Surviving 2012 and Planet X: Scientific and Historical Proof
Too bad that when conspiracy theorists use the term "scientific proof" their meaning is slightly different from what science itself means with it. For example, it doesn't mean "cherry-pick evidence that seems to support the theory and ignore/deny any evidence of the contrary (probably as part of the conspiracy)".
For example the second part of the video argues that discrepancies in the orbit of Neptune indicate the presence of a massive transneptunian object. Of course this happily ignores later discoveries, such as:
"Six months before, Myles Standish had used data from Voyager 2's 1989 flyby of Neptune, which had revised the planet's total mass downward by 0.5%—an amount comparable to the mass of Mars—to recalculate its gravitational effect on Uranus. When Neptune's newly determined mass was used in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Developmental Ephemeris (JPL DE), the supposed discrepancies in the Uranian orbit, and with them the need for a Planet X, vanished. Moreover, there are no discrepancies in the trajectories of any space probes such as Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 that can be attributed to the gravitational pull of a large undiscovered object in the outer Solar System. Today, most astronomers agree that Planet X, as Lowell defined it, does not exist."
Why is this thread being used to complain about movie tags (not) applied to a specific movie?! Go post this stuff in the movie threads themselves. This is a discussion about movie tags (and their applications) in general.
Perhaps we should have a thread for exactly these types of reports (and all the reports here moved to that thread). If any editor is watching and applying the corrections, it will be significantly easier to notice them when they are all collected into one single thread rather than being scattered around.
It's not that straightforward because even with brute force searching you can use clever algorithms to somewhat cut down the search tree, or at least prioritize branches which are more likely to give you a result. Also, in average it would take half of that time. The complexity class is correct, though (that is, O(2n).)
I already thought and tried to come up with some clever ideas
What I meant by cutting the search tree was things like: If two different paths lead to the same overall state, you can cut one of those search branches away completely (because they end up being identical to each other and hence would make the same subsearch twice). For example, if in one search branch you first press A and then B, and in another you first press B and then A, and the global state ends up being exactly the same in both cases, it's enough to check just one of those branches, rather than both. This will cut one complete search branch away.
(Of course detecting if the overall state of the program in two search tree nodes are identical is a big problem in itself, and may be too hard to be feasible. Basically you would need to store all the CPU registers and RAM contents on each node so that you can compare them. This may well take way too much memory to be feasible.)
Not a bug per se, but could be perhaps considered a small design error.
Namely, the current way of showing awards allows people to fake having such an award, as demonstrated in this post.
And again ignorant people can't help but to show their idiocy publicly in the comments:
"That’s neat, but it totally doesn’t count as playing it through on an NES in 5 minutes. Look at 3:54–my NES doesn’t let me wall-jump like that! Or look at 5:10!"
I would like to know how this person explains how the device forces the game to do things that the "NES doesn't let" a normal player do, using the controller only.
Even then you could be running a custom computer installed inside the NES itself (I've seen an NES case used as a small-form-factor computer case before)
A friend of mine and I once entertained the idea of taking an old C64 (he had some broken ones for collecting spare parts), building a PC inside it using laptop hardware, constructing the necessary interface to make the C64 keyboard work, install Linux in the PC and run a C64 emulator to run C64 games... thus coming full circle.
Btw, this is the same song as I posted in my first post, but I made a better version (in terms of A/V quality) of this:
Link to video
The song is obviously not mine (no kidding?), but the arrangement is. I didn't look anywhere for it, but composed it entirely myself (as all the other guitar arrangements I have made videos of).
Somehow it feels like when an untalented writer tries to create profound and smart dialoge for his characters: At times it sounds like he's almost getting there, but overall it sounds... forced and unengaging. Artificial. Cliché. There's no real talent behind it.
Brute force is the best solution to find the fastest completion input collection. Needless to say, the time needed for brute forcing a game is something like that:
[2 ^ (Number of buttons * Actual TAS record frame count)] / Emulation time.
It's not that straightforward because even with brute force searching you can use clever algorithms to somewhat cut down the search tree, or at least prioritize branches which are more likely to give you a result. Also, in average it would take half of that time. The complexity class is correct, though (that is, O(2n).)
<nitpick>
Don't you mean "at most"? (And there's no need to specify that many decimals as they convey no useful information in this case. A 5.3*101613 would have sufficed to give a notion of the magnitude.)
