If a TAS uses techniques that are also possible and used in regular speedruns, is that really a reason to disqualify it from the recommended-for-newcomers category?
This makes the assumption that newcomers are already familiar with regular speedruns, and have seen the ones of those games.
That's a good point. Doom is of historical interest as one of the first games to kickstart the speedrunning community, but that doesn't make it recommended for newcomers.
If Super Mario Bros is interesting to newcomers due to its fame and its history, then so is Doom. Everybody knows Doom. Even somebody who has never played a single video game in his life knows Doom.
I am of the opinion that ubiquitous fame of the game in question can be reason enough to recommend a speedrun for newcomers, especially if the speedrun itself is of high quality and interesting to watch.
If I understand correctly, in Japan all animated cartoons are "anime". It's just their word for it. Thus (and again, if I'm not mistaken) even western cartoons are called "anime" there. It's just their loanword for "animation" (ie. animated cartoon).
In the west, however, "anime" tends to have a much more specific meaning. Usually it not only means animated cartoons made in Japan, but more specifically ones with a certain style. In other words, it's a word that refers to a style or genre, rather than just being a generic term for all animation.
With Japanese cartoons like Heidi, this western definition may become a bit blurred. Some might consider it "anime" while others don't.
I have serious doubts that a phone-based VR system is ever going to be all that feasible.
Both the Vive and the Rift have really hefty hardware requirements (even by today's standards, although, and of course, as time passes, it will be becoming more and more mainstream; but as of today it's still on what can be classified as "high end", or "enthusiast level", rather than your average gaming PC), and there's a good reason for it. After all, you want to reach that critical 90 frames per second, at a relatively high resolution. And without your game looking like a PS1 game.
(Although, if you look at what kind of VR games are currently available, at least 90% of them look like PS2 games. A few of them even look like right at home on a PS1. Most of them look like absolute crap.)
Even the PSVR, with its lower hardware specs, is aiming for that critical 90 FPS threshold.
Modern phones are really powerful, but they aren't that powerful. And they won't have a 90Hz display. Maybe some time in the future, but not now.
Secondly, phones are running Android. Android is trying so hard to be a gaming OS, but meh. Maybe Angry Birds and Clash of Clans. But for the real gamer, meh. And I'm not just saying that as some kind of "PC master race" elitist or something.
At this moment, PSVR seems to be the most promising platform. It's still slightly on the uncomfortable side in terms of price, but at least it's much better in that regard than its PC counterparts. It might not have the exact same specs, but it seems to be good enough. Just wish it didn't cost as much as the entire PS4 Pro (and more than the basic PS4).
It would be sometimes useful to have a concise name for what I otherwise call "high school math" (or, dare I say, "practical math"; at least practical in graphical programming).
Obviously this goes beyond mere arithmetic, but not too far into calculus (and, in practice, calculus can be left out completely). It would include things like analytic geometry (without going to complex subjects like topology), vector math and trigonometry, as well as equation solving.
I suppose "elementary algebra" might encompass most of that, although I'm not sure it encompasses analytic geometry. So maybe "elementary algebra and analytic geometry"?
Suppose p is some of the listed p's and p is a divisor of p1p2...pr+1. That means that
p*A = p1p2... * p * ...pr+1
p*A - p1p2... * p * ...pr = 1
p*(A - B) = 1
p*k = 1 (impossible)
It becomes much clearer when shown like that. But I have seldom seen that being explained in the "proof" in practice.
Btw, about an earlier post I made, for some reason I have a really hard time proving this:
"If the positive whole number M divides the positive whole number N, then all the factors of M are also factors of N."
(which would be the final step in the proof that all positive whole numbers larger than 1 have at least one prime factor.)
This sounds like a completely intuitive, trivial and self-evident thing, but I have a hard time figuring out a way to "prove" it methodically. I suppose there's a reason why I'm not a mathematician.
Just some ideas I have about the recommended TASes:
- A few of them ought to be absolute glitchfests, to really show how badly a TAS can break a game. One of them should just destroy the game so badly that it becomes unrecognizable. Another should not exactly break the game, but should zip through the game at absolutely impossible speeds due to heavy glitching (Megaman comes to mind as an example.)
- Some of them should be relatively (or even completely) glitch-free, but clearly show absolute superhuman "skill", that clearly no human should be capable of. In other words, showcase the very essence of tool-assistance.
- Some of them should just be really flashy and showy, like a work of art. Bonus points if it does it so in a manner that's next to impossible in real-time playing.
