What would one need to do in order to obsolete it then?
Program something significantly more complex, impressive and entertaining, and then show a playthrough?
(And before you object with those being subjective... well, entertainment is subjective. Let the voters tell their opinion.)
I thought that the entire point of the Moon tier was to allow for alternative goals (other than pure raw completion speed), and that a run can be published under that tier if it's found entertaining enough. Well, look at the votes and the comments. If those are not deserving of the Moon tier, I don't know what is.
I don't see the problem here.
What's with the site at this moment? Apparently it has been down for hours. Some people commented at the twitch.tv chat something about a DDoS attack, but it might just have been a wild conjecture.
The stream itself seems to be working ok here:
http://www.twitch.tv/speeddemosarchivesda
Edit: Seems to be back up again.
While I agree that this is a massively important run for the TAS community, the run itself does not bring or show much new. The first Pokemon total control was huge. The improved Pi version was also quite nice, but at that point, the total control hacks reached the limit. Once you can program anything you want, what makes Snake more impressive than a Pi showcase?
I think that from a layman spectator's point of view this is much better than either of those.
Showing a static picture and playing some simple music is ok alright, but it's rather... well, static. Nothing much happens. As for the Pi hack, it just shows random numbers on screen. Personally I thought it was completely sub-par in comparison and didn't make any kind of sense.
This, however, shows something actually happening on screen. Some activity, some game logic, and using something that even the casual viewer will understand what's happening. Thus I consider this idea much superior in this sense.
Nach wrote:
In good judgment, I don't see where we can accept this. It's slower than it should be, and the trade-offs could be better. Great demonstration video for gruefood delight.
Damn, I live in the wrong time zone. Most of the games that most interest me (Bioshock, Deus Ex, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Final Doom, Doom 1/2, HL, HL2, Portal, Portal 2) are run in the middle of the night... :/
(Yeah, I know I can watch the archived streams, but it just doesn't have the same feeling as watching live...)
One thing that slightly bothers me: The aesop of Power Ponies was that Spike is not just a comic relief, not just the butt monkey of the group, but in both subsequent episodes he has been nothing but.
Btw, how does this work with more doors? Assume that instead of three doors there are four.
If the host always opens a goat door with prior knowledge of where the car is, is it advantageous to switch to one of the remaining two doors? (Obviously yes, although it's also obviously now less likely that you will win. However, the chances ought to be higher than by staying.)
However, what happens if the host opens a door at random (from the ones you didn't select) and by chance happens to open a goat door? Is it now also so that it doesn't matter if you switch?
I see a lot of stuff posted here and I don't know if Warp yet accepts the answer already, but may I offer a simple analysis?
I understand now why the program prints "50%" (which was surprisingly difficult to predict and even understand after I saw the result.)
However, it still kind of puzzles me if and why the host's overall strategy would affect what you should choose in one single round. After all, if you are playing one single round, and the host opens a goat door, the situation is identical regardless of whether the host always opens a goat door or a door at random...
(Although it gives some insight into that question that if the host always opens the car door unless it was the one you selected, then, even though it appears to be an identical situation, it would nevertheless be disadvantageous to switch because you would lose by doing so. In this case the host's behavior does indeed affect the single round.)
Whether only one round is performed or not is irrelevant. Every round has a success probability, even when there is only one.
My mind just refuses to accept that one single round (where a goat was revealed) can have different probabilities depending on what the host's strategy is over all rounds. It almost sounds like the gambler's fallacy (although I understand it's not, because that fallacy is related to a rather different, psychological phenomenon.)
(The exception being the excellent point you brought up, of course: If the host were always playing against you, and thus always deliberately opened the car door if you didn't select it to begin with, then switching would be detrimental because you would always lose by doing so. If you knew this strategy, then it would be effectively the host telling you outright "the door you chose is the correct one." However, this is a special case. The classical vs. random strategy affecting the probabilities of one single round still baffles me.)
That explains why the simulation gives 66% in one situation and 50% in the other.
The question remains, though: If you are playing one single round, and the host reveals a goat door, is it advantageous to change?
Let's say you don't know if the host opened the door randomly or knowingly. How would you even know, if nobody tells you? How do you know if you are in the standard Monty Hall setup, or in the randomized version? There's no way of knowing.
More puzzlingly, even if you do know, why would that make any difference?
If you were playing several rounds, then it obviously makes a difference. In the randomized variation you are, effectively, playing with two doors, which is why there's a 50/50 chance. In the normal version no door is discarded, so you have the 66/33 chance.
I think this puts the original question in a new light, given that the original Monty Hall problem (at least implicitly) talks about one single round. Does it really make a difference whether you switch or not?
Including the rounds where the car door is revealed is not relevant to the problem I posed.
The point was this: "if before your decision (to switch) I told you that the host actually opened a door at random, would it still be advantageous to switch?"
All logic and intuition would dictate that it makes absolutely no difference what the host knew or didn't know in his head when he revealed the goat. Heck, you (as the contestant) cannot even know if this was a random or a deliberate reveal if I didn't tell you. Yet somehow it does make a difference...
Why do they insist in having such an overly long opening theme? Along with the stupid ending live-action segment, they then have to start cutting the episode proper. It makes no sense.
So, Monty Hall once again... is as unintuitive as ever.
So, you are playing a round of Monty Hall. You choose door number 1. The host opens one of the other doors and reveals a goat and gives you the chance to switch your selection. Would it be advantageous for you to switch? Since you are savvy and know the probabilities, you of course switch, in order to get the 2/3 win probability.
