I have hard time believing that you'll get a megaton-range explosion by sublimating ice.
It's the kinetic energy of the meteor (which is absolutely ginormous due to the speed it's traveling) that gets converted into heat due to colliding with air. It's why they are so bright in the first place. If they break up, it may cause a chain reaction where the fragments themselves will break up even more, and so on. When it breaks up, the total momentum remains the same, but the surface area (and thus the amount of air it compresses in front of it) increases.
You are not incorrect, but your explanation is a bit incomplete. In summary, the explanation is this:
An object traveling at enormous speeds through the atmosphere compresses the air in front of it, which makes it heat up (and it can heat up a lot in this manner). This is what happens to re-entering space capsules and meteors. The amount of air being compressed depends on the surface area of the object.
If the meteor breaks into pieces, its total surface area will increase, while its mass, and therefore momentum, remains the same. So in other words, it will now be pushing against more air than before, causing even more heat and thus more energy release.
This may cause these pieces to break up even more, increasing the total surface area and so on, which ends up in an accelerating runaway chain reaction where the entire meteor is pulverized into smithereens in a small fraction of a second.
In other words, all the kinetic energy of the falling meteor (which even for a relatively small meteor is absolutely enormous) gets converted into heat in a small fraction of a second, which effectively causes an airburst that depending on the mass and velocity of the meteor may reach even the megaton range.
That may explain why they break apart in the atmosphere, but doesn't in itself explain how a meteor can suddenly explode in a megaton-range blast, as if it were a thermonuclear bomb.
I believe this situation will continue until some method is made for TAS content creators to showcase their event specific art.
I think that the part I bolded is the crucial problem in all this.
Let's make a comparison to speedrun.com. It's a site dedicated to showing and maintaining top lists of fastest speedruns (often in several categories) for video games, usually with quite strict rules. Generally you need to achieve a specific goal (most often reach the end of the game, in some cases something else) as fast as possible, and you need to provide some kind of proof of your achievement, which is verified, after which your entry will get onto the top list of that game in that particular category, based on your time to reach the specified goal.
That site is not about, for example, showcasing glitch exhibitions, let's plays, playthroughs, tutorials, or gameplay in general (such as multiplayer tournaments, for instance). It is not a site for people to showcase any form of "art" that they might create with a video game (via gameplay or otherwise). Incidentally, it's also not a site to show segmented speedruns (which isn't really necessary with regards to this subject, but anyway.) If you want to publish some kind of exhibition, gameplay, tutorial, or any form of art, that site is not for that; you'll have to go somewhere else (the easiest way is to just publish your video on your own YouTube channel).
Now the question is: What should tasvideos.org be about? Is it a site to collect, maintain and present world records of tool-assisted speedruns of video games, or should it be just a generic website for people to showcase whatever they can come up with using a console emulator (no matter how technically impressive it might be)? Should we indiscriminately just publish whatever people care to submit, or should there be some kind of standards and requirements in order to have something published?
tasvideos.org has always been about game completions and, sometimes, with a few games, other goals. There are certain requirements for such a game completion to be considered legit. For one, like with speedrun.com, you need to provide proof of your run. In our case this proof requirement is much stricter. A simple video is not enough. We need to be able to corroborate the legitimacy of the run (to be able to check that, for example, the game hasn't been modified, or the video edited). The proof must be verifiable and the run replicable pretty much by anybody who so wishes. Luckily, there's a perfect way to provide such a proof: The timed keypress file created by the emulator.
Another key component, a key concept, that has always existed at tasvideos.org is that of obsoletability: It should always be possible for a better TAS to obsolete an existing one (in the vast majority of cases this means that the new TAS completes the goal faster). This is one issue were tech demos, custom payloads, "art", starts to fall short. It's hard to obsolete something that cannot be measured objectively. You cannot objectively determine that one piece of "art" is better than another, because it's extremely subjective. You could put it to a community vote, but in the end it would make little sense (especially since most probably novelty will be considered "better", for the mere reason that it's new and previously unseen.)
Sure, we could have some kind of separate "tech demo" part of the site, and this has indeed been suggested many times over the years, even semi-officially. But even then, the whole question of what the requirements are for such a subjective topic, and whether there are obsoletions, or whether it's just a dumping ground for anything that's considered cool, remains. Maybe there should be no obsoletions in this category? Maybe if something is published there, it stays published for eternity. (There's also the practical problem that this whole thing would require a lot of work on the backend and frontend of the site.)
Technical showcases and demos fall into this weird niche where they aren't really speedruns, nor can they really be judged as such.
