Holy wow, this run was awesome. I've never played the game before but it seemed about a trillion times cooler than the NES or SNES Contra games. Anthropomorphic wolves with bionic arms, flaming walls of death, breakdancing robots, hoverbikes that turn into ostriches, wall climbing, a boss that morphs into various constellations as well as a helicopter, among other things, ... what's not to love?
Proving or disproving that there is a cardinality between between these of the countable and uncountable sets using Mario Paint as a chalkboard to write down the proof.
I was recently asked an interesting programming related question that boils down to, "Can you write a wrapper for a general function that automatically memoizes recursive function calls?"
As a specific example, suppose you have the recursive function for calculating Fibonacci numbers:
Fib(n) { Return Fib(n-1) + Fib(n-2); }
A clever programmer intending on calculating lots of Fibonacci numbers might write a program that stores previously calculated results in a hash table so that each call to Fib need only be calculated once per n.
But suppose Fib is an already written function whose code you can't change. Can you write a wrapper function that stores and retrieves previous calculations as necessary?
It would be trivial, for example, to ensure that if you've calculated Wrapper(Fib(n)), you never need to do so again. But if you try to calculate Wrapper(Fib(n+1)), Fib will make a recursive call to Fib(n), not Wrapper(Fib(n)). Is there a way to address that?
Anyway, when asked this question I said, "I don't know, I suppose it must depend on the programming language. I don't know of a way of doing it, though." Then again, I don't actually know very much about programming, so I'm not the best person to ask these sorts of questions to. Regardless, I thought it was pretty interesting and thought you guys might like to hear it.
Ode to SpotFelis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,
An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature;
Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses
Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.
I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations,
A singular development of cat communications
That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection
For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.
A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents;
You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance.
And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion,
It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.
O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display
Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.
And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,
I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.
It started slow but got progressively more interesting, especially past the ~halfway point. Is that because you got better at tassing the game, or because the level design became complicated enough to allow crazier stunts?
You are missing DarkKobold's whole point then. You watched, you didn't like it, vote No! Don't just not vote
I disagree. Someone bothered to TAS the game, therefore it is reasonable to assume some nonzero number of people would be entertained by its publication. I don't feel it is correct to vote no for a TAS just because I don't appreciate the game, especially when I can't/won't evaluate the TAS on its technical and artistic merits.
I can't recall if I've ever voted 'no' for a TAS or not, but if I did, it was only because I was intimately familiar with the game and recognized the TAS was not well-made. I know other people don't share my laissez faire attitude, but that is the correct way to vote in my opinion. If the American Gladiators TAS is reasonably well made, I believe it deserves publication on TASVideos, even if I won't watch it.
I at least begin watching most runs that get encodes, but it's hard for them to hold my interest if I am not familiar with them already. Compound that with the unfortunate truth that lots of games aren't that good. Take, for example, the American Gladiators run that's currently in workbench. I started watching it, but the game is clearly made of pure gorilla shit. Maybe x2poet tassed it well, but I don't really care to find out. So I didn't vote.
If there were an encode to watch, I'd probably vote yes for this. I don't have any issues with pointless appeals to tradition/nostalgia, as long as everyone involved knows that's what they are. For a long time 16-star was the state of the art, and this is one of the most popular games of all time. Yadda yadda. I don't think the internet is running out of space. (Since I suspect I am in the minority here, I am pleased at adelikat's intimation that this run will at least be linked to in the 0-star summary text.)
Someone actually did make a game out of it.
From a given intial state, kill every cell with as few toggles as possible. You are allowed to step for as long as you want (including not at all) after each toggle.
That sounds cool, do you have a link to a page where people give examples or talk about theory or whatever?
Found it! It's a Christmas miracle the laptop this was on still booted ;)
http://www.mediafire.com/?493a3zbiu7e09tu
Fair warning, this is kiiiinda slooowww. (For example, the default glider gun pattern takes ~10s per generation. Smaller patterns are a bit faster.)
So basically, you expected to waltz me along to a conclusion you made, while holding the claims leading to the conclusion in an immutable and indisputable position? That is hardly a way to conduct meaningful discussion.
No, I (correctly) assumed we were essentially in agreement on a minimum of one of my perceptions of your concept of god. Then I stupidly asked a question that amounted to, "If we are essentially in agreement on at least one of these points [and we were], I believe the following to be a logical conclusion. What are your thoughts on that conclusion?" My question was stupid because it foolishly ignored my "the bible is not math" maxim which renders all logical discussion concerning irrational beliefs moot.
