Posts for thatguy

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Posted: 3/14/2017 7:35 AM
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thatguy
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Remind me what the "trick" is again? I like you saw the run and was disappointed by it, but I can't remember why.
Posted: 3/14/2017 7:30 AM
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thatguy
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Game doesn't appear to run on my laptop for some reason... EDIT: this link works for me http://armorgames.com/play/3141/super-stacker-2
Posted: 2/26/2017 5:26 PM
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thatguy
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Andypanther is asking us to disregard the official ratings system's arbitrary judgements and instead implement his own arbitrary judgements. Hmm... I'm no fan of censorship, but I do understand the argument that Nach and the like are making that hosting such content might jeopardise the site at the hands of internet guardians. But if someone really wanted to shut us down they could do so anyway on copyright grounds - even if we aren't breaking any rules that doesn't seem to stop people.
Posted: 2/17/2017 7:24 PM
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thatguy
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A fiendish problem I came across recently (it's an old riddler problem: after seeing the Fractalfusion link I went on an archive binge.) A duck is swimming in a circular pond, with a fox standing on the bank. The fox cannot swim, and the duck can fly but cannot take off from the water - it has to get to dry land first. Once ashore it can immediately take flight and escape permanently. The fox is hungry and has the duck in its sights. It will run around the circumference of the pool to try to keep the duck trapped. The duck wants to escape, but in order to do so has to get to the shore in such a way that the fox won't be waiting for it when it arrives there. How much faster must the fox be able to move than the duck, in order to ensure that the duck cannot escape? The naive answer is pi times - assume that the duck starts from the centre of the pond and swims directly away from the fox, then the ratio of speeds is the ratio of a circle's radius to the length of a semicircular arc. However, with a cleverer strategy the duck can escape a rather faster fox.
Posted: 2/17/2017 7:04 PM
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thatguy
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This puzzle, and a solution/explanation, appears in the film Little Big League: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7jVL_JSWgI&index=45&list=PLmNp3NTX4KXIqtjt2AKOr4DUIxn64xj8G
Posted: 2/17/2017 8:01 AM
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thatguy
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The thing is that this TAS just doesn't appear all that superhuman. It doesn't look as though TAS tools confer that much of an advantage for a run this short and this menu-based. Not a criticism of the run, it's just the nature of the game. By the way, what is this TAS's timing with RTA rules?
Posted: 2/16/2017 6:16 PM
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thatguy
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FWIW, I feel that these games don't belong here - it's not like we are the only place TASes can exist (much as we like to pretend otherwise), so there is nothing stopping anyone publishing content from these games elsewhere. However, on a practical level, the AO games which are being discussed above are not the sort of games that are currently amenable to TASing. We ought to clarify the rules at some point, but they are mostly not a concern for current levels of TAS capability. More relevant, and wholly undiscussed thus far, are Atari porn games. While I imagine they would be vault fodder, they can certainly be TASed with current technology. They also pre-date the age rating system. What to do about those? Also, the existence of ACE means that a TAS of a non-adult game could still theoretically involve adult content...
Posted: 2/14/2017 8:07 PM
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thatguy
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You raise an interesting point, actually. The equation he solves has two solutions, one (the correct answer) is the golden ratio (1+sqrt(5))/2 but he has conveniently ignored (1-sqrt(5))/2. To prove convergence, you could work out the "error" (difference to the golden ratio) of Xn+1/Xn relative to Xn/Xn-1, and then show that that error is smaller by a large enough margin that as n goes to infinity error does indeed go to zero.
Posted: 2/6/2017 6:58 PM
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thatguy
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SmashManiac wrote:
Uhhh... the legality of this TAS is already questionable. It contains a bunch of music code ripped from other games, sprites ripped from other games, one copyrighted song and one copyrighted video clip.
Spoilsport. This is clearly a transformative work and therefore fair use. If the ROMs of other featured games were programmed in and played it would be different, but they are not - it's all just A/V.
Posted: 2/5/2017 8:07 PM
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thatguy
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This is not merely the greatest TAS of all time, this is the very pinnacle of human achievement. If MrWint had dedicated himself to medicine instead of computer programming, he'd have unlocked the secret of everlasting life in his coffee break.
Posted: 2/1/2017 8:35 PM
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thatguy
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Onto actually solving the problem: The neat thing about this is that it can actually be reduced to a two-dimensional problem, which is much easier than trying to think in three dimensions. Consider the pentagon formed by the free edges of the five faces surrounding a single vertex. They have a circumscribed circle which is just a planar slice of the sphere circumscribing the icosahedron. What is the radius of this circle? Well, if the side of the pentagon is 1 then the radius of the circle r is 1/(2*sin(pi/5)) (difficult to explain without a diagram, and a worthwhile exercise). When you turn the icosahedron's triangles into those triforces, the pentagon in the 2-d slice becomes a decagon inscribed in the same circle. By similar argument to above, this decagon has a side-length 2*sin(pi/10)*r = sin(pi/10) / sin(pi/5). That is then the side-length of the outer edges of the triforce - those triangle edges which are not part of the central triangle. The side-length for those central triangles - well that's rather harder as I suspect you do have to do some calculations in 3-d for that. I'll leave it to a more able geometer.
