The only concern I'd see with the listed time being inaccurate are for purposes of comparison with non-tool-assisted speedruns, and I can't see that being a particularly big issue. Certainly not one worth voting no for. If the author's willing to add on some entertainment at the end after the run is complete, who am I to argue?
If the "official" time is not shown anywhere, only the length of the input file, it can be pretty confusing for someone who would want to improve on the movie exactly which time he should be aiming for. (As said, with some games the exact termination point can be heavily a matter of opinion.)
Stop getting worked up by extra input at the end of a run. Once you see the actual end, anything that does or doesn't happen is of no consequence. Worry about how many frames there were to reach the end, that's where the competition needs to be, not what happens after.
This is a bit in odds with the rules, which state: "It should end with the last input. Don't leave any blank input at the end of the movie."
Sure, you are not talking about blank input, but I believe the spirit of the rule is "the keypress file should end where the game ends".
And that makes sense for practical reasons: If a keypress file could be as long as one wants (iow. have any amount of stuff after the end of the game), it would mess up with the automated movie length calculations. Suddenly you could have a 1-hour movie obsoleting a 10-minute one, yet still being claimed as being faster.
Everyone here, judges or viewers, are intelligent enough to differentiate between the actual ending and further playing around that can be done during credits roll.
But the server software isn't. It would be confusing and raise questions if a seemingly significantly longer movie obsoletes a shorter one, yet still was claimed to be "x frames faster". It makes automatic timing reporting easier if the keypress file ends when the game ends. Moreover, it requires less work from the publishers and editors because they can see the length of the movie from the keypress file (which is what the server reports) rather than having to figure it out by estimating at which frame the game actually ends. With some games this might even be heavily a question of interpretation. The length of the keypress file is unambiguous.
Seems that old dogs do learn new tricks:
"I am Donny Afuze Esq the attorney to Chief James O. Ibori formal Governor of the Richest State in Nigerian for 8years, i am looking for your cooperation in building a Tourist Hotel or Real Estate in your country with my client funds that is deposited abroad in a Trust Account because i cannot be incharge of the funds myself as the attorney incharge, i have the power as the attorney incharge to make a new heir to the funds with the consent of my client (Chief James O. Ibori). I am sorry if this is not in line with your profession. My client Chief James O. Ibori was arrested by the Interpol in Dubai for Money Laundering recently." And so on, and so forth.
As for what I wrote in an earlier post:
Warp wrote:
I bet in a few years they will simply start just sending messages like "want money?" and nothing else.
I also received this:
Scammer wrote:
I seek your partnership in re-profiling $50 Million .Get back for details
That was the entirety of the email. Nothing else. So it indeed seems that some of the scammers really are getting quite lazy.
Why? Even a 80386 running Linux should be powerful enough to emulate an 8-bit console at full speed, not to talk about a supercomputer like the PS3. There must be something else going on there.
Since the Fukushima incident nearly everyone here in Germany wants nuclear power plants to be shut down.
Yeah, lots of earthquakes and tsunamis in Germany...
I'm curious to know which alternative they are proposing. (Nuclear powerplants produce probably at least 50% of all the energy, probably a lot more. It's not like they could just shut it down. The economy would collapse and many people would die. What alternative are they suggesting?)
I think you have it backwards - elastic collisions are where no energy is lost (Ke of body 1 + Ke of body 2 = a constant before and after the collision), non-elastic collisions are where energy is lost (friction, heat, crumple zones, air resistance...)
I suppose I got confused about what "elastic collision" means.
There's friction in this problem, it clearly mentions "friction prevents any sliding". Also, non-elastic collisions reduce the mechanical energy of the prism. This problem was actually proposed at an important physics event, there's nothing wrong with it.
I'm no physicist (nor even very good at it), but it sounds to me like the problem is too underspecified to give a simple answer.
If there is friction that prevents sliding, it also means that some of the energy will be lost due to the friction. This would, I assume, depend on how much friction there actually is. How much of the energy will be lost due to the friction? I don't dare to even guess (other than it's probably not a simple linear formula).
What is the formula for the amount of mechanical energy lost due to a non-elastic collision? What does this depend on? I assume there is such a formula, but I have no idea what it could be. What I don't understand is that if the collision is completely non-elastic (at least in theory, of course; in real life there's no such a thing), why is there energy loss? Where is this energy going? Dissipated as heat? (But wouldn't that require an elastic collision?)
There must be some energy loss for the pencil to stop. In an ideal setting (no losses from friction, air resistance, etc. and no outside inputs after the initial impulse), I'm not seeing where this energy would go.
I think you also have to assume non-elasticity (iow. the prism doesn't bounce when it hits the surface). An elastic collision could make a difference. (When the next edge of the prism hits the surface, it would bounce back, making the prism to jump, after which... it becomes complicated.)