</nitpick>
All the warp glitch Rygar runs employ death to skip massive parts of the game. Rygar only has 1 life, thus there is a big fat game over screen in all those movies.
Well, part of it might be that many people here consider (for a reason I personally don't fully understand nor agree with) that using an "cheat" offered by the game itself (whatever the definition might be in this case) is not ok, but if an unintended glitch is involved, then it becomes ok. Thus the rationale seems to be that a gameover in general is not ok, unless it's used to glitch yourself forward in the game.
As said, personally I don't see why glitching should make any difference in this whole issue.
In relation to TASing you could certainly create intelligent AI that could TAS NES games which only have 256 possible inputs per frame.
It doesn't really matter how many buttons there are. Even if you had only one button and your only choice on each frame would be whether to press it or not, you would still end up having an exponential amount of possible combinations as the run progresses and it quickly becomes too numerous to calculate in a rational amount of time. (You just need to advance something like 50 frames and we are already talking about hours, if not even days to go through all the possible combinations. Although some smart pruning algorithms could cut down the search tree significantly, they would only allow you to advance maybe 10-20 frames more before the amount of branches once again becomes too large.)
The only hope is to come up with a heuristic that does something else than brute-force searching.
One thing is for certain: Trying to find an optimal completion of a game by brute-force searching (even if you use smart pruning algorithms) is impossible in a rational amount of time. (The Sun would engulf the Earth long before the program gets to even 1% completion. And this assuming it had enough RAM, which it doesn't, not in a trillion years).
Whether a heuristic algorithm can be developed that doesn't necessarily find the perfect solution but can beat humans, it depends enormously on the type of game.
A Rubik's cube has an exponential amount of possible rotation combinations, but smart heuristic algorithms can solve it in less rotations than any human can (at least in average). They might not always find the minimum amount of rotations, but they can certainly beat humans.
A computer can beat humans in checkers almost trivially (even though checkers also has an exponential amount of branches). With chess it becomes a lot harder (while chess programs have beaten world champions, there exist grandmasters who are specialists at beating computers, so the fight is more or less even right now). With go computers have currently no chance against humans (not even on small 9x9 boards, not to talk about the full 19x19 board).
So it really depends on the game.
The topic of using death (or even damage) as a shortcut is an interesting one, as it affects the style of the run. The issue boils down to the fact that TASes have two almost contradictory goals:
1) Flawless, perfect, "god-like" playing that "pwns" the game with perfect superhuman skills, with no human defects, errors, mistakes nor sloppy playing.
2) Completing the game at superhuman speed, with a completion time that is basically impossible for a mere mortal to achieve in normal play.
These two basic goals become contradictory when damage or death can be used to make the run faster, at least depending on one's definition of "flawless" and "perfect" playing. One can define those terms to mean that if you get damage or die, that's a sign of sloppy playing. (Of course in the case of a TAS it's intentional, but to the viewer it might look like imperfect playing. After all, "perfection" can be understood as getting no damage whatsoever, much less dying.)
While we do have the "Forgoes time-saving death" and "Forgoes time-saving damage" categories for this precise reason (ie. to allow authors to avoid damage/death as a stylistic choice), the general consensus is, nevertheless, that normally damage/death is a completely acceptable and valid technique if it saves time, and not seen as "sloppy playing". (The only case where it is seen as such is when it doesn't save time, in which case it should generally be avoided as completely unnecessary.)
I don't know if there are any actual games that would be impossible to TAS, but I know that you can certainly make impossible challenges if you really want to. I'd like to see someone beat the Final Fantasy VI All Imp, No Equipment, No Magic, No Specials, No Items, Lowest Levels, Fewest Steps Challenge (AINENMNSNILLFSC). No amount of luck manipulation can kill Kefka with those limitations in place...
Posing an impossible challenge doesn't make much sense. You might just well say "beat the game in one frame".
There's at least one exception to that rule: Rygar. It's allowed to end right when the final boss dies, even though after the longish ending sequence the player has to press a button to get the final congratulations text screen. The encoder usually does this so that the run doesn't have to be many seconds longer just for that one single keypress.
That reminds me of the time when I had to make programs for manipulating graphs as my payjob. I learned quite a lot about graphs back then (and have forgotten most of it since).