- If possible, at least one should showcase heavy luck manipulation, preferably, and if possible, in a manner that's clear even to somebody who has never played or even seen the game before.
- A couple should be of immensely popular and well-known games, just because they are immensely popular and well-known. No other reason needed. There's nothing wrong with that. It attracts people.
You probably thought that I wrote that in jest. I was, however, being 100% serious.
When I wrote that, I weighed 104 kg (229 lbs). Today I weigh 82 kg (181 lbs). I can't comment on how much of a "hunk" I might be, but I'm happy to have become healthier, and that, for once, I was able to keep such a cliché new year's resolution.
If you don't assume any background knowledge in the reader, and try to prove everything from first principles, you end up needing hundreds of pages to prove 1+1=2. The proof is very difficult to follow, because it spends so much time in the detail that you don't get a sense of the bigger picture.
Again, I don't think that the last part of the "proof" is such a trivial everyday thing that it can be simply glossed over without so much as a brief cursory argument of why it's true.
As said, the original argument by Euclid doesn't actually gloss over it. Here's one translation of it:
"Call the primes in our finite list p1, p2, ..., pr. Let P be any common multiple of these primes plus one (for example, P = p1p2...pr+1). Now P is either prime or it is not. If it is prime, then P is a prime that was not in our list. If P is not prime, then it is divisible by some prime, call it p. Notice p can not be any of p1, p2, ..., pr, otherwise p would divide 1, which is impossible. So this prime p is some prime that was not in our original list. Either way, the original list was incomplete."
(Granted that this version just makes the claim that "otherwise p would divide 1" without explain why, but at least it's much closer to a complete proof.)
the fact that any positive integer greater than one has a prime factor
That got me thinking how to prove that.
Let's assume there exist positive integers (larger than 1) that are not divisible by any prime number. By necessity, there must exist the smallest such number, N.
If N is only divisible by itself (and 1), then it's prime by definition (and thus divisible by a prime). Therefore for the assumption to be true it has to be divisible by some other number M, which is smaller than N.
Since we established that N is the smallest non-prime-divisible number, then M must be a prime-divisible number. But if M is divisible by a prime, so is N, which leads to a contradiction in our original assumption.
That last part follows from the fact that all factors of M are also factors of N. And that's true because... hmm...
Damn, that's a bit tricky. It's intuitively very simple, but to state it methodically... There's probably a very simple proof of that, but...
I don't think "the product of all primes up to n, plus 1, is not divisible by any of those primes" is a trivial, self-evident statement requiring no further explanation (even if it's an informal one). It also isn't just a well-established named theorem (like the Pythagorean theorem, or the fundamental theorem of arithmetic) which explanation can be omitted because of that.
I know this has already been discussed, but would it be too much to ask if encoders didn't use that ugly filter? Just plain unfiltered pixels would be completely fine by me.
The classic proof that you often hear that there are infinitely many primes is a simplified version of Euclid's argument. In other words, the "if there are finitely many primes, multiply all of them and add one, and you get a number that's not divisible by any of those primes, therefore there has to be at least one more prime" thingie.
I don't remember when or where I heard this "proof" for the first time, but even back then it bothered me when it just makes the claim that you get a number that's not divisible by any of the listed primes, without even an attempt at a cursory informal argument about why that's the case. It kind of takes it as a self-evident fact that that's what happens... even though I don't think that can just be glossed over like that. It's not that self-evident. It always bothers me when the "proof" is repeated by people, and that last part is just stated as some kind of self-evident trivial thing that needs no argument or explanation, and can just be taken for granted just like that. I would argue that the proof is incomplete if that last part isn't explained.
Euclid's original argument doesn't actually gloss over it, nor take it for granted, but gives a short explanation of why the claim is factual. But you seldom see this part anywhere.
Thinking of it, the argument (even the original one) actually does take something else for granted without even mentioning or referring to it, namely the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. But I suppose that such fundamental theorems can in most situations just be implicitly taken for granted without the need to explicitly mention them.
In high school I just loved math and physics. Because I loved the subjects, I paid attention in class, because it was so interesting. Eg. at math class, everything the teacher said, and everything he wrote at the blackboard, I understood just like that, without any problems. My brain absorbed all that information like a sponge absorbs water. I just "got" it. Just like that. I never even bothered doing any homework because everything was so easy. I regularly got full 10 points in all exams. Physics was the same.
Then something strange happened in the last year of high school. At some point I just lost interest in physics. Math was still interesting, but somehow I just couldn't "get" physics anymore, and suddenly I started actually failing exams, to the great puzzlement of both me and my teachers. I still got straight 10's in math, but could barely pass physics exams with a lot of effort. I don't really know what happened. I just somehow lost interest.