My question then is, what is the uphill slope at which the pencil will start rolling back down instead of coming to a stop? :)
Wouldn't that depend on the initial orientation of the prism and the initial force?
As you point out, the pointer to the enemy data ought to be stored in a variable (iow. a memory location). This variable might have a fixed location on memory (again, depending on how advanced the system and the program is). See if you can find the address of the enemy data somewhere else, and see if that address changes accordingly when the enemy respawns and its new data changes location.
(OTOH the address might not be directly stored in any variable because it could well be a base address and an offset which are stored in two variables. Finding them could prove to be more difficult, but not impossible.)
Depending on how the game manages memory, the location of the enemy data might in fact change every time it spawns. In very old consoles with a very limited amount of RAM this might be very limited (probably even often to the point that the data for a specific enemy will always appear in the exact same memory location, even if that enemy is killed and it respawns), but the newer the console and the more advanced the game, the chances that the data is at a random location in RAM increases.
Btw, when an encode has been done, simply editing the submission text (to embed the youtube video or whatever) will not cause the forum listing to show that there's something new in that thread. Unless someone makes a new post on the thread, many people might miss the encode (and hence not vote).
In that sense at least when an encode is available making a post about it might be a good idea.
This got me thinking: The path taken by the astronaut probably doesn't matter much on the basic phenomenon that he ages less than a twin on Earth. He could make a perfectly circular path, with a diameter of 4.3 light years, and the same thing would still happen: When he comes back to Earth he would be younger than his twin.
The diameter itself shouldn't matter either. Whether it's 4.3 light years or 1 meter, it should still happen: After returning to the starting point, the traveler should have aged less than someone who remained stationary at that starting point (even if in this case the difference is minuscule).
This got me the idea that if you spin a wheel very fast, shouldn't the wheel age more slowly than its surroundings? If you put a clock on the rim of the wheel (a clock which working is not hindered by a strong acceleration), shouldn't it run more slowly than a clock that is outside, stationary?
In fact, the aging of the wheel is not constant throughout. The rim ages more slowly than the center (which experiences no acceleration and thus ages at the same speed as the surroundings).
(Of course the faster the wheel spins, the closer we start getting to the so-called Ehrenfest paradox, but that's another question entirely.)
The acceleration felt by the astronaut (which can be unambiguously measured by the astronaut using an accelerometer) can be constant forever, even under SR/GR, as far as I understand.
Absolutely correct.
This is the point I have trouble understanding. Constant acceleration forever means that its speed will eventually exceed the speed of light, doesn't it? Would a space traveller then be able to exceed the speed of light from his own reference frame?
Constant acceleration as the acceleration felt/measured by the astronaut (eg. using an accelerometer). In other words, no matter how long the spaceship travels, its acceleration is always such that the astronaut experiences the same "gravity" as on Earth. As the King pointed out, it might be less confusing to talk about a constant force felt by the astronaut (due to the speed of the spaceship always increasing) than acceleration.
However, no matter how much time the spaceship accelerates this way, if the astronaut measures his own speed (with respect to anything), it will always be less than c, and if he measures the speed of light in vacuum (anywhere), that will always be exactly c. (Again, general relativity makes things a bit more complex because the geometry of space can change in such ways as distances truly increasing faster than c, but we are restricting ourselves to special relativity for simplicity.)
As you might remember, mass increases as velocity increases, which AFAIK is related to the explanation of why the astronaut can feel a constant acceleration forever.
Bobo the King wrote:
I still maintain that velocity cannot increase monotonically indefinitely (and if it does not increase monotonically indefinitely, it technically does not increase monotonically at all).
I think that the point was that m/s2 is a unit of acceleration (it's what eg. an accelerometer could report) and hence it's completely valid to use it. Your objection seems to be that using that unit would mean that the speed of the spaceship (as measured by some frame of reference) would literally increase by 9.8 m/s for each second that passes, while in SR the speed can only asymptotically approach c, and hence using a different, less confusing unit of acceleration would be better. Perhaps for the sake of clarity that could be the case. However, that doesn't make m/s2 any less valid of a unit for the measurement of acceleration performed by the astronaut.
I think that what the original poster meant was that in both unassisted and assisted playing the goal is to complete the game as fast as is possible, using realistic expectations of what is possible unassisted or tool-assisted. The goal of a TAS is not to beat the unassisted run (in which case it would certainly be much easier), but to beat the game as fast as possible using all the tricks available, which can indeed make creating the run much more difficult, as many of those tricks are not even expected to be used in an unassisted run (eg. luck manipulation giving you 100% success rate).
An experienced speedrunner can make a 1-hour speedrun of a game in... well, literally 1 hour (assuming a bit of luck so that he doesn't need to restart). However, making a competent TAS of the same game could require months, if not even years. That could be taken as a measurement of how much more difficult it is.
The way I'm reading this it seems to me that it's possible for a body to exceed the speed of light from an outside reference frame (when neglecting space contraction?).