For example, checking if two graphs are isomorphic is an NP problem. (Two graphs are isomorphic if you can rearrange one of them so that it becomes identical to the other. That might at first sound like a trivial problem, but it's, in fact, an extremely hard one.)
Curiously, determining if two graphs are strongly bisimilar is a polynomial-time problem, even though the problem sounds very similar to the isomorphism problem. (Two graphs with named arcs are strongly bisimilar if all the named paths in one graph exist in the other, and vice-versa.)
Strong bisimilarity happens to be a much more useful comparison of graphs than isomorphism, so it's lucky that it's an easy problem.
How about in-game tutorials? You know, tutorials that teach you the basics of the gameplay, but rather than them being just boring textual tutorials or completely separate tutorials (such as a "training course"), they are actually embedded into the main storyline.
When sufficiently well done, it can actually add to the depth of the game. For example, the famous "pick up that can" minitutorial in Half-Life 2 is so memorable that it became an internet meme.
Did you ever play Chronicles of Riddick - Escape from Butcher Bay for the Xbox or PC? If you didn't, go find Chronicles of Riddick - Assault on Dark Athena. It's one of the by far most amazing games I've ever played, if you are into semi stealth-action.
And Big Rigs isn't? C'mon, starting a new race after you've "won" another one makes you an instant winner. Apparently they forgot to reset that flag. Oh, and there's a track in there that you can't even drive on cause the game crashes when you try to.
Hey, they fixed that with a patch, so clearly they are supportive of their customers. (IIRC they fixed it by simply having that track be the same as the first one.) Also the patch made the opponents actually move (although admittedly they will stop before reaching the end, probably because there's no code to handle the situation where an opponent wins).
Gears of War is 3rd person, but when you hit the "AIM" button it becomes first person and that is how I spent most of my time? Either way, it's a shooter, and I really enjoyed how different it felt than Halo and COD and all the other run and gun games.
The great thing about the Gears of War gameplay (although it's most probably not the first game to use it, although it's certainly one of the most popular ones) is that it allows for tactical playing that is difficult and awkward, if not outright impossible, in first-person shooters.
I used to compose music both on a tracker and on a midi sequencer software many, many years ago, but that hobby has waned quite significantly (partially because of lack of tools and because, quite ironically, my computer hardware has gone towards being more primitive in the sound department than it was over 10 years ago).
Here are a couple of tunes I composed back then (with a midi sequencer and the awesome SB awe32, RIP). Nothing fancy, really:
http://koti.kapsi.fi/warp/Sunshine.v1.0.mp3http://koti.kapsi.fi/warp/Laulu.v1.0.mp3http://koti.kapsi.fi/warp/test8.mp3
And something for the Adlib:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T94TZ3J_biE
The capacity for a game to scroll in more than one direction
Well, scrolling itself. Most of the very first games where not scrollable and had, at most, levels divided into different screens.
the move to beginning-to-end gaming rather than strictly playing for high scores, and introducing recognizable characters as protagonists rather than faceless spaceships and shapes (thank you, Pac-Man). Boom.
This got me thinking: Perhaps innovations in gaming could be categorized into two groups:
1) Innovations that were rather self-evident and didn't surprise anyone (in other words, it was just a matter of time and/or technology when it would be implemented for the first time).
2) Strokes of genius. Something which was not self-evident at all, but required somebody to come up with the innovative idea that almost nobody else had thought of before.
#1 doesn't necessarily mean that the innovation was insignificant and boring. For example, it was only a matter of time (basically the only obstacle was lacking technology) before we got fully 3D photorealistic sandbox FPS games with huge worlds that can be freely explored and interacted with (rather than the player being confined to a narrow path) and their eventual development didn't really surprise anyone, but the first such games (such as eg. Oblivion) were still very impressive.
Oh come on, Fisher-Yates is not that hard; it's not like implementing cryptography or mersenne twister or something like that.
It's also handy in that you don't need to shuffle the entire list if you only need a smaller amount of random elements.
In other words, if you need eg. 100 non-repeating random numbers in the range 0-200, you can put the values 0-200 in the array and run the algorithm for the first 100 elements only (rather than the entire array) and you will get your 100 non-repeating random numbers from that range (with even probability).