After high school there was a life situation, involving moving from one country to another, that didn't allow me to go immediately to university. In the interim year I went to a kind of open university for a couple of months. Mostly for math courses. I was still interested in math, and everything was really easy.
Then something again suddenly happened. One day I was still fully interested in math, the next day I lost all interest completely. I really don't know why or how. And it became really hard. Everything I had learned previously was easy, but everything new was really hard because I just couldn't get interested, even though I tried. It was really strange.
This was quite problematic when I finally got to university. Every math class that dealt with the same subjects as in high school was relatively easy, but everything that dealt with complex new subjects was really, really hard, and I had a very hard time passing the exams. No matter how I tried to motivate myself to get interested in those subjects, it didn't work. I eventually passed all those math classes, barely, but with great difficulty.
I still to this day love high school level math, especially in programming (and especially in graphical programming). I like geometry, trigonometry, vector math... All the high school level stuff. They have practical applications in programming. But when the subject goes much more complex than that... aargh.
I noticed several times at university that passing exams and getting good grades was 100% a question of getting interested in the subject. If I had no interest, it was extremely hard to pass. If I got interested, it was easy to get high grades, even full grades.
One particular example was an introductory class to economics. I literally had zero interest in the subject, and while the teacher was quite good and tried to make the subject interesting, I just didn't "get" it, and failed exam after exam after exam. One year, when I was repeating the course from scratch, however, a friend who was also on the same course suggested that we study together. He actually succeeded in making the subject somewhat interesting, when we discussed it together, and pondered about the problems together. I got a 3 (from a scale from 0 to 5, where 0 is failure, and 1 or higher is a pass) on the final exam, just like that, without much effort. It was all a question of getting interested in the subject.
Ok, wall of text over.
One has to understand that the GPU doesn't run code in the same way as a multi-core CPU. GPU's have "general-purpose" cores in the sense that they support almost everything that a CPU does (at least in terms of mathematical calculations applied to data), but not in the sense of "every core can execute code independently of each other".
Each core in a multi-core CPU can run an independent routine, or the same routine completely out-of-sync. The cores are pretty much completely independent of each other and can do whatever they want. (Which is actually one of the reasons why it's so difficult to have them handle the same shared data: They could interfere with each other when reading/writing that shared data.)
In a GPU, however, each core (at least the cores in a group) runs the exact same routine, completely in sync. It's like a bunch of cores traversing through the set of opcodes at the same speed, every one executing the exact same instruction as every other one, in parallel. (This execution model is labeled "SIMT", or "single instruction, multiple threads".) So it's essentially having one program, which multiple cores are executing in perfectly in unison. (The reason why this makes any kind of sense is that the values that the program is operating on can be different for each core. Ie each core can get different input values, execute those instructions on them, and thus produce different output values.)
Anyway, what this means is that to be able to get any advantage from GPGPU, your task needs to be one single routine that can be run in hundreds/thousands of cores in parallel (using different input values for each). You can't just run different tasks on different cores.
(Well, technically you can because the cores in a GPU are divided into groups, each group being able to run an independent routine. However, to get any sort of speed advantage from this, the routine ought to be parallelizable to dozens of cores at least. But even then, there are limitations on how these different routines can interact with each other.)
Fragment shaders are a good example of this (and it's exactly how they work in the rendering process). A fragment shader is one program that gets run in parallel for hundreds (even thousands) of pixels, with different input values (eg. texture coordinates).
(The SIMT mode of execution is also the reason why conditionals are a bit inefficient in GPGPU programming. If you have an "if(condition) slow_code(); else another_slow_code();" what happens is that when the threads reach that condition, the ones where the condition is false go to idle, waiting for the remaining threads to finish executing that branch. After that the first threads will start executing the else branch, while the others go idle. The overall speed of that conditional is the same as executing both branches consecutively, regardless of how many threads go to one branch and how many to the other.)
Thanks for your answers.
The top image makes color calculations (eg. in surface lighting) in terms of perceived colors (in practice in terms of raw pixel values). In other words, for example, if a surface at some point reflects half of the incoming light, a 100% white light will get reflected as 50% gray (ie. if in terms of pixels, a white pixel being (255, 255, 255), the surface will have a color of half of that, ie. (127, 127, 127).)
The bottom image makes such calculations in terms of absolute light energy, rather than perceived brightness. In practice this means that eg. said surface would look approximately as 73% gray (ie. its pixels would be about (186, 186, 186).)
