Quantum entanglement, the double-slit experiment and things like the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment have always been rather esoteric and have always had a feeling of been very far removed from actual everyday life and visible applications (other than possibly some rather non-descript-to-the-layman interference patterns on a photographic film).
However, researchers have now taken a step further and have actually demonstrated quantum entanglement in action: Taking a "photograph" of an object with photons that never touched nor reflected from said object. Instead, photons emitted by a light source are split in a manner that they get entangled, then one stream hits the object and the other stream hits the camera. Thus the photons that hit the camera never came into contact with the object being "photographed" this way. Yet the image appears on the film. The only reason for this is quantum entanglement.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-08/uov-qpe082814.php
Btw, I'm wondering if by "antialiasing" you really mean "bilinear filtering".
(While I suppose that bilinear filtering could technically speaking be considered a form of antialiasing, it's not what is usually meant by the latter term, so it's a bit confusing.)
Bilinear filtering is the technique of interpolation usually used when scaling an image bigger (ie. the color of the new in-between pixels are calculated by interpolating from the four original pixels.)
Mersenne primes are prime numbers of the form 2n-1. There are quite many of them (ok, only 48 have been found so far, but there doesn't seem to be a good reason to believe there aren't infinitely many, although that's still an unproven conjecture).
So what about prime numbers of the form 2n+1?
If you test the primality of such numbers, you'll find out that they are prime for values of n of 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16. There seems to be a clear pattern here. It seems that whenever n is a power of 2, 2n+1 is a prime.
But then you try with n=32, and it's composite. Bummer. How about n=64? Composite. 128? 256? 512? All composite. In fact, no other n has ever been found (be it a power of 2 or not).
For some reason n follows a nice pattern up to 16, and then it just stops. I find it curious. Is it just coincidence?
(Btw, primes of the form 2n+1 where n is a power of 2 are called Fermat primes. I think it has been proven that it can only be prime if n is a power of 2, but it has not been proven that it goes only up to 16. In other words, it's yet unknown if there are more, or even infinitely many.)
If this competition becomes reality in AGDQ, will the participants know in advance what game will be TASed, or is the idea that the game will be revealed only right when the 2-hour competition starts?
Even watching the TASer make the TAS for 4 hours and explain the process would be interesting. As others have noted, it would also show millions of people how a TAS is made.
Given how much repetition is involved in making a TAS, wouldn't it get pretty boring pretty fast?
One idea for a total control hack would be something that seems at first glance impossible to do on the target console. I'm thinking of how demo programmers time and again seem to defy what seems possible with limited hardware in those old consoles. Or, perhaps alternatively, show some picture that seems to be of much higher quality than what the console is capable of. (There are tricks that can be used eg. on the NES to make an image look like it has much richer color palette than usual. I'm sure on the SNES this could be taken much further.)
Of course I understand that making such a demo, game or even image would be a lot of work, so the suggestion may well be unrealistic in practice.
I am not sure how widely offered the required classes are, but before I had the understanding of how things work under the hood, I had to take both a course in state machines, embedded programming and compiler theory, something I doubt is offered today at most universities since they are moving more and more towards C# and .NET environments.
All three of those are standard courses (or part of them) at the university here. (Of course I can't speak for all universities in the world.)
(Where he goes off the rails is complaining about the reset button. A perfect player could easily press that button. I know of a Pokemon human speedrun that involves cutting off the power and corrupting the save file. It lets you get into a glitched menu that lets you pick an option that will take you to the final room of the game. If it can be done in a real speedrun, it can be done in a tool assisted speedrun. It's only the other way around that might be impossible.)
For what it's worth, I'm personally not completely happy with save files being corrupted via resetting in real-time runs either. It just doesn't feel like speedrunning anymore. It feels more like "how can we break the game by abusing the power/reset button". That's not playing the game and thus, in my books, isn't speedrunning it either. Sure, kudos to the people who have the skill to do it, but it's a different category altogether.
"If you can do it in a real console, it's legit" is not a very good argument. You can modify the real console, but that doesn't make a speedrun of it legit. And once we get to removing and changing game cartridges while the game is running, we are going way south with the whole idea of completing games by playing them.
But that's just my opinion.
Haven't we gone through the issue of admins making personal insults in thread titles already in the past? I'm frankly getting tired of it, and I'm really tempted to start throwing insults back myself. Do we really have to go through the same shit all over again? Just stop with the personal insults, thank you.
Yeah. Why respect people's opinions?
It's not a question of it being on the controller. Resetting, removing discs or cartridges, power-cycling, altering the machine's RAM via external means (ie. other than by the game itself), corrupting the savedata and so on is not playing the game. In my books any run that uses any of those doesn't count as a legit completion.
(Yes, I know about that one game that needs resetting to continue. No need to bring it up again. I can grant an exception with that game. If you want to smash the console with a sledgehammer and pour water on it when TASing that particular game, be my guest.)
I never thought of this before, but The Last Roundup is pretty strange.
So Applejack is ashamed because she didn't win the rodeo competition. Wouldn't it have been the honest thing to do to come back and just be open about it? And that's not all, consider this:
"S'no big deal, guys. I thought cherries would be a nice change from apples, so I took the job and came here. That's it. End of story."
This is an outright lie, pure and simple. From Applejack. The element of honesty.
(Of course one could reasonably argue that being the element of honesty, and being honest by nature, doesn't mean that you never, ever, ever lie. Her shame was so overwhelming that it made her act against her own nature, and this only adds to the depth of her characterization, rather than erode it.)
Hey, whatever floats their collective boats. As long as they aren't hurting anybody, kudos to them. F*** societal norms; dare to be different, dare to be free, dare to express yourself in whatever way they want, and anybody who feels like mocking them can go screw themselves, I say.
