I don't know enough about English grammar to say for sure, but AFAIK using the singular is a valid form at least if using a dash. It's the same as in expression like "an 8-mile run" or "a 2-hour marathon". In the same way it would be "a 0-star run". However, I don't know how mandatory the dash is, according to English grammar.
Perhaps "0-star" and "0 stars" would be correct, but not "0 star".
I spent three years in Seattle and just couldn't hack it. The sun seriously goes away in September and you basically don't see it at all until April. For some people that's great, but not so much for me.
Compare the latitude of Seattle to the latitude of even the southernmost places in Finland...
The best way to think about it visually is this: speed in space-time is analogous to an angle in an Euclidean space (strictly speaking, it is the rapidity -- the hyperbolic arctangent of speed -- which is analogous to an angle); a Lorentz transformation is exactly analogous to a rotation in Euclidean space (but since space-time is hyperbolic, it would have to be an imaginary angle).
Could it be visualized like the following?
If we think about one of the three spatial dimension having been completely flattened, so space is a plane, we could think of the Earth as a big circle traversing along the time axis. The object we are examining travels on this same plane alongside the Earth, along the same time axis. If we just let go of the object, it will start moving towards the center of the circle because space curves towards it as both objects traverse on the time axis, so it will make a straight line towards the center of the Earth when projected on the space plane, but a parabolic curve when taking into account the time axis as well (ie. if we examine the trajectory in this "three-dimensional" setting).
Giving the object an initial horizontal speed causes it to move on the spatial plane (tangential to the border of the Earth at first) and hence it will follow a different space-time curve towards the center of the Earth. This will cause it to move with respect to the surface of the Earth and hit a different point.
If the initial speed of the object is large enough, its geodesic will actually escape Earth's gravity well (iow. as the Earth and the object advance in the time axis, the objects' initial speed is so large that when it follows the geometry of space, the shortest path leads away from the Earth).
If this visualization is (even close to) correct, then how does the maximum speed c step in into this? Is c kind of "infinite" speed, but it still nevertheless follows a curved path because that's the shortest path even at "infinite" speed? (In other words, if light were to try to travel "straight" it would have to actually deviate from the shortest path?)
There's something that I have never been able to understand in general relativity, and I would be really grateful if someone could help me understanding. (And while I'm not afraid of math, I would like to understand this visually rather than through equations, so please try to help me visualize how this works.)
If I understand correctly, according to the theory gravity is not caused by a spooky force, but it's in fact a result of the geometry of space-time: Free-falling objects are solely affected by the basic law of inertia, iow. they will follow the shortest path (iow. a geodesic) unless acted upon by a force (deviating from the geodesic would mean acceleration, which won't happen unless a force causes it to happen), but since space-time is curved close to a mass like the Earth, these geodesics are curved, and thus as objects traverse through time, they will follow the geodesics that look to us like curves.
Anyways, what I do not understand is why the geodesics are different for objects moving at different speeds. For instance, if I throw an object horizontally at 1 m/s it will follow a drastically different geodesic than if I had thrown it at 2 m/s.
I fail to grasp why shortest paths depend on velocity. In a purely Cartesian coordinate system the shortest path between two points does not depend on how fast something is moving between those two points. Likewise even if we have a curved surface, such as the surface of a sphere, the shortest path between two points on that surface will not depend on the speed of an object traveling that path.
I'm suspecting that the problem here is that I'm thinking three-dimensionally. My brain is completely incapable of visualizing a four-dimensional coordinate system (even a Cartesian one, not to talk about a curved one!), so there has to be a way to simplify this.
The classic way of simplifying this is to compress one of the dimensions to zero size, so that eg. the original x and y axes are still the x and y axes, but the z axis is compressed to zero size, and the fourth t axis can now be visualized as a third dimension. But then what? I don't know how to proceed from here in order to visualize the geodesics in a curved space that depend on the speed of the object.
(The classic "gravity well" picture is imaged like above, with a funnel-like surface. However, even there shortest paths do not depend on speed, so there has to be something more to it than that.)
What happen, if some random dude work in his office wgile watching your video, then get caught... the guy might be fired right away.
Boss: "Hey, what are you doing?"
Employee: "Just watching some speedruns here."
Boss: "Ah, ok. Carry on then."
*Boss glances the screen*
Boss: "What? You watchin' 8-bit porn during work hours?!? You're so fired!!!"
I would think that lazily done (rushed) "minimum presses" runs could be rejected for being suboptimal or unentertaining just like other submissions. Especially if the run in question doesn't actually complete the game in the least number of button presses.
How would you know that it's not the least number of button presses?
If this category is implemented, I would say that any run that uses the same number of button presses, but does it in less time is enough to obsolete the previous run.
If this category is accepted for this game, should it be accepted for all games? Will we start getting a flood of lazily-done "minimum presses" runs of random games?
(Edit: With the above remark I didn't mean to imply that this run was lazily done. I was trying to say that the quality of such runs for other games might decrease if people start rushing to submit runs under this category.)
I think there's no reason to not allow BLJ anywhere in the run. Why not make a run entitled simply "70-stars" or "all required stars" and allow BLJ in the run?
