The series is divergent according to wolfram alpha.
In that case, then perhaps a variant of the problem (as someone suggested in a previous post) could make more sense:
If the bully loses n times, he simply declares himself as winner and ends the game. (In other words, rather than saying "I said it's <n+1> out of <(n+1)*2-1>" he just takes the price by force.) How many coin tosses in average will a game last, for an upper limit of n losses for person A?
Another variant: Assume that instead of coin tosses, it's rock-paper-scissors. How many hand throws will a game last in average, for an upper limit of n losses for person A?
There is no average. You need an infinite sample of games to find the average here. At least one of those games will have infinite coin tosses. total coin tosses/number of trials = infinity/infinity = you lose, loser.
I don't think that's how it works.
Let's say that the probability of a game lasting for X rounds is p(X). Thus if we play n games, then in average n*p(1) of them ended in 1 round, n*p(2) ended in 2 rounds, and so on. The total number of rounds will be n*p(1)+n*p(2)+p(3)+...+n*p(n).
Thus the average number of rounds per game (when n games have been played) is (n*p(1)+n*p(2)+p(3)+...+n*p(n)) / n = p(1)+p(2)+p(3)+...+p(n).
Now when n goes to infinity, the question is whether that series is divergent or convergent. If it's convergent, then the average number of rounds will be the value to which the sum converges.
If, for example, the probability of a game ending in n rounds would be 1/(2^n), then the sum would converge to 2, and thus the average number of rounds would be 2.
Half the time it will last 1 round. So would that not be the expected number of rounds?
No. For the average number of tosses to be 1, either all games must end in one toss, or if there are some games with more than 1 toss there would have to be an equivalent amount of games with "less" than 1 toss to compensate. After all, the average is the sum of tosses in each game divided by the total number of games.
Assume two people, person A and person B, who want to decide who gets a price by tossing a coin.
Person A is a bad loser and a bully, so if he loses he says "I said it's two out of three". So they play it like that. If A loses again, he says "I said it's three out of five", and so on, until he wins.
How many tosses is this game expected to last, in average?
When Microsoft doesn't provide security measures in their OS, people complain. When Microsoft does provide security measures in their OS, people complain. It's a no-win situation.
"Understanding the Unique and Often Strange Way a Developer Thinks "
Honestly, who needs that. It should've never been there anyway. The designer needs to figure out what how the player thinks, not the opposite.
Just watch some of AVGN videos and you'll find that the shittiest games own on that matter.
I understood the article to be written tongue-in-cheek, ie. ironically. It's humoristically presenting features of old games which truely are a good riddance.
Making an image search on "gunsmoke arcade", it looks like it could definitely be the game.
(Btw, anybody up to TASing it? It would bring memories... :) )
(OTOH, it was probably an autoscroller, so it would be more a playaround than a speedrun... Well, at least the bosses are probably something which can be speedrunned.)
2) A 2D wild west game from an aerial perspective. Levels scrolled down, and you controlled a sheriff (or such) and could shoot to three directions (up and diagonals). In some levels there was a horse which you could ride and could take three hits (IIRC) before dying. At the end of each level there was a tough boss. (I don't remember details about the bosses, except for one, which dodged your bullets by rolling on the ground.)
Sounds like Gunsmoke to NES to me. Except the dodging bullet part.. so maybe another version of it?
It was an arcade game, not a console game. Perhaps the NES version could simply be a port of the same game, though.
In my youth a friend of mine was addicted to two arcade games. I'm wondering what they were (and if they could be TAS-worthy). I only remember some details of them:
1) A typical 2D fighting game viewed from the side. The only thing I remember is that between levels there were bonus stages, one of them being three bulls charging at the playable character, and you had to knock them out with punches or kicks.
2) A 2D wild west game from an aerial perspective. Levels scrolled down, and you controlled a sheriff (or such) and could shoot to three directions (up and diagonals). In some levels there was a horse which you could ride and could take three hits (IIRC) before dying. At the end of each level there was a tough boss. (I don't remember details about the bosses, except for one, which dodged your bullets by rolling on the ground.)
I fondly remember the times when I played graphical text adventures on the Spectrum, and had to draw maps to not to get lost. Some games were nice and all the maps were consistent and logical. Other games were more sadistic and had maps which were much more difficult to keep track of and required lots of corrections (eg. going north-east-south might end up in the same room as going east-east, ie. the two northern rooms were actually two rooms apart from each other, an there was no indication of this other than where you ended up, requiring you to fix your hand-drawn map as necessary).
I don't think that's how real religion works either.
Science says: "Here's the evidence, you can check it for yourself. Don't take our word for it."
