Aw jeez, you guys are right. I was thinking the permutation total was 256 * 18000, when in fact it's 256 to the power of 18000.
Even if you take impossible key combinations out of consideration, even if you break the game up into 20-second level-by-level tasks, even if you have a supercomputer capable of emulating 60,000,000 frames per second, it's still going to take until the end of time to exhaust all possible combinations. Just goes to show that humans are still smarter than computers.
I wouldn't mind even if the entire movie (still talking about the keypad input) is computer generated. Actually, that could be exciting to see :)
This is actually something I've been thinking about for a while now.
Even a short game, like a 5-minute-or-less run through SMB1, has 4.6 million possible combinations of controller input. A few of them might beat the human-assisted record; almost all the rest will feature Mario blindly walking into the first Goomba on level 1-1. The trick in finding an efficient way to create computer-generated game runs will be finding that needle in the haystack, and not wasting time on hay.
I have a few ideas about how this might be accomplished, and they draw on all the three semesters of Computer Science I didn't really pay attention during when I was in college. Has anyone else given any thought to this kind of thing?
Another item that can be skipped is Disk 1. Just walk/slide under it before it drops from its location every time you go through. And obviously, if you don't pick it up, you don't have to waste time analyzing it either.
Definitely use death as a shortcut instead of traversing back to the beginning of a level. It's repetitive enough that you have to play parts of Kazakh 4 times, we don't need to see Hiryu go through them in both directions.
There's really only one "right" path through the game as far as I've been able to discover, and a lot of texty cinema scenes that can't be skipped over... I think glitch abuse is going to be important if the goal is to create a movie that people will want to watch more than once.