Reading YouTube comments on the SGDQ tasbot snippets, one semi-common sentiment seems to be that people are getting a bit sick and tired of ACE payloads. It has all been seen a thousand times already, and it kind of has lost its charm.
Personally, I can't blame them.
By the way, I really like how R.O.B. is being shown clearly and close-up in many of these runs, with the led-lights controller.
It's not a contradiction. Space and time did not exist before the universe existed. So it's entirely possible that at the instant the big bang occurs and all space comes into existence, it comes into existence as infinite.
I don't really understand why it would expand, if it already became into existence as infinite. The place where it expanded from would have been somehow different from the entirety of everywhere else. (Unless I'm completely talking out of my posterior here, it's not like it was just that all energy was at this initial location and then started expanding to its surroundings, but that space itself experienced, and still experiences, a metric expansion. Space itself becomes larger, and matter/energy just moves with it, like a conveyor belt moves material.)
Dealing with and solving equations was a staple in high school math class. When you have "something = something", you can mostly perform operations on that easily and with your eyes closed.
What wasn't taught much in high school, or even university (at least where I have been in both cases), was how to handle inequalities.
Inequalities are a lot trickier, and need much more careful attention. Yet I have never been taught any sort of rules or heuristics on how to deal with them properly (in the same way as with equations).
If you have "something < something", simply squaring both sides might or might not require switching that inequality around (and, perhaps, might even require splitting the statement into two, with two different ranges, I think). After all, if you had something like "-2 < 1", squaring both sides would require switching the inequality, but "-1 < 2" would not. Heck, if you have "-1 < 1", squaring both sides would require you to change the symbol to "=". Thus if you have "x < y" can you even square both sides? Do you need to split the expression into three, with their own domains?
Solving something like "x2-2x-3 > 0" becomes less trivial than if it had been "=0".
I'm wondering if there are rules and heuristics for all this. It seems to be a much less talked and taught topic.
(I suppose I'm not asking or challenging anything here, so this is, technically speaking, "off topic" of sorts for this thread. Just speaking out loud. Anyway.)
The current model does not assume that the universe has a finite volume. The best data we have points to a flat model within the margin of error ( Ω = 1). That means, it's consistent with a infinite universe or at least one which is much larger than the observable universe if the curvature is near. If Ω is slightly less than 1, the total universe is quite big but finite. If 1, it's flat and infinite. If more than 1, it's infinite and hyperbolic.
Isn't even the notion that the universe might be infinite in contradiction with the hypothesis that at one point the universe, in its entirety, was a singularity that expanded? I don't think you can have both. That would be impossible.
Could someone help me understand, or even get a vague mental picture and understanding, of the (current model of the) geometry of the universe?
It is my understanding (and correct me if I'm wrong) that the current model of the universe is that it has finite volume, but has no edge. You can't just traverse to the "edge" of the universe and go outside of it (or be stopped by some strange horizon, where the universe stops existing). On the other hand, at the same time, the geometry of the universe is postulated to be "flat". Whatever that means.
As a programmer, I have difficult time undrestanding anything else than Euclidean geometry. All of those other geometries go above my head.
Let's assume that the universe, for some incomprehensibly strange reason, just stopped expanding, and becomes completely steady-state. It just stops expanding or contracting, and just stays as it is at this exact moment. Let's also assume you start traveling away from Earth, and you are able to do it for as long as needed, as fast as needed. What happens, given enough time? If there is no "edge" to be reached, what exactly happens if you just keep going?
x = e^(-u)
dx = - e^(-u)du
Substituting this you get the integral from 0 to infty of e^(-u)(sin u)/u, this is easily done using a Feynman trick.
You skipped the step of explaining why the range 0 to 1 becomes 0 to inf with that substitution, and I don't immediately see it. (I remember blackpenredpen dealing with this in some other videos, explaining how the new range is calculated, but unfortunately I don't remember anymore.)
My problem with anything that relies on the submission text is exactly that: It requires a detailed submission text. Not everyone writes those and I don't see how that is relevant in any way to the movie itself.
I think a detailed submission text is quite relevant, informative and useful, especially for a technical rating. I suppose I could say "if you don't write a detailed submission text, don't expect a very high technical rating".
