Posts for Warp


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hegyak wrote:
Warp wrote:
In this video there's a Texas hold'em showdown where one of the players has four aces and the other has a royal flush. What is the probability of this happening?
Impossible? Doesn't a Royal Flush use the Ace as well?
The ace of the royal flush is on the table (the "community cards") rather than his hand. (The same ace is part of the four aces hand.)
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In this video there's a Texas hold'em showdown where one of the players has four aces and the other has a royal flush. What is the probability of this happening?
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I think PowerPak is the thing you're looking for. It's a bit pricey, though.
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When making the TAS, take into account that the viewers should be able to read all the text, so it should be slow enough. (Might feel contrary to speedrunning, but hey, it's done for the humor value...) Also, would it be something with live commentary?
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The common way of discovering such a thing as the RNG used by a program is to first find the memory location of the seed(s) used (which can often be found using memory watch or other similar features, although by the nature of random numbers it might be a bit laborious to distinguish it from everything else that's going on), and then you use a disassembler/debugger to find out which part of the machine code modifies that particular memory location. Usually you have found your RNG. (Although it's possible for more than one part of the code to modify the same memory location. Most typically one part will set it up to something, like the system's clock or something else in older consoles, and then another will be the actual RNG algorithm. I suppose it may even be possible for other parts of the code to modify it.)
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dwangoAC wrote:
I've updated my first post to note that if we are unable to get enough donations to offset our travel costs we will make the difficult decision to liquidate a personal asset to cover the costs (I have four pinball machines I've collected over the years that I really don't want to part with but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make if it came to that).
I don't think there's need for that. I don't think anybody would blame you for not going if you simply can't afford it. (As for any unused or extra money, the most logical place to put it would to donate it to the marathon as normal. I don't even know why that would be a dilemma...)
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Please insert a rickroll somewhere in there. That ought to elicit some laughter.
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If it so happens that you don't get enough donations to go, do I assume correctly that you're going to give all that money to the AGDQ 2015 as a normal donation? (In other words, no matter what happens, if we donate, it will go either to your travel expenses or directly to AGDQ donations?)
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Out of curiosity: The TAS will be run like in the previous AGDQ, ie. simply using a device connected to the game controller port of the console? How does this work for the gameboy? (I didn't know we had a gameboy-capable tasbot.) Or does this work through an SNES somehow?
Post subject: Re: How to determine the formula for a random number generator?
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Vykan12 wrote:
Is there a way a formula like that could be determined from a sample set of say, 100,000 consecutive RNs?
My intuition is that in the general case that's an impossible task. (And by that I don't mean "extremely difficult" or "it would take millions of years for all the computers in the world to calculate it". No, I literally mean impossible.) If you suspect that the program might be using a certain RNG, such as a Linear Congruential Generator, then it's not impossible, but it could ostensibly require a lot of time and, moreover, the answer may be ambiguous (ie. it's theoretically possible that different LCG's give that same particular pattern, but differ when you go further.) A brute force method may well require millions of years, depending on the size of the seed (for 8-bit seeds it would probably take a few seconds, for 32-bit seeds it could take thousands of years...) However, even then, there's not one single standard way of implementing a LCG, so you might actually never find it this way. By far the easiest way is to disassemble and find the actual implementation of the RNG.
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I don't understand why the centrifugal force felt by a rotating object would depend on the rest of the universe...
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I must admit that most of your posts go well above my head, but I got curious about the Mach's principle. Do I understand correctly that it's a physical-philosophical question of how do we know that an object is "motionless"? That if we define it as "motionless" by comparing it to the average distribution of mass in the entire universe, this opens up many difficult questions? The principle also seems to deal with whether an object is in inertial or non-inertial motion. For example, how do we know that an isolated object is "rotating" if we don't have anything to compare it to? But this part sounds strange to me because rotation can be measured by measuring the centrifugal force that's applying to different parts of the object. (And in GR it even causes frame dragging, which I also assume is measurable.) On the other hand, an object orbiting another object (such as a planet) is also "rotating" but experiences no centrifugal forces... (but isn't it actually in inertial motion according to GR?)
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I'm not very fond of games without an actual ending, and which are "ended" just by deliberately losing. (Some of the tetris runs are borderline...)
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So it would be like "if we shoot this particle at this closed timelike curve exactly in the right direction with an exact momentum, it will collide with itself, setting itself in a path to collide with itself" and if they do it, it will happen, but only then. It seems still paradoxical, though. If the collision never happens, it would just continue on its normal path (which may not result in any collision with itself). Why would the collision happen in the first place? Seems like some kind of ontological paradox.
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I think there was a solution to a particle orbiting two rotating black holes (inside their ergospheres) to "catch up" with itself, iow. encounter itself. I think that it has something to do with the fact that distances inside the ergosphere of a rotating black hole increase faster than c (due to frame dragging). While nothing can travel between two points faster than c, the distance between two points can increase faster than c (which is a different thing). Thus if you curve the path in a manner that it creates a loop, you can have a particle that "travels faster than c" to meet itself, basically traveling back in time. And this is exactly what would hypothetically happen under certain configurations of rotating black holes. If this were to happen in real life, I don't even dare to guess what happens if a particle collides with itself. At the very least it ought to cause some kind of paradox. (I think some scientists postulate that such paradoxes are impossible because there's some fundamental property of existence that forbids them from existing...)
