If someone takes someone else's movie and makes a very small change at the end which makes the movie a few frames faster, but otherwise completely identical to the previous, is it fair? He basically gets his name on a movie made by someone else. His only contribution was changing a few keystrokes at the end.
I think there's another answer to my question of why it's still advantageous to switch even if the host chooses a random door (and it happens to be an incorrect one), even though in a long series of such events the probability of winning is 1/3:
In average in each third round the host happens to open the correct door, and thus your probability of winning in that round was 0.
In average in 2 out of three rounds the host happens to open an incorrect door, in which cases you have 2/3 of chances of winning by switching.
When we average these probabilities from a multitude of rounds, we end up having 1/3 of probability of winning (because the zero probability cancels one third of the other rounds). However, in each round where the host opened the wrong door, the probability of winning by switching was 2/3 in that round.
Thus switching is advantageous if you happen to be in such round.
Why does it matter if he knows or not? You still have 1/3 chance of having picked the wrong one at first. So, if out of the 2 other doors remaining he revealed one that doesn't have the prize, then the prize has 2/3 chance to be on the door you haven't picked.
How do you prove that switching is advantageous? If you run the experiment many times, trying to calculate the probability, you will end up seeing a 1/3 winning probability.
(Of course if we only count those runs where the host picked the wrong door, and discard the ones where the host picks the right door, then we will see a 2/3 probability of winning by switching. However, which one of these two probabilities is the correct one for the one single case?)
However, if the game is played only one time, and the randomly opened door was incorrect, is it advantageous to switch?
Yes, because it then becomes the exact same problem. Switching is advantageous in both cases (whether the host does or does not know). If the host doesn't know, that only affects your chance of not even getting to switch. If the door opened is incorrect, switching is advantageous. What makes you think the host's knowledge has any effect on that chance?
It has effect on multiple runs: If the host knows the correct door and always deliberately opens an incorrect one, then switching is advantageous in average, when the game is played many times. In this case there is information being passed from the host to the contestant. Basically the host is saying "the 66% probability of these two doors is actually in this one door". Switching gives a 2/3 chance of winning in average.
However, if the host does not know, and opens a door at random, then in multiple runs there is no advantage in switching: The contestant wins with a probability of 1/3 regardless of whether he switches or not. (The reason is that in 1/3 of the runs in average he automatically loses when the host opens the correct door, thus removing that third from the total.)
These always work when averaging the results of multiple runs (the more runs, the more the average result approaches 2/3 or 1/3 respectively).
The interesting question is, however, if switching makes a difference with only one run, assuming the host does not know, and opened an incorrect door at random.
My point is that it might be difficult to enforce any license you choose (because licenses are always based on copyright, and it's not clear whether emulator movie files fall into copyright protection, especially since they are based on copyrighted material).
The Monty Hall problem works only if the host knows the correct door and deliberately opens an incorrect one every time. In this case the host is giving some information to the contestant. If you simulate the situation many times, then the result is indeed that switching is advantageous.
A more interesting question is what happens if the host does not know the correct door, and opens a door at random. If the randomly opened door happened to be incorrect, is it still advantageous to switch?
If you simulate this many times (assuming that if the randomly opened door was the correct one, the contestant immediately loses), then the result is that switching doesn't change the chances of winning in average.
However, if the game is played only one time, and the randomly opened door was incorrect, is it advantageous to switch?
thought yeah, if you want to be enought accurate to give a name on a product, you may want to add some kind of ™ or ®, if this should'nt be already done...
I don't think it works like that. Unlike copyright, registered trademarks are not automatic, nor do you get them by simply claiming you do. Trademarks must be officially registered with the appropriate authority (and only after that can the owner claim trademark rights).
Copyright is automatic (and you don't even have to explicitly claim to own it), but what constitutes as copyrightable material and what doesn't can sometimes be rather fuzzy. (And simply claiming you own copyright on something non-copyrightable doesn't make it so.)
No. It is not. That's why TAS is Tool Assisted Superplay, not Speedrun, as it used to be.
Who decided that? You?
I just love it when people argue that it must be "superplay" because of that logo in the forum. That must be quintessential proof of everything. (Never mind that that's about the only place where the term is used, about everything else uses "speedrun", including eg. wikipedia. I don't even know why "superplay" was put there in the first place, but nobody has changed it, and now everyone always uses it as irrefutable proof every time the topic comes up.)