Here's a hypothetical and analogous situation: I said, "It seems to me that you believe 1+1=2. If that's so, isn't 25 a prime number?" Instead of saying, for example, "No, I disagree, 25 is the square of 5," or "Yes, I agree, 25 is a prime number in base 6," you just said in a very long-winded fashion, "1+1 does indeed equal 2." That is, you merely reiterated my contention that we essentially agreed upon a particular premise without addressing the conclusion I drew from it.
Anyway, I certainly didn't expect you to do any waltzing. Perhaps in my wildest dreams I nursed a forlorn hope you would do more than tread water, but I happened to be awake when I posted the question. Soon I won't be, though. Maybe my brain will invent an answer for you before morning. Even if it does, I doubt I'll post it. I just hate arguing, so I think I'll stop now.
I considered it self-evident that we could agree upon the correctness of at least one of my perceptions of your concept of god. I fail to see the relevance of your blow-by-blow justification for god's moods. I understand that religious apologists feel the need to contextualize everything according to whatever interpretation supports the argument at hand, but in some real sense it appears that "god is not love" and "god's feelings toward humanity cannot be correctly described as loving" are reasonable things to say. That runs counter to my understanding of how most people internalize the concept of god(s), so I was curious about your thoughts on that. Predictably, you responded to me by explaining irrelevancies rather than addressing what I actually asked. Anyway, I don't fault you for it. I fully expected no meaningful discussion to result from my question, so perhaps I was merely goading you. My post was indeed a mistake, so I withdraw the query and will ask none further.
Ten whole dollars, eh? I thought the internet was serious business but $10 doesn't seem very serious to me. You also seem pretty dumb. I have never played the game but if an off screen hit causes the score to go up, it can obviously be "seen" happening, just not visually. Also, why request a youtube video when you could just ask for the keypress file? (I eagerly await a some self-righteous diatribe against emulators and ROMs.)
How do you know that the possibility of life being created is small when nobody knows how life is created? The anthropic principle that you bring up doesn't seem to give any evidence that life is here by coincidence rather than some other reason.
Principles and theories never give evidence of anything. They are models that are used to explain observed evidence and predict outcomes for future observations. Anyway, the anthropic principle is not a model that predicts that the presence of life on Earth is due to any particular factor. It merely states that if indeed the presence of life on Earth is coincidental, we should not be particularly surprised by the coincidence. (That, is we should not view ourselves and our presence on Earth as "special" in any meaningful sense.) That is because, tautologically, an organism making an observation necessarily has to be an organism capable of making an observation. A scientist's dismissal of nonscientific origins for life has nothing to do with the anthropic principle and everything to do with the general observation that there appears to be no evidence of anything supernatural in the universe, according to our best current understanding. (Even the many observations of things we don't properly understand don't appear to be evidence of the supernatural, at least according to most scientists.)
It says that "life exists on earth because the circumstances happened to be right and the circumstances happened to be right because otherwise we wouldn't be here to observe this." Isn't that circular reasoning (begging the question)?
What you just said is circular reasoning, but what you just said is not the anthropic principle. As I said above, in a nutshell, the anthropic principle merely states we shouldn't be particularly surprised that we exist in a place special enough to bring about and support life. Where else would we exist? Again, the anthropic principle has nothing to do with explaining the origins of life or the conditions necessary for life to form, it's merely a fancy name the rather obvious observation that life develops in places where life can develop.
So you're saying that humans have no free will? Why then care what this pattern of neural activity that is me is saying to you? Btw, I'm not saying that what humans do is uncaused, I think that it's humans that are the cause. Of course, it could be equally true to say that we have no free will, but determinism is not scientific because it's unfalsifiable.
Why does it matter if we have free will? Either we do, and we do, or we don't, and it's irrelevant. Any rational person may as well suppose we do. Also, I don't know how determinism fits into the discussion. The universe is demonstrably nondeterministic, assuming you accept, as most scientists do, that quantum mechanics is essentially correct in most of its details.
Could you post any source for the claim that it says that it has to be an "object" that causes objects to move? I've read the definition for the unmoved mover (like on wikipedia for example) and I've never seen anything like that.
I only skimmed over the rest of this thread so perhaps I missed something in a post somewhere, but what is with all of the "first mover" talk? I don't understand what relevance it has, or why you seem to be accepting as axiomatic the idea that an object in motion had to be set in motion by a "first mover". I believe the onus is upon you to justify this fantastic leap before any meaningful discussion can be had on the subject.
