a giant pun. The pun in this song is a word play between Aiin, a catch phrase that Shimura established and can translate to either "tally" or "habitual drink(er)", and Ai, which means love (because they're so lovely and cute, I'd assume). They're jutting their chins forward like that because they're pretending to be idiot feudal princesses or something like that.
The puns in the movie link I've posted can easily be made out by looking at the translation and Jankenpyon is a pun on jan-ken-pon (rock paper scissors). Pyon is onomatopoea for a jump (like boing). It is also sometimes used to express a kind of whobbling motion that is associated with trancy states in Japanese culture (a female character who's in trance would f.e. often end their sentences in -pyon for comical effect). At the same time it is associated with bunnies (they hop a lot), hence the rock-paper-scissors playing bunny in that video.
In the 80ies -pyon was also commonly used by girls as a suffix to sound cuter (bunny association). That's probably why they're dressed in 80ies style in the beginning.
The milk/cow in that video comes most likely from a pun at Kyung Pyon, a kind of sweet in bunny form made from condensed milk (because Mini Moni love sweets). Their space ship looks strangely similar to Kyung Pyon btw.
The reason why they are dressed as bunny astronauts in the very beginning is because "the man in the moon" is really "the hare in the moon" in Japanese culture, so bunnies are strongly associated with the moon/space.
See, all that weirdness can actually make sense, if you just investigate a little. xD
I apologize if any of this isn't accurate. I tried my best.
Something like that would be very useful to have in any emulator.
Thanks, partyboy1a.
I think an interface reminiscent of snes9x.setrenderplanes(snes9x.BG_LAYER_ONE | snes9x.BG_LAYER_TWO) would generally be preferred, however [URL=http://lua-users.org/wiki/BitwiseOperators]I've just read[/URL] that lua doesn't support bitwise operators in its standard definition. I should also note that I have no experience with the lua/c inteface at all. Hm.
It's Minimoni, hence it's by definition awesome. :D
I can highly recommend not watching this either:
It's Minimoni ja Movie: Okashi na Daibouken (featuring Takahashi Ai) - Parutu One!
Link to video
Bonus: Jankenpyon
Link to video
Hm, yea. Although to discover gruefood delight, you'd have to visit the forums or browse the site really carefully. If those runs got part of the obsoletion chain, they'd be a bit easier to discover. Also, there'd maybe be more motivation to create such runs because they would, after all, get accepted in the voting process and that'd feel more rewarding to the author.
I do realize there are a lot of disadvantages to it, but I saw a lot of complaints about how some people feel like certain glitches actually reduce the entertainment value of the resulting movies, and I get their point, so I came up with this suggestion.
(I also realize it'd potentially create some problems. If, for example there's movie A applying no glitches at all, and movie B obsoletes A, and uses two new glitches, then there'd be no way to logically deduce which glitches should be absent in inter-obsoletions of movie A. Again, the reason I came up with my suggestion was just because I saw that many people were dissatisfied with the current system. Personally, I'm totally fine with it.)
The overall picture that new visitors of the site would thus get would probably make them feel more amazed about this community, in that everybody who enjoys TASes gets some form of acceptance here (currently it has a bit of an elitist touch to it). Maybe I'm just overestimating the impact that my proposed change would make though.. For it to work, we would also have to find a way to draw more attention to the "Obsoletes movie xxx" link that's present in every submission. It'd be a way to show that even though the current submission is the fastest one, we still respect the work of the previous authors.
I don't know. Just felt the need to throw out this idea to be openly discussed.
If no supporters of my idea show up in this thread, then it should obviously be ignored.
Every now and then improved versions of older, already obsoleted runs pop up, when really the goal of those runs would be totally arbitrary by current standards. (I'm thinking SM64 16 stars f.e.) Most of the time such runs don't get produced in the first place though, just because people know they're not very likely to get accepted. They have an undeniable entertainment value though.
Would it be an idea to make it possible to accept and publish these runs, but add them into the middle of obsoletion chains and leaving a special note in the description of said publications?
A big disadvantage of that approach would be that the obsoletion chain would no longer be in chronological order then.
Ability cooldown has never been a great gaming innovation.
It has been around since the very advent of gaming.
Yes, punching, then having to wait till the punch finishes to be able to punch again is indeed a form of cooldown.
You're maybe thinking of cooldowns that last significantly longer than it takes to execute the move/the ability? (Btw, if the cooldown is shorter than the animation, you call that cancel-abel by itself. It still has a cooldown though.)
As for a random old game that has a long ability cooldown, try Alisia Dragoon for the Genesis. Basically, you have to wait a certain amount of time until you can use that maximum thunder attack or whatever it is. If that doesn't fit your description of an ability cooldown, then I don't get what you're talking about, and chances are many of your readers also wouldn't.
(Yes, I know you could explain with ease why my example is really something different.)
To me it almost seems that you like the idea of a cooldown so much that you want it to be one of the greatest innovations of all time. But it isn't. It was alway there.
*hides*