I think this is a better explanation:
The gambler's fallacy thinks about the problem backwards: It thinks that as you throw more and more heads, the probability of getting tails in the next throw increases. However, this is thinking about it backwards.
If you set up to make, let's say 10 coin tosses, before you start the probability of getting 10 heads is 1 in 1024. Now if you toss the coin and get heads, the probability of getting 9 additional heads is 1 in 512. And so on. When you have tossed 9 times and got all heads, the last toss will have a 50% of probability of also being head.
Any of the individual tosses you made had a 50% chance, but the total of 10 tosses had that changing probability described above.
especially because it just wastes time rather than completing the game sooner, making the video longer than it could be.
This is basically saying it's boring, especially because it's not fastest. I don't get the causal relation here.
What I'm saying is that I'm not at all convinced that making a long run (20 minutes or more) even longer is going to make the movie more entertaining. I fear that in most cases it may be fun to watch for the first 5-10 minutes, but after that it will start feeling just like artificial dragging, trying too hard to be "funny" when there isn't really any novelty in it anylonger.
The idea might work on a short run (5 minutes max, I'd say), but not in the average length ones, and especially not the really long ones (over half hour).
In a regular tool-assisted speedrun at least there is a clear goal, and the variety comes from the game itself. Seeing the game beaten superhumanly fast is the source of the entertainment, even in very long runs.
I'd like to see other creative ideas for runs. Some "drunken master" like play could maybe be interesting where the game is finished in totally obscure and surprising ways. The game would have to provide a high degree of freedom to the player and the player would have to have loads of knowledge about it though.
This is precisely what I was talking about in my original post. It sounds all well and good in theory, but honestly speaking, how many of the currently-published runs would benefit from "free play"?
Note that what you are describing is something which could entertain for a minute or so. It would be foolish to try to make an entire 20-minute run which completes the game and just fools around such a concept. And there are only so many "funny tricks" you can pull off in one game. If you repeat it too much, it quickly becomes boring, especially because it just wastes time rather than completing the game sooner, making the video longer than it could be. (In other words, rather than a 20-minute speed completion you get 30 minutes of fooling around; is that really going to be entertaining?)
Your idea might work for some very short games, those which can be completed in less than 5 minutes, and which lend themselves to such "free play". However, the average length of the published videos is probably somewhere in the 20 minutes. Making them longer is usually only going to make them more boring to watch. The first 5 minutes might be funny, but it gets old very fast. There isn't that much variation in games. I don't think "free playing" is a panacea which will suddenly make long videos more entertaining, if you are bored of watching them.
As I said in my original post, if you want such a "free play" run, then make one, put it on youtube or somewhere, and post links. It's one thing to talk about it, and another to actually do something about it. Maybe if you succeed, it will catch on.
I think honestly the best notion is to moderate anybody that's not established, then have the judges or a special moderation only judge either confirm that they're not joke/troll submissions, or quietly kill them before anybody sees them.
Which is the whole "quarantine area for first-time submitters" idea suggested earlier.
This is an expansion of the 1 submission per day for non "members". How about 1 per day and 2-3 per week?
I honestly can't see how that is going to help. Those misguided/troll submissions are not being submitted several times per day, as far as I can see. If someone wanted to vandalize the submission process, he could well do that by making 3 bogus submissions per week.
It could protect from someone making 100 submissions per hour as some kind of DoS attack, but I don't think that has been happened yet. (OTOH it might be a good idea to protect the site from such a thing in advance...)
People want to see the "Whole game" played, similar to the difference between a low-% and a 100% run, but the difference they are looking for are silly things like "No bunny hopping", because somehow if you play the game without bunny-hopping it feels more "proper", it feels like you're doing the game more "justice".
I don't think "tool-assisted playing which looks almost like regular playing" makes too much sense in the context of tool-assisted speedrunning, I also doubt it would be very entertaining in most cases.
However, as I said in the other thread, and as I have suggested in the past, I personally am not opposed to a "uses the route intended by the game developers" category. In other words, aims for maximal speed, but without skipping by abusing glitches nor level design errors. That has potential with some games which currently heavily abuse glitches.
Of course this category would have to get an official status before people will attempt such runs.
I know this dead horse has been beaten more than enough, but please allow me to present a different perspective on the issue. (Essay follows.)