I know the answer to this, but I'm asking it here because it might be of interest to people (and, perhaps, as a kind of challenge in the vein of the "math challenges" thread).
When meteors fall onto the Earth, they might explode in mid-air while falling, releasing staggering amounts of energy. There have been famous examples recently, with such explosions having been estimated in the hundreds of kilotons range, and historic such events, such as the Tunguska event, estimated in the megatons range. (That's right, a falling meteor may explode in mid-air, with the same force as a thermonuclear blast.)
But what exactly are the mechanics behind this? How can a falling rock not only suddenly explode mid-air, without colliding with anything (well, anything other than air), but do it so violently that it's equivalent to a megaton-range thermonuclear blast? How can a rock explode? What exactly is happening? What makes it explode so violently, mid-air? What are the underlying mechanics behind it?
Don't get me wrong. I don't think the Kirby Avalance TAS should be accepted either. It's just that the reason is different from the stated one (ie. "it's replicable via unassisted play"), which I think is a bit silly.
Of course my reasoning is much more contentious and ambiguous (ie. "it doesn't actually play/complete the game"). I suppose that if my reasoning were to be applied, it would have to be left to the somewhat subjective decision of a judge and the community whether the TAS showcases enough gameplay to constitute a legit "completion" of the game or not.
Tools that assist making movies should be justified. The resulting work should be superhuman. If it's perfectly humanly possible, there's no value in tools used to do exactly the same.
I have to disagree with that. It's always interesting to know how close humans can get to perfection.
Look at Super Mario Bros, for example. Compare how incredibly close human players can get to the perfect run. It's amazing to follow the advances in human play, and see how close it gets to the tool-assisted version.
Who on earth would think "the TAS is too close to the real-time speedrun. Let's reject it and not publish it." Even if human players were able to exactly replicate the TAS, it would still be extremely interesting and have a great deal of value. It gives a point of comparison.
So yeah, I strongly disagree with that sentiment.
I don't remember this submission but usually the judgement for these were "Too trivial to standout from a non-assisted run", that is the "TAS can be easily replicated without tool assistance".
This makes no sense to me. I have never seen (although I may well have missed it) a rule that states that a TAS needs to be somehow "better" than the unassisted equivalent. (The only rule I remember is that the TAS needs to beat existing records, meaning that if the TAS is slower than the unassisted run, it will be rejected for being suboptimal.)
I thought that the principle has been in place for years that every officially published game (with the exception of games of certain genres, like certain types of educational games) for the currently supported consoles, can have an any% TAS published in Vault, with pretty much no requirements (other than it being as optimal as possible). I have never heard of a Vault rule that the TAS must not be replicable in real-time.
Recently a TAS of Kirby's Avalanche was submitted that's like one frame long, and does nothing more than jump directly to the end credits. It was rejected for being too trivial and showing zero gameplay, even though it's technically speaking a valid "completion" of the game.
That got me thinking: Exactly how much of the game has to be shown for it to not be rejected, and why?
If the run (assuming it would be possible) showed like a half second of the first level, but with no gameplay of any kind, and then jumped straight to the end, would it be acceptable? The main menu was probably shown, and the start of the first level flashed on the screen for like a half a second, and then we get the end credits, but no actual gameplay was shown. Would it be accepted or rejected?
Where exactly do you put the threshold for acceptability, and why?
I think this goes once again to the question of what constitutes "completing" the game. Clearly simply showing the end credits is not enough. Something else needs to be done in addition to that. But what, exactly?
With many games long gone are the days when a speedrun would have to actually play it through, from beginning to end (with, at the very most, some very minor route skips within individual levels). Nowadays it isn't even clear how much of the game needs to be shown in order for it to be considered a legit "completion".
This made me curious about whether the product of square roots rule holds for complex numbers. What I thought would be just a quick corroboration via google resulted more in confusion and doubt than anything else.
The product of square roots rule for real numbers assumes that the numbers are non-negative, as for example stated here.
For complex numbers it becomes more confusing, with some questions at Stack Exchange asking why doesn't multiplying square roots of imaginary numbers follow the rule, and another trying to prove that it does, with confusing answers.
Even if it is a breaking the 4th wall gimmick, it's way the game is intended to be played.
Specifically for MGS, the Psychomantis fight CAN be beaten without doing this swap (which means it's not necessary for a TAS). But to me, the fact that it is the intended way of playing means it should be acceptable.