Given that many TASes require countless hours of work and grinding, often even days, weeks and months, writing a detailed submission text ought to be a rather minuscule part of all that work, requiring, perhaps, in the worst case scenarios, 15-30 minutes of writing work.
Of course, and as noted in those guidelines, not all games may lend themselves to great technical feats (in the same way as not all games can be great entertainment, no matter how you try to run it), and thus there isn't much to write about. In those cases, well, expect a low technical score.
A low technical score shouldn't be taken as a sign that the run is badly made. It could perfectly well be that it's not a good game to show great technical prowess.
At least in the optimal case, of course (ie. every person who gives a technical rating uses this approach for deciding a good score).
I don't think you were necessarily wrong Warp by including these things, but I don't think they work.
Maybe, but I think the major problem is not the submission text (or possible forum discussions that the author has made for creating the run). Viewers will have their own opinions on what "technical score" means, and there may be as many opinions as there are people.
With this I don't mean to say that they are wrong if they don't think about it like me. When I wrote that section, I tried to give some ideas and some inspiration, rather than trying to make everybody conform to my views.
As has been noted, cross-contamination of categories is certainly a problem. A run with a very high entertainment score is very unlikely to have a very low technical score (and vice-versa). I suppose it's natural for people to think that it's "wrong" to give an extremely entertaining run a poor technical score. Likewise if people find a run mind-numbingly boring, they aren't very likely to give it a stellar technical score.
Optimally the entertainment and technical scores would be completely independent of each other, one having zero influence on the other. A run could perfectly well have a technical score of 10 and an entertainment score of 0 (quite unlikely, but theoretically possible.) But of course this might be too naive of a view.
That question doesn't really create a paradox because as Grincevent points out, "no" is a perfectly valid answer. Just because you are answering "no" to this poll doesn't necessarily mean that you always answer "no" to all polls.
A more paradoxical question would be, for example: Is your answer to this question "no"?
But this depends on the author being truthful. I could make a submission I spent one hour on, change the rerecording count into the billions, and write a long text about how I spent years researching the game and post a disassembly I generated with some tool, and make it seem like I really did go nuts with it.
I think a level of trust in TAS authors is warranted. Getting a point or two higher technical rating is such an inconsequential thing that it would feel extremely stupid for someone to go to great lengths to try to fool viewers into thinking a lot of work was put into the run. If somebody is really so petty as to try to fool people like that, well, that person is quite petty and stupid, and the "damage" is rather minimal. Non-existent, even.
I think that the vast majority of authors can be trusted to be honest.
I don't know who put it there.
feos makes a good point that there's no way a viewer can honestly know this information. Therefore with his good argument, we should remove it from the voting guidelines.
I was asked to write that section.
With "amount of work" I didn't mean "hours put into it" (at least not solely), but more like how much effort was done/needed to do the run.
Of course basically the only way that a viewer can get any sort of idea how much effort was put into the run is by reading the submission description (which the author ought to also put effort into). I was thinking that if the author demonstrates a great deal of work put into making the run (and its submission text, I suppose), that could be a good reason to raise the technical rating by a notch or two.
Like the other bullet points in that list, it wasn't intended as a hard rule. As in "does the author demonstrate a great amount of effort? If yes, raise the score, else lower it." Instead, it's more like a suggestion or idea of something to look for and consider, when deciding on a technical score. I hope I have succeeded in describing what I was thinking.
The youtuber blackpenredpen showed in his latest video how to calculate the integral from 0 to 1 of sin(ln(x))/ln(x) dx. While the final answer is relatively simple, calculating it looked quite challenging.
You cannot disagree. We literally have rules for how to use the technical rating. Wiki: VotingGuidelines.
The rules don't mention it depends solely on how hard it is to achieve, but rather it's several factors.
<nitpick> It's a guideline, not a rule. </nitpick>
But yeah, the technical rating shouldn't be considered a measurement of one single thing (nor even the exact same thing for every single game).
frankly I don't have the time and energy to be extremely polite and cautious with words all the time
Well, then don't be surprised if people grow antipathetic towards you.
Being polite and diplomatic doesn't require energy. It merely requires a more neutral tone.
and many people are still blaming me over this and demanding me to shut up.