If glitches that could be used to complete the game with less stars are allowed, then the number 70 becomes completely arbitrary. Why 70 and not for example 38, 12 or 0 for that matter? It makes little sense from the point of view of completing the game.
70 becomes more rational when it's the required amount of collected stars to complete the game when no route-breaking glitches are allowed. It becomes a more sensible goal. The number "70" is no longer arbitrary, but imposed by the game.
That being said, if this run uses glitches that could be used to complete the game faster, then it breaks this principle, and collecting precisely 70 stars is rather arbitrary. Personally I would have preferred if it didn't use any such glitches.
E: It seems this movie uses the (E) ROM with NTSC timing, which is against the rules.
I was wondering how a first-timer could beat SMB by ten freaking seconds, which would be nothing less than earth-shattering. That explains it.
Quick rejection?
Also, sub 1:30 on a 120 Star is MUCH more than feasible.
That's probably so, but it would still be twice as long as this one. I think this 70-star run has intrinsic value because it's not overwhelmingly long to sit through (although it's certainly pushing that limit). Categorize it as low-glitch or whatever.
this is a really well done run, but I don't think a 70 star run shows anything that a 120 star run doesn't already show.
There's one huge difference, though: The 120-star run is an hour longer. That's quite a lot to sit through. 40 minutes is still within barely bearable limits.
It would only make sense if the run also had to be as fast as possible (iow. match the current record). But then it would look identical to the current record, and all the extra button pressing would just happen behind the scenes. You would get a number which means little.
Btw, isn't the RS-232 port on a PC connected to an IRQ (at least if configured so in BIOS)? That means that the adapter could send an IRQ to communicate to the PC that the console is polling for input. On the PC side you could have, at least in theory, a kernel module that responds to said IRQ immediately. (Basically this kernel module could be used as the software buffer for the input data to the console so that the buffer doesn't have to be built in hardware into the adapter.) I think this would be as close to real-time as you could get.
Of course the only question is: Would you install a kernel module from a random website? Any security-savvy user would shiver to the idea.
Problem is response times. PCs with general purpose OSes are not good for hard realtime work with very short response times.
How fast does the PC have to respond to a poll by the console? If it has to be within the 60 Hz timeframe, I don't think it should be that problematic.
(I suppose that if it becomes a problem, then the adapter would need some kind of buffer which the PC can fill up, and which the adapter then sends to the console as needed. This buffer probably doesn't need to be very large if its only purpose is to guard against the PC missing one or a couple of frames of polling. It does make the adapter much more complicated, though.)
I think I have asked about this earlier, but nevertheless I'm still curious to know how feasible it would be that rather than building a dedicated electronics board to send the console controller input, instead have just a game controller cable -> PC port adapter. (I'm assuming that the RS-232 port would be by far the easiest for this, although using the PC's USB port is probably also possible, but requires a more complex adapter.)
The advantage of this would be quite clear: Not only would the adapter be (most probably) a lot cheaper and easier to build, but programming the "bot" would become much easier and versatile because you can do it with whichever language you like (as long as it has some way of reading and writing that port).
(It also opens other possibilities, such as playing the console using your PC, eg. with your keyboard or whichever game controller you have.)
Since I'm not an electronics expert, I was hoping that the people here who have much more knowledge about these things could share their opinion on this.
Are people seriously considering this for publication?
If I understood correctly, this isn't even a game, but just a prototype, an alpha version of a potential game that never got developed. It's not a complete game.
I find it amusing that back in the days when color TV was first invented and developed, those coloring artifacts were an unwanted defect caused by limited transmission bandwidth and technology, but today people are trying to emulate these defects.
(The reason why the color information in analog TV is so destroyed and mangled up is because TV transmission bandwidths had been established by governments for sending B/W TV signals, and changing them to be wider would have been way too much trouble. Thus the engineers had to come up with a way to mix the color information into the same bandwidth as the existing luminance information. This meant that there had to be far less color information than luminance, and it had to be interleaved between the frequency "peaks" in the latter. It was then up to the TV to separate them appropriately. Most cheap TVs did a bad job at it, making the picture even worse than it could have been.)
When you arrive at a port with the ship, you leave the ship at the first tile where it's possible, rather than going as deep inside the port as possible. Since the ship moves much faster then the character on land, wouldn't this save a lot of frames?
@Warp: I don't mean this in a demeaning way, but there are programs on being right vs. being happy. Their message is you have to give up on trying to be right/correct all the time in order to become happy. You might be interested in some of that. I realize it might be difficult to stop trying to be right in case that's currently your main source of interaction with people.
You couldn't be more off the mark.
You might not have "meant it in a demeaning way", but frankly, I find your comment utterly annoying and distasteful. I honestly poured my thoughts on the issue of loneliness, based on personal experience, and you basically respond with a "people don't like you because you want to always be right". Way to cheer up a person who, for all you know, could well be pathologically depressed right now.
And no, I'm not lonely because I "want to be right". You are pulling that from your ass.
and on the next frame this:
What is the meaning of this?