I think the most notable use of peripheral hotplugging - that allows for a novel strat, rather than just skipping text - is in Secret of Mana [SNES], where AI controlled characters have different behaviours (such as not activating triggers) to player controlled ones, so at one point you unplug one of your three players, manipulate the AI to walk past a guard, then plug the controller back in to skip a trigger.
Unplugging and plugging controllers is an interesting question, from my perspective.
It's not "severely" messing up with the hardware (like eg. bending cartridge pins, or partially connecting a cartridge, would be), so perhaps in some kind of sense it might be seen as even less severe of "hardware abuse" as pressing opposite directional buttons at the same time (on consoles where that's normally not possible). At least it's something that is "perfectly fine", and shouldn't even break the game (like eg. resetting in the middle of saving would).
On the other hand, is unplugging and plugging the controller gameplay input to the game? I imagine some particular game (Metal Gear franchise?) might use that as a breaking-the-fourth-wall gimmick at some point, but in general not.
Let's just say that in the same way as with the pressing opposing directional buttons, I wouldn't lose any sleep if it weren't allowed.
This sounds like pressing opposite directions on the D-pad of an NES controller. It's not recommended by the manufacturer, it's digitally possible, and some programmers may protect their games against it. Yet we use it all the time.
I for one wouldn't lose any sleep if it were banned.
As I explained above, only if the console can detect it and react to it.
Just because a piece of hardware has protection mechanisms in place for something doesn't mean it's "officially supported", as in, something that the manufacturer is recommending the user to do.
For example, many electronic devices may have surge protectors built into them in order to prevent or minimize the damage done by current spikes. That doesn't mean that the manufacturer is now officially supporting the user to cause deliberate surge spikes.
3. I didn't know that copying and pasting from sites nowhere dedicated to this one was illegal.
Copying text from Wikipedia is not illegal. However, if it's useless and shows laziness and lack of effort if that's the only thing you are doing. It's useless because you could put a link to the original Wikipedia article instead, which would be much better. Of course that's not the only thing that the submission text should consist of.
Nice, that means my only published TAS would have been rejected. There would be no way to show off the last two levels of that "classic" game except by using a controversial glitch that I'm sure you would also want to be banned.
I have never been for absolute rules that are written in stone, enforced with an iron fist and with no compromises or exceptions ever allowed, no matter what.
If there's a very good reason to justify some form of modification of a game (for example because otherwise the game is not completable because it's buggy), then a special exception could be granted for that particular game. It wouldn't set a general precedent.
(Same with the use of the reset button, as I have mentioned several times: If there's a very good justifiable reason to allow it, for example if it's a requirement for advancing at a particular point in the game, then it can be allowed for that particular game at that particular point.)
Of course these are just my dreams, but I can fantasize.
Tilting / swapping the cartridge doesn't modify the game. It will interfere the communication between the cartridge and the console.
I think you completely missed my point.
And then there's memory corruption and other things like ACE that (edit:) could literally modify the game.
Which is one of the several reasons why I have a great distaste for both.
If it were up to me, they would be banned. We don't allow modded ROMs, therefore we shouldn't allow modded ROMs no matter how they are modded. To me it makes no sense to have a rule like "modding the ROM is not allowed... unless you do it like this. Then it is allowed." It should be "modding the ROM is not allowed" period. That's where the conversation should end.
But I'm the only person in the universe who thinks like this, so there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.
Partially Disconnecting a cartridge: Cartridges are like components in modern computers, they're part of the closed environment in which to start any TAS. I don't see how allowing this would be viable.
You didn't really explained why you don't see it viable to allowing it.
We don't allow cheating devices such as GameGenie and similar, which work by sitting between the cartridge and the console, and essentially modify the game data (if I understand correctly, when the console reads the data in the game cartridge, when the data at a certain address is read, the cheating device gives a different value instead to the console. In other words, it essentially mods the ROM.)
Similarly we don't allow modded versions of games (at least not as a legit TAS for that particular game. If a modded version of a game is rarely accepted, it will be considered its own, completely separate game, not the original.) TASes should always run on the original unmodified game.
Consider why we don't accept those things. Apply the same reasoning to tampering with the physical cartridge or the cartridge slot in some manner.
The sine of the difference of two angles obeys this equality:
sin(A-B) = sin(A)*cos(B) - sin(B)*cos(A)
I can't help but to notice the similarity to the formula for rotating a 2D point around the origin by a given angle. If you have a point (x, y) and you want to rotate it around the origin by an angle A, you can multiply it by a rotation matrix, which results in the formula:
newX = x*cos(A) - y*sin(A)newY = x*sin(A) + y*cos(A)
I wonder if this similarity is just coincidental.