I'm not demanding you to shut up. I'm advising against writing in such a confrontational and insulting tone, because it doesn't do you any favors, and only causes antipathy and resentment for no good reason. You should approach whatever grievances you might have with more diplomacy.
We take this work seriously, and we expect our experienced encoder and publisher to do the same. Unfortunately, to me, Spikestuff was too busy giving this run a bad rating to do his job right.
With certain topics, like this one, I sometimes feel like the YouTuber TL;DR is the only voice of reason online. I really liked his latest video on the subject of social isolation and involuntary celibacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J93U-iokyw
Your example completely irrelevant.
In SMB / Sonic for example, no such thing as dictionary.
If you aren't willing to even try to understand what I'm saying, then fine.
No such thing as dictionary... sheesh. Way to miss the point by a country mile.
If you try to brute force all orders of grabbing blue spheres - that's 64! approximately 10^89 - not feasable again.
But! Imagine you did that. You did try all orders of grabbing blue spheres...
That's not enough. You also may grab them from four different directions.
This adds 4^64 (approximately 10^38) variants for each.
So, total approximation is 10^127.
And if you try all the possible permutations in the example I gave, it would take at least 77 years to go through. Conclusion: It's impossible to build a comprehensive list of words in a feasible time?
I think you are missing my point.
Can you please be more specific and tell why you think that finding the absolute shortest sequence of inputs that beats the game is the same task (in this context) as:
Warp wrote:
Suppose you are given, let's say, 20 random letters, and a large dictionary of English words (let's take the sowpods dictionary, which is used for official scrabble tournaments, and contains 276663 words), and your task is to find every single word in that dictionary that can be formed with any amount of those 20 letters.
I didn't say that they are "the same task", as in solving one automatically solves the other.
Both are optimization problems, in the sense that we want to find the best possible result as fast as possible. We know in both cases that the optimal solution can be theoretically found, and the sole question is how fast it can be found.
Not all such problems require an exponential amount of time (with regards to the size of the input). It's incorrect to state that it always does, no matter what, because it depends on the actual game in question.
The major difference I see is that the answer to your words task can be checked directly: you just look into the dictionary and clearly see whether the particular word you invented is present or not. The answer to "shortest possible" requires having data to compare to, without having 100% of the possible data you won't be able to prove it's the shortest possible.
That's like saying that it's impossible to prove that a given path between two points is the shortest possible path.
No, they aren't. Not in this context. In this case we are talking about an algorithm to take some input data and find an optimal result. In this context it doesn't make sense to say "this kind of input is different from this other kind of input". Data is data. It doesn't matter what that data represents. What matters is what the end result is expected to be.
Right in front of us people find glitches that cause unexpected shortcuts. Not even necessarily something that instantly ends the game. Just basically any glitch can happen if truly exhaustive search is done, regardless of our assumptions of clearly useless input.
Just because you can't think of a way to cut down the search tree doesn't mean that it's impossible in all cases. With some tasks it could well be, but it's not necessarily so in all possible cases. This is the point I'm trying to make.
Just saying that finding a perfect solution doesn't necessarily require trying every possible combination of inputs.
Yes, it's not recessary.
But exhaustive means that you exhausted all other options.
That feels rather nitpicky. The goal is to find the optimal input. "Exhaustive" in this context can be taken to imply that the input is indeed provable to be optimal. Finding this optimal input doesn't necessarily require trying every single combination.
You seem to be arguing something like "you can't call it exhaustive if you don't go through every possible input", when that's not the point.
So, there is no shorter input that finish game.
But you can't know that, just because you can't try all of them.
The entire point of my example was to show that it's not always necessary to go through every possible combination to know that the end result is optimal. Depending on the game, there may be combinations of input that cannot lead to an optimal solution, and thus can be skipped.
Only one truly exhaustive search is: try all possible inputs.
Which may be equivalent to say, in the example I gave, "the only truly exhaustive search is to try every single possible permutation of the 20 letters". Which is completely unnecessary, because the perfect answer can be found in a microscopic fraction of that.
(Not saying that's necessarily possible with a NES game. Just saying that finding a perfect solution doesn't necessarily require trying every possible combination of inputs. It could, depending on the game, but not by necessity in every single case.)
