One way to find glitches would be to experiment with things that are often poorly done in other games; for instance, you can zip in similar ways in both mega man 1 and 2, so if a new mega man game came out (10!) you might try and reproduce zipping in the same way.
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/ contains intelligent discussion on religious/evangelical issues. Its riffings of the Left Behind series were what got me hooked.
Another thing I do daily, if it counts, is watch youtube.com/user/raocow 's new videos. It is essentially a stream of consciousness on top of super mario world/yoshi's island hacks, so it's not for everyone.
When I read the title what came to mind was an image of puzzle games where there's no hidden information - picture a sudoku game for instance, where the only thing a TAS can do is fill it in really fast or in creative patterns.
Maybe instead of a "heavy luck manipulation" tag a run could have a luck manipulation quotient or something like that. It would indicate how probable it is for the rng (if not manipulated) to spit out the numbers needed to make the run possible. That doesn't include random events that don't influence the run's time. It should, however, include luck manipulations for entertainment purposes. For games where it isn't understood how the rng works, this value would have to be approximated.
The higher (or lower) that value and the shorter the movie, the more densely luck manipulated it is.
Just a suggestion, as I don't see people ever agreeing on what constitutes "heavy luck manipulation".
It would mean a lot of work, so my bet is that nobody will actually ever calculate these values. ;)
The problem is it's not just a function of how improbable the RNG's results are, but how muchg time would be lost if the RNG was not predictable.
Like, let's say there's a manuver you can do that has a 1/10 chance of happening but saves a second to do so. A TAS would always take advantage of it but a real time runner might abstain if the drawbacks are too bad. You can think of it like this: If the RNG was related with a perfect RNG that wasn't altered by the state of the game, how much slower would a tool assisted run (entering input frame by frame with perfect knowledge of the game) be compared to the manipulatable, predictable RNG?
Does that make sense?
Weird timing. I was just about to do another run of this game to see if I could manipulate Waldo to be right under the cursor every time. It would be an interesting technical achievement, though still not an interesting movie. At any rate, I suspect that this run is improvable... at least in terms of length. Not in terms of entertainment. In that regard, the game is beyond help.
It'd be worth doing for the sake of novelty, kind of like the king's bounty video but not as dramatic.
Shmups are trivial to TAS, but there's a shump bullet pattern emulator called YGS2000 which has a 'level' parameter, which scales almost every pattern up to ludicrous levels. (Some produce more interesting results than others.)
Much of what is being stored in North Sinai - including food items like lentils, pasta, chickpeas, and juice - has been deemed by Israel to be "non- essential" to life in the Gaza Strip.
It's not like the hatred Palestine expresses for Israel is unprecedented; they've been forced off their land, oppressed and attacked for decades now. Can you really be surprised a nation would resort to such radical extremes in such a desperate situation?
If Israel respected Palestine's sovereignty as a nation we'd have no problem. (A question could be asked of whether it's too late now, on the other hand.)
Can you give an example of an elected politician in, say, America who displays antisemitic beliefs? I didn't think it was that common.
[23 miles off the coast of Gaza, 15:30pm] - Today Israeli Occupation Forces attacked and boarded the Free Gaza Movement boat, the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY, abducting 21 human rights workers from 11 countries, including Noble laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (see below for a complete list of passengers). The passengers and crew are being forcibly dragged toward Israel.
"This is an outrageous violation of international law against us. Our boat was not in Israeli waters, and we were on a human rights mission to the Gaza Strip," said Cynthia McKinney, a former U.S. Congresswoman and presidential candidate. "President Obama just told Israel to let in humanitarian and reconstruction supplies, and that's exactly what we tried to do. We're asking the international community to demand our release so we can resume our journey."
According to an International Committee of the Red Cross report released yesterday, the Palestinians living in Gaza are "trapped in despair." Thousands of Gazans whose homes were destroyed earlier during Israel's December/January massacre are still without shelter despite pledges of almost $4.5 billion in aid, because Israel refuses to allow cement and other building material into the Gaza Strip. The report also notes that hospitals are struggling to meet the needs of their patients due to Israel's disruption of medical supplies.
"The aid we were carrying is a symbol of hope for the people of Gaza, hope that the sea route would open for them, and they would be able to transport their own materials to begin to reconstruct the schools, hospitals and thousands of homes destroyed during the onslaught of "Cast Lead". Our mission is a gesture to the people of Gaza that we stand by them and that they are not alone" said fellow passenger Mairead Maguire, winner of a Noble Peace Prize for her work in Northern Ireland.
Just before being kidnapped by Israel, Huwaida Arraf, Free Gaza Movement chairperson and delegation co-coordinator on this voyage, stated that: "No one could possibly believe that our small boat constitutes any sort of threat to Israel. We carry medical and reconstruction supplies, and children's toys. Our passengers include a Nobel peace prize laureate and a former U.S. congressperson. Our boat was searched and received a security clearance by Cypriot Port Authorities before we departed, and at no time did we ever approach Israeli waters."
Arraf continued, "Israel's deliberate and premeditated attack on our unarmed boat is a clear violation of international law and we demand our immediate and unconditional release."
pirate_sephiroth, have you heard of special relativity before? Basically, it's a set of mathematical theories based around modelling a universe where any observer sees light travel at the speed of light relative to them, no matter who they are. The idea was concocted after Einstein after seeing that no one was finding evidence of an 'aether', a medium light would move relative to like sound waves through water. These models were found, in fact, to predict real life behaviour later on. It's called 'special relativity' because no frame of reference is special; no matter what velocity you're moving at light always travels at the same speed as far as you can tell. Without invoking a reference point, it's meaningless to say whether you're at rest or moving at constant velocity since no experiment can be done to show either is happening. (If special relativity was not true, moving at constant velocity would mean you'd see light move at that same constant velocity in that opposite direction, i.e. there would be an absolute frame of reference)
This has all sorts of interesting consequences, because all observers still have to see all the same events; something has to give, of course, and when one observer sees another near the speed of light, they will be contracted relative to their direction of motion and their time relative to yours will appear to be running slower. You can prove results like this geometrically by imaging that a train is rushing past an observer on a train station while running an experiment which bounces light off a mirror either horizontally or vertically and back into a sensor. To the person on the train everything is moving at the same pace and he detects nothing abnormal, but the person on the station will see that the light is going at the speed of light for him, regardless of how fast the train is moving, so the trip will take longer (there is a horizontal component if the light is going up and down, or if it is going horizontally it has to move against the train's velocity on the return leg) The consequences of this are (and you can work it out) that the train's time will be slower relative to the observor on the platform and the train will contract relative to the direction of motion, such that all events are self-consistent no matter who is observing them and how fast they're moving relatively.
Oh man...it's been ages since I've done it, but it's all so awesome and the best part is that phenomena like this, while unlikely to be seen in every day life (trains don't run close to the speed of light!) can be observed in astronomical and atomic phenomena. For example, particles (nuons I think) have been observed to last longer when moving at high speed, because relative to us their 'time' is running slower so we see them lasting longer even though they experience the same amount of relative time.