Religion says: "Reason is your biggest enemy." (Martin Luther's words.)
I was under the impression Bisqwit was leaving. You know, for good. Vanishing. Poof, gone. Aparrently I was wrong at some point, so since he still seems to be around:
I think that his main point was that he wanted to relinquish his ownership and the admin duties of the tasvideos site rather than stopping visiting completely.
Has anyone ever been prosecuted for publishing a game video as a case of copyright infringement?
I have never heard of such case (but I don't follow these things too closely either).
On the other hand, there are examples of game companies (eg. Square) sending cease&desist notices for (alleged) copyright infringement, even for their older games. Probably has never gone to prosecution, though.
But creating TASes using the ROMs, by itself, is not illegal and cannot be prosecuted or claimed as copyright infringement
That's certainly true, but it's not the problem being discussed. The problem is not creating TASes, or even publishing movie (ie. emulator keystroke recording) files. The problem is publishing videos containing significant portions of the game's music sountrack (sometimes even full songs). That, all by itself, is copyright infringement and cannot be claimed to be under fair use. It's redistribution of music without permission.
(Also publishing a video with significant amounts of the game's graphics, ie. artwork, might also be copyright infringement, although I must confess I am not equally certain as with the music. A safe bet would be to assume it is copyright infringement.)
since the act of TASing or releasing a video of a TAS is not an infringement in any way I know
Unfortunately the soundtrack of the published video will be copyright infringement all by itself, so technically speaking there's no way we are in the clear. Most of the copyright holders might not care, and some of them might even deliberately allow it, but it cannot be assumed from all of them.
That's why I'm of the opinion that it would be a wise move to keep a low profile and not draw attention with advertisement stunts.
If there was a good legal way to accumulate cash quickly that wasn't "get a job", then you can bet people would be doing it already.
A working "fast cash" scheme wouldn't even work on the grand scale. If people would get tons of cash, the value of that cash would decrease. The value of money is always bound to the actual total wealth of the country. Thus if you, for example, double the amount of cash without the actual wealth of the country also doubling, the value of that cash would halve.
There are criminal ways of getting tons of cash, but fortunately such criminals are a very small minority. If they were the majority, the economy would collapse (not to talk about society).
"Evolution didn't create the Grand Canyon". I wonder if anyone is even claiming that evolution created any geographical formations whatsoever... :P
evolutionists and scientists claim that evolution created grand canyon. evolution means "change over time". when he says that evolution didn't create grand canyon, he's of course talking about the evolution of the earth, not the evolution of species.
The theory of evolution is about biology, not geology.
Besides "made by a flood" (whether that is plausible of not) is also change over time. First it was one way, then another. How is that not change?
I think this subject has been discussed in the past. An alternative option to save memory when using the rewinding feature is that the emulator doesn't create a savestate at each frame, but only each n frames (eg. each 10 or 20 frames or such). When the user wants to rewind by one frame, what the emulator does is that it loads the savestate prior to that wanted frame and then silently runs the recorded movie at full speed until the desired frame is reached. This happens under the hood so the user just sees the movie going one frame backwards.
Of course implementing this is slightly more complicated than a savestate-per-each-frame solution, but the memory usage can easily drop to 1/20 or even less. (The frequency of such autosaves could even be a configurable parameter.)
I think this video was quite well done. Unlike other have said, personally I didn't find any of the segments too long (including the intro, which I think was cool).
Don't the major publications get special permission to use those or something?
Every single gaming magazine in the world asks permission from every single game company and distributor? I don't think so.
It falls under fair use (and for a good reason too).
"Evolution didn't create the Grand Canyon". I wonder if anyone is even claiming that evolution created any geographical formations whatsoever... :P
Apparently the Grand Canyon was created with a giant garden hose, according to this guy. (I really fail to see how a world-wide flood is in any way equivalent to a garden hose.)
Under US law, whether or not you make money off it makes a world of difference, in terms of damages, and determining whether or not the circumstance qualifies as "fair use".
If you make money off it, it becomes commercial usage, and inelligible for the "fair use" exceptions to copyright infringement.
I honestly don't understand how that can be. If that were so, then it would make it illegal, for example, for a gaming magazine to publish reviews of games with screenshots of the game in them. Publishing screenshots of games in a review definitely falls into fair use and thus is not copyright infringement, and most gaming magazines do it for commercial purposes.
or the authors were too scared (their intention was to release for free, using original content).
When will people get rid of the misconception that copyright infringement must entail commercial usage? Copyright infringement has nothing to do with whether you are making money out of it or not. It doesn't matter if you are distributing it for free. It doesn't even matter if you were paying money to people to take it. That doesn't affect the question of whether it's copyright infringement or not.