However, if before your decision I told you that the host actually opened a door at random, without knowing what would be behind it (and it just happened to have the goat behind it in this particular case), would it still be advantageous to switch?
"Of course", you say. "What goes inside the host's head doesn't change anything. The two other doors still have a 2/3 chance, and now I have information about which door it can't be. So of course it's advantageous to switch."
Seems completely reasonable. If in a particular round the host reveals a goat door, we are within the standard Monty Hall scenario. The reason why that particular door was revealed shouldn't change anything. It's not like the probabilities change depending on what the host was thinking at that moment, or what he knew. This isn't (a pseudoscientific version of) quantum mechanics, after all; this is pure math.
So let's test that scenario with a small computer program. Just to see that it works correctly we first implement the traditional scenario (the host always reveals a goat door, and the contestant always switches). This gives the expected 66% winning rate.
Now we change the program so that the host opens a random door from the two unchosen doors, we discard the rounds where the car door was opened (because we are not interested in those rounds, we are only interested in the rounds where a goat door was opened at random, because our scenario was to see if it's advantageous to switch if you happen to be in a round where a goat door was opened) and then print the result.
And our collective jaws drop to the floor when the program prints a winning rate of "50%" (or something close to it.) We review the program to see where the bug is, and can't find it. It still prints "50%" no matter how many times we run it.
I wrote a small such program that runs a million rounds. With the classic Monty Hall scenario it prints
1000000 rounds, 667169 wins, 66%
With the random-reveal version it prints
666267 rounds, 333630 wins, 50%
Why does this happen? Why does the host knowing or not knowing affect the probabilities of those rounds where the goat was revealed? Why is this so unintuitive?
Specifically Fluttershy's transformation. The "explanation" just made me go... huh? Fluttershy's stare isn't magical in nature. The spell Twilight cast shouldn't even have been able to DO that.
I find that to be misplaced criticism from your part. How magic should work in this setting has not been clearly established, and moreover, Twilight's magic backfiring in unintended and semi-random ways has been used several times before. This particular case isn't even a complete ass-pull either, as there's at least some logical connection.
I find your criticism misplaced in that, if anything is to be criticized about this whole scenario, it's that Twilight still doesn't understand the consequences and side-effects that her spells can have even though she supposedly became an alicorn princess precisely because she supposedly mastered magic. Her magic backfiring once again goes in contradiction with this whole notion. She clearly still hasn't fully mastered her magic.
Someone commented on youtube (not on this exact subject, but something similar) that it's possible that these episodes were actually originally intended for the 3rd season (before the finale), but since the 3rd season was cut short, they never got the opportunity to use them there. And this is why there's such a big disconnect between Twilight's alicorniness and the plots of these "light" episodes in this season. Either way, it still creates somewhat of a plot hole.
But considering the episode all on its own, without connecting it too much to the major overall plot, I liked it.
It was also really predictable, though a lot of episodes kind of are...
I'm not sure what exactly was so predictable about this. Sure, it didn't have a downer ending (that kind of goes hand-in-hand with the genre and primary target audience), but other than that, at least I couldn't have predicted most of the events.
I might have had I not been busy reflecting over how fucking little sense the whole thing made.
You have seen the season 3 finale and you complain that this episode doesn't make any sense? This episode was awesome in comparison. (And it didn't really have anything nonsensical in my opinion. The only thing that seems slightly nonsensical is that Twilight doesn't seem to have learned anything from the two or three previous times that her careless use of magic has backfired.)
Maybe you should just learn to relax and take them for what they are: Fun little episodes. No need to stress so much over them.
Btw, this is the third time this season there has been an episode-ending gag or other curious detail. I don't remember them ever using this trope before. I wonder if there's some deeper meaning to this change, or if it's just that they are trying something different.
Could someone briefly explain the mechanism by which they will generate a steady supply of air, water, food and electricity that lasts for a lifetime in such a hostile environment?
So, okay, that episode wasn't terrible, just stupid. The general plot was just a rehash of Swarm of the Century with references to some other episodes thrown in.
If you didn't love vampire Fluttershy, then you lose all credibility in my eyes... ;)
If the writers don't care, then why should I care?
Because if the writers actually did take advantage of the change in the status quo, people, and possibly you, would still be complaining.
So even the writers silently acknowledge that the change was useless and serves no narrative purpose? And now they are forced to draw the wings on her because.
(The wings still honestly bother me a lot. They somehow just don't look right. I don't know if it's the fact that she didn't have the wings for 3 entire seasons or what, but they just don't seem to fit. The wings on RD and Fluttershy look natural, but they stick out as a sore thumb on Twilight. I thought that I would get used to them as the season progresses, but that hasn't happened.)
There's only one thing I can say about the latest episode:
I love vampire Fluttershy!
On a completely different note, a little rant about my pet peeve, namely Twilight's princesshood:
The whole concept came completely out of left field in the season 3 finale, and this season has done nothing but reinforce the fact that her princesshood/alicorniness feels completely artificial and tacked on. Even the writers don't seem to know what to do with that.
The fact that she can now fly has not been used even once in a significant manner, as a plot device (as far as I can remember). The fact that she's a "princess" has been used exactly once, in the season pilot, and even there it was one of the stupidest moments of the entire episode that made little sense (ie. her friends basically abandoning her and dissing her because she is a "princess"), and even the little actual drama that could have been resulted was resolved way too quickly, as if the writers just didn't care.
In fact, the writers don't seem to care about the whole new Twilight at all. Her new wings are tacked on only because they have to, and her new flight ability is never used for anything. The fact that she's a princess is never used for anything either (except that horrible mini-subplot in the pilot).
If the writers don't care, then why should I care?