It also affects all the other kinds of color calculations (such as color mixing in reflections).
In theory the latter should be more physically accurate, so I wanted to see which version unbiased people would think is more realistic.
For a small project I'm participating in, I would like to poll people on which one of these images looks more realistic. (Click on the image for a larger version.) They have been rendered using slightly different methods.
Since I don't think I have the permissions to create polls on this forum (or if I do, I don't know how), you can vote here instead: http://www.strawpoll.me/11451622
I had a feeling the Riddler question requires a lot of computation to solve completely.
This is actually the kind of problem that sounds like it would require a lot of computation to solve (and, if you were to make some kind of generic version of the problem, it would probably be exponential-time / NP), but in practice, due to the limitations given in the problem, is actually very fast to calculate with some very simple optimizations.
The key is that you don't have to test all possible combinations (which would indeed be exponential-time). When building combinations, if you encounter an invalid path (in this case one that crosses a line) you can simply discard that search sub-tree completely. This cuts off the amount of branches you have to search by an enormous margin.
I haven't tested, but I suspect that you can make a program that searches for all valid paths on an 8x8 board in a fraction of a second. (It obviously becomes slower and slower if you keep increasing the board size, but I think that it would remain reasonably fast even for somewhat larger board sizes, maybe even something like 20x20 or 30x30. But this is just a gut feeling. As said, I haven't actually tested it.)
About the finale (this doesn't actually contain spoilers of any significance, but I'm putting it in spoiler tags anyway, in case you don't want to read anything at all about the finale, not even opinions.)
I think the finale was quite ok, even though I thought it was a bit of a letdown given the grandiose nature of the previous two season finales, where they went really the extra mile to make them spectacular and epic. There was kind of an attempt at this in the setup, but ultimately in the end it just felt like a somewhat average mid-season episode.
Although, in some sense, that was also somewhat of a relief. At one point I was actually fearing they would pull another Magical Mystery Cure and actually make Starlight Glimmer a princess. I was thinking "no, no, no, please don't, no, no, don't do that, please oh please. Don't make another MMM, please." Luckily, they didn't, and I'm really relieved because of that.
I really liked the idea of making, not just a regular episode, but the season finale of all things, it about secondary characters (nice lampshade hanging from you-know-who, too.) It was a refreshing change of pace. Too bad that the finale turned out to be, regardless of the promising beginning, rather meh and average.
I think there was a great missed opportunity in the first half, where they could have prolonged the "mystery" longer, ie. the strange behavior of the ponies when Starlight returns to Ponyville. They could have eg. made it look like nobody remembers her and that eg. apparently something has happened to the timeline, or something. But they disposed of any such possible plotlines way too quickly, which was a shame.
Also, the radical change in the end happened way, way too easily. I know, kids' show, limited runtime, but still... way too easily. Broke willing suspension of disbelief.
I know psychologists are for everyone.
But i have my serious doubts its going to help me any. I have been to psychologists before.
At this point i might as well try it again though. just waiting for monday where i can call my hospital to ask them for phone contacts
Im crying again btw
i feel ive been done injustice.
I know this sounds like the most cliche armchair psychology in existence, but I really think that opening up like this is a very good thing, and a step for the better. The worst thing one could do in such a situation is bottling it up.
MUGG, have you considered meeting with a psychologist to talk through your feelings?
By the way, I think this is good advise.
People tend to be wary of psychologists, especially if they have never been to one, and may be either really shy about even thinking going to one, or think that it's only for neurotic old wives or the truly insane. In actuality it's nothing like that (although I can't talk from personal experience, as I have never been to one, but I do know close people who have been to psychologists.) They are there to help, and there's nothing to be scared of, or ashamed of. There is nothing shameful about it. And they can really help. That's their job, and generally they are good at it.
I worked in a kindergarten 7 months internship and now they tell me there are too many problems etc. i can now only go there fridays but its like a slap in my face. i did nothing wrong. i was just being me. They never told me what i should do or fix. They just tell me "their team is coming to the agreement i should only come fridays"
Maybe try to discuss it with them more? If there are problems, ask what they are.
You can personally agree with Warp all you want to, but people in higher ranks than you make this decision and I already know they will back me just like in the past
I don't understand this tone at all. Why does it have to be so confrontational?
Also, the tasvideos staff is notorious for listening to people and considering what they have to say, and changing things if good suggestions are made (something that seems really rare nowadays). That's why I'm encouraged to voice my opinion if I dislike something.
Anyway, it's just an encode. There's nothing to get so riled up about.