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The universe is generally described as four-dimensional, with the fourth dimension being time. However, does the time axis really exist? If I have understood the history of special relativity correctly, Einstein himself didn't describe spacetime as four-dimensional in his original paper (published in 1905). It wasn't until 1907 that Hermann Minkowski came with the idea that the theory could be most conveniently formulated in four-dimensional space. In fact, his formulation is described like this (emphasis mine): "In mathematical physics, Minkowski space or Minkowski spacetime (named after the mathematician Hermann Minkowski) is the mathematical space setting in which Einstein's theory of special relativity is most conveniently formulated." In other words, thinking about the universe as four-dimensional spacetime seems to be just a convenient mathematical tool to make calculations and understanding easier, rather than describing actual reality. Or does it describe actual reality (thus being what could be called serendipity)?
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For that matter, "turing completeness" isn't necessarily as descriptive as many people seem to think. It's a highly mathematical term, and it's so low-level that there are many, many things that are "turing complete" yet basically unusable as an actual programming language. XSLT is turing-complete. Conway's Game of Life is turing-complete. Magic the Gathering is turing-complete. That doesn't mean, however, that they are actually usable for computing anything. (The thing about turing-completeness is that it assumes an unlimited amount of resources. Even seemingly trivial operations or rules can become turing-complete if the amount of resources/amount/space/memory available is unlimited. The thing is, with many such things, you would need craploads of those resources to do anything useful, and it would take like the age of the universe to do it.) Most importantly, though, being "turing complete" simply deals with computations. It doesn't say anything at all about what you can do eg. with the hardware the program is running it. For instance, being "turing complete" doesn't mean that you can eg. draw a pixel on the screen or play a sound. In fact, you aren't even guaranteed to be able to write a certain value at a certain memory address. It only means that you are able to perform a given numerical computation and have it in some form that can be interpreted, somewhere. It's more practical to estimate how easily you can express a program with the thing, not if it's theoretically capable of doing it (given an infinite amount of memory and time).
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Besides, running an interpreted scripting language in a tightly controlled sandbox environment, and even with some commands deliberately filtered out, does not constitute "arbitrary code execution" in my books. You can't do anything you want.
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Warepire wrote:
I am not super-thrilled about the name here. Just figured I'd mention this.
But you are somewhat thrilled nevertheless?-)
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If you define the term too loosely, it loses its meaning and becomes just an umbrella term for whatever you want it to mean, and that's not very useful. Compare, for example, to how the term "luck abuse" was used prior to the overhaul of the tags. Since the term was extremely loosely defined, you could technically speaking apply it to almost every single run ever submitted. Which means that it was a rather useless term. If you define "ACE" too loosely, you could argue for almost anything. The run jumps to the end of the game via glitching? ACE, if we loosen up the definition enough. The run causes items to appear in your inventory that shouldn't appear there? Same thing. And so on, and so forth. In fact, if you loosen it up enough, it would simply become a synonym for "glitch".
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Nach wrote:
Why does it have to be machine code? What if a game in an interpretive language, and you can inject code in said language?
I think "arbitrary" implies "anything you want, without limitation". A scripting language will always limit what you can do. I do, however, understand if someone uses it with the meaning "something that wasn't intended by the developers".
Also, does it have to be an unintended exploit?
If I write a C++ program, compile and run it on this computer, would you consider it ACE? Technically speaking it is, but it's not what's usually meant by the term in the context of tool-assisted speedrunning.
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In context, ACE as a term ought to be limited to situations and/or platforms where the user can't normally input and execute native machine code. A PC with a C++ compiler might allow ACE technically speaking, but in that context the term makes little sense. If a game internally uses some kind of scripting language, and you find an exploit to enter and run code in said scripting language, you might argue it's ACE, except for the fact that you are not completely free to run completely arbitrary code that the host machine is capable of (as you are bound to what the scripting language allows you to do), although this might be a matter of opinion and definition. ACE makes most sense in the context of a closed platform where a regular user cannot normally input and execute any kind of machine code at all, under any circumstance (except through unintended exploits).
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Ford wrote:
Honesty has definitions concerning honor, too. It's not just about truth.
I don't see how. The honest thing is to admit your mistakes and failures, not try to hide them and run away from them.
Remember when she lied to Pinkie to keep her surprise birthday party a surprise? That was also a lie, but she was honorbound to tell it.
She had difficulties in doing so (even to the point of being an outright caricature), and she was doing it for unselfish reasons. (And, technically speaking she never lied. They were renovating the barn.)
She's not the only pony guilty of betraying her element, either. Pinkie has battled depression
I don't see how that's against her nature. Her nature is to make others happy. That doesn't mean she can't be sad.
and Rarity has been quite stingy previously.
I get the feeling that the writers sometimes forget what her personality should really be.
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The video is very good in terms of presentation. A bit of editing, as you say, and it should be superb. (I'm wondering how much detail should there be in this kind of submission video, and if there could be more detailed and/or concise technical details.)