Many people complain how TASes "break" the games so badly that they basically become unrecognizable pieces of glitches and garbage until there's basically nothing of actual gameplay left to watch. They would want "entertainment runs" which do not aim for absolute maximal speed, but which do something entertaining and interesting, even if it's not speedwise optimal.
If one would not know better, one could get the impression that the vast majority of TASes abuse bugs and glitches that badly, that the majority of TASes are just random glitchfests with no discernible gameplay and which cannot be understood nor enjoyed without extensive knowledge about what is going on in the run.
However, be honest: Exactly how many of the about 500 published movies are such glitchfests? How many of the about 500 movies would benefit from "entertainment runs" which do not aim for maximal speed? 10? Maybe 20? That's less than 5% of all published movies.
Let's take a concrete example: The quintessential old console game, Super Mario Bros. Exactly how would a TAS of this game benefit from not aiming at maximal speed? Exactly how would a run of this game become more entertaining by fooling around instead of trying to complete the game as superhumanly fast as possible? You could maybe come up with some ideas, but would it really make the run better and more enjoyable and entertaining?
How about Super Mario Bros 2? Or the third. Or basically any of the other hundreds of games which do are not heavily glitch-abused? Exactly how would they benefit from slower runs?
There are only a few published runs which are both extreme glitchfests and do not have less-glitched alternative publications (mainly Megaman 1 and 2 come to mind). The vast majority of published TASes are not glitched beyond recognition, and even from the few which are, there often are non-glitched alternatives (eg. 100% completion runs). From the non-glitchfest runs not many would benefit from non-speed completions, from an entertainment point of view.
Should we really change the whole philosophy of tool-assisted speedrunning just because less than 5% of the runs are overly glitched and might benefit from completions which do not aim for maximal speed? Isn't complaining how TASing is all about glitch abuse and frame-shaving a bit exaggerated, given that the complaint can be targeted only on a very small subset of all published runs? Is condemning all 500 published runs really fair because some 20 of them are glitched beyond recognition?
If you want an "entertainment run" of an overly-glitched game, then why don't you go ahead and just make it? Put it on youtube and post a link here. You can even make a webpage listing all such "entertainment runs" on youtube. You can even score them if you want. What would be the problem? I just can't see it. If such a page becomes popular enough, it might even get some kind of semi-official status (such as those excellent TAS lists by alden).
If you want "entertainment runs", then stop complaining and just do it. There's nothing stopping anyone from creating them. I just don't find it rational to complain how TASing is all about "glitching and skipping" just because of some 20 published movies which do so. That's not fair for the other 400+ movies where there's basically no other rational goal than maximum speed to achieve entertainment.
Shut up and fuck off. We don't need that kind of attitude around here.
Great, another whiner.
Where do you get that he thinks his runs are special?
Because in another thread he complained how his runs were obsoleted by newer runs which were faster by only a few frames. If that's not whining, I don't know what is.
This discussion about entertainment vs speed has been here since forever. Thing is that frames always wins in the end, which sucks in many cases if you ask me. And that's why I, most likely, won't be doing a TAS ever again. Feels like I derailed off topic quite much, but since it was brought up..
In another thread you said that you stopped TASing because others were obsoleting your runs by saving off just a few frames.
I'm sorry, but that sounds like whining to me. Why should your runs have been kept and other, faster runs not have been published? Were your runs somehow special? Do you think you had some kind of special privilege that should have protected your runs from obsoletion? Why?
Do you think a 100m sprinter is going to whine if someone else beats their world record by 0.01 seconds? "Hey, he beat the time by too little. I should have the right to keep my world record."
It's not a laughing stock, it was just beaten by a speedrun, if the speedrunner had tried a tas instead they would have got an even faster time. Usually it's because of a new trick or soemthing like that.
I bolded what is exactly my point. I don't believe a TAS can be beaten without some new trick or strategy. It is possible that a speedrun includes this before a new TAS does, but this doesn't change anything. The TAS could even be frame perfect had it not been for that one trick. It only means a new TAS can be made that obsoletes the current one.
I think the OoT TAS was rather unique in that those tricks were known before it was accepted for publication (but after the run was made), which made the whole publication dubious. I think it was published for the wrong reasons: People were way too eager to finally get an OoT TAS, and almost anything was acceptable, even a run which did not use known tricks.
I can certainly understand the sentiment in desiring to unpublish it: The fact that it was published in the first place was probably a mistake.