It cannot in any circumstance exceed the speed of light (c). If you think about it, if it was possible it would mean that it would actually outrun photons traveling in vacuum (which is what "traveling faster than light" literally would mean), which is impossible. Photons (and any massless particles for that matter) in vacuum will always move faster than any massive body (and if you measure the speed of those photons, it will always be exactly c, regardless of where you are measuring from).
If you send a probe from Earth to Alpha Centauri and have it come back, it's not possible for it to come back in less than 8.6 years. (GR might allow some bending of space which would literally reduce the distance. Even then the speed c would have not been breached. It's just that the physical geometry of space has been modified and the distance reduced. However, actually bending space like this might be practically impossible.)
The traveling astronaut can himself experience the round trip in less than 8.6 years (in other words, when he arrives back to Earth he would have aged less than that amount). I suppose that if you put a clock on the spaceship, have it go there and come back, and use that clock as your measurement of traveling speed, you would get a value which is larger than c. However, that would be a miscalculation because you would be taking time from one frame of reference (the spaceship) and distance from another (the Earth). This would be equivalent to watching two objects approach each other at 0.8c and concluding that they are seeing each other approaching at 1.6c. Obviously that's not the case.
Still, I will take the time to point out that to properly define the acceleration, you should refer to the force per unit mass. In particular, the problem is well-stated if you demand that the spaceship's momentum, not its velocity, increases monotonically. Your units imply that the velocity increases monotonically, which is obviously not possible.
The acceleration felt by the astronaut (which can be unambiguously measured by the astronaut using an accelerometer) can be constant forever, even under SR/GR, as far as I understand.
There's a lot of confusion about special relativity and maximum speeds (and I'm in no way claiming I have no such confusions myself, mind you). One such misconception is that you can't eg. travel from here to Alpha Centauri in less than 4 years, no matter how much you try. However, this does not take into account the frame of reference. Certainly you can't launch a probe from Earth to Alpha Centauri and have it come back in less than 8 years. But that's from our frame of reference.
The frame of reference of the probe itself, or in this case the astronaut, is a different matter, though. If I have understood correctly, the astronaut himself, from his own frame of reference, has no lower limit to the time he can reach Alpha Centauri. In principle he could reach Alpha Centauri in 1 minute (disregarding that he would be vaporized by the acceleration and deceleration).
What happens as his speed increases is that the universe contracts and, from the astronaut's point of view, the distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri decreases.
This means that if the spaceship was capable of traveling to Alpha Centauri in 1 minute (from its own frame of reference), a round trip would make the astronaut 2 minutes older, while a bit over 8 years have passed on Earth when he arrives back there.
Someone who actually understands these things please correct me if I'm wrong (because I would really not like to spread BS about this if I am).
(This is actually the subject of the so-called twin paradox.)
That trick with the wall reminds me of Megaman ... being thrown somewhere else after entering the wall
The "corner bug" is pretty famous in the Tomb Raider series, as it has been there for at least Tomb Raiders 2, 3, 4 and 5. For example in TR3 you could use the corner bug (pretty easily even) to get to the roof of the Croft mansion (which is normally completely inaccessible) or to get outside the fence surrounding the mansion (again, normally completely inaccessible).
In this case I don't know if it's the same "corner bug" or a related bug, though, as sometimes it seems to be done in places which are not outer corners.
Let's assume that only special relativity is in effect (general relativity probably would make a slight difference because the solar system is a gravity well, and Alpha Centauri is another, but just for the sake of simplification let's consider it negligible).
An astronaut starts traveling from Earth to Alpha Centauri, a distance of 4.365 light years. The spaceship maintains a comfortable constant acceleration of 9.8 m/s2 until half of this distance has been traveled, after which it makes a 180-degree turn and starts decelerating at the same 9.8 m/s2 so that when it reaches Alpha Centauri, it will stop. The trip back to Earth is started immediately in the same way.
1) How long did the overall trip take from the point of view of the astronaut? (In other words, how much older is he after he's back to Earth?)
2) How long did the overall trip take from the point of view of the Earth? (In other words, how much older is someone on Earth?)
I'm actually curious to see how this calculation is done.
For an extra difficult additional (but optional) assignment: How much of a difference would it make if we took general relativity into account?
I still think that the run would benefit from having more funny pictures instead of random doodles. Also the piano playing being atonal (or whatever the term is, I don't remember now) with the background music makes it a bit annoying to listen to. (Of course the basic idea is to play something completely unrelated to what you are supposed to play and still get a perfect score. However, it sounds a bit awful.)
However, these don't detract from the run as much as for me not voting yes. I suppose this would be a "weak yes" in tasing parlance.
No animals were hurt in the making of this run. (Except for that one lion. He totally deserved it.)
I think that should be added to the movie description... :P
(Having played this game, seeing a TAS of it brought memories.)