Posted: 2/1/2017 7:26 PM
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thatguy
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(Just sayin', I saw your drawing and immediately the Zelda theme started playing in my head. Dun dun, da da-da-da-da-da...) It's pretty trivial that this is not a platonic solid because not all the vertices are the same. There are five triangles meeting at each of the twenty "original" vertices, and six triangles meeting at each of the sixty "new" vertices. Clearly, since the shape is convex (ie angles round a vertex are less than 360) some of the triangles are pointier than equilateral triangles at the "new" vertices.
Posted: 1/25/2017 9:09 PM
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thatguy
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Okay got into a mess with the google doc because I mixed up "comments" and "suggestions". Looks like a good explanation but I personally feel like the concept of re-recording is very important. For me the key concepts are: input file, frame advance, re-recording, perhaps memory watch.
Posted: 1/25/2017 9:00 PM
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thatguy
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Sorry got4n. Really looking forward to the TAS, the WIPs I have seen so far have got me super hyped. Had no idea you had done anything like that many re-records, which just makes it even more impressive. Looking forward to it, your dedication is immense.
Posted: 1/23/2017 7:19 PM
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thatguy
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Beautiful. Voted yes, unfortunate about the downtime but it can't be helped really. Now can Got4n & co just finish Rayman 1 already? It's odd that this and Rayman 3 have been TASed before 1 & 2.
Posted: 1/21/2017 10:10 PM
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thatguy
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Gruefood Delight might be a good hunting ground for "awful block" TASes, but I don't know if we want to endorse work that we ourselves have rejected. (Also a lot of GD is very high quality, and was rejected for technical reasons, arbitrary goal choice, or for just being boring if they were submitted in the pre-vault era.)
Posted: 1/21/2017 11:03 AM
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thatguy
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Well, to a physics graduate and amateur/recreational mathematician like myself, it's not obvious why the Riemann Hypothesis would imply that the primes are "randomly" distributed (for a suitable definition of "random"). The only link that I can understand that it has to primes at all is the Euler identity: infinite_sum(1/n)^s = infinite_product(p^s/p^s-1) where p are the prime numbers. It's not obvious how you go from there to saying that the zeta function has anything to do with the distribution of primes. Of course, other mathematicians have done this legwork but it's hardly trivial, is it?
Posted: 1/20/2017 6:25 PM
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thatguy
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The Riemann Hypothesis was always a bit weird for me, as unlike other famously unsolved conjectures of its kind there doesn't seem to be a heuristic reason why it should be true. I understand what the question is asking but it just doesn't seem at all obvious that the zeroes of the function have any reason to all line up as they apparently do. Compare that to Goldbach's conjecture, for example. It's easy to see that the higher you take your number n, the more possible pairs of numbers (n/2) you could add together to achieve that number; and that n/2 grows much, much faster than the "probability" they will both be prime decreases (ln(n)^2 a consequence of the prime number theorem). Hence you expect the probability that there will be at least one suitable pair to approach certainty very rapidly, and once you've checked up to a thousand you conclude that it's very unlikely there's a counterexample. Now of course that's not a proof because probability is not certainty and the above assumes that the primes are randomly distributed, which they most certainly are not. But you can see how it's plausible. With the Riemann Hypothesis, it's more "look at the first few zeroes, they all lie on this line" with, for me at least, no deeper intuition as to why that should be so.
Posted: 1/5/2017 8:55 PM
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thatguy
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I believe the word you're looking for is "normalization". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_(statistics)
Posted: 12/26/2016 11:23 AM
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thatguy
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Seriously though, we have got to a point where two sides cannot talk to each other. The fact that we now live in a world where anyone who disagrees with us is at best a troll, if not a stain on the human species, is deeply saddening - more saddening to me than an election result which is only relevant for four years. About the election itself I am certainly disappointed (though not all that surprised), but I refuse to be "butt-hurt", to assume as though this is the end of the world as we know it, as that is exactly how the alt-right wants me to feel. Well I'm not giving them what they want. Mankind survived Hitler and so ought to take Trump in its stride. Happy Christmas!
Posted: 12/26/2016 12:25 AM
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thatguy
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For some reason this conversation reminded me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMU1_-_4WKg
Posted: 12/13/2016 5:31 PM
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thatguy
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On its submission thread, there were quite a few people suggesting that [3275] DS Kirby: Canvas Curse by GloriousLiar in 25:45.53 might be worthy of a star. For me it's one of the most "superhuman" TASes I can remember seeing for a while. Thoughts, people? EDIT: I've just checked and there are no Kirby games with stars at the moment. That's probably a point in this movie's favour.
Posted: 12/11/2016 9:13 PM
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thatguy
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feos wrote:
Which glitches does it skip exactly? And if there's a bunch of them, are they actually all possible glitches for this game? Because if it only skips some, it can't be glitchless. And if it skips some that are really common in this game, it can in the end become "no X glitch".
Just the Pomeg glitch, which is the only known glitch in this game, or at least the only one with speedrunning applications. The only thing which *could* be considered a glitch in this run is the catch tutorial - but IMO that's just luck manipulating a really unlikely event where you kill the Ralts before you're meant to catch it, ending the tutorial early. So I guess "no Pomeg glitch" is an acceptable name for this category?
Posted: 12/5/2016 10:41 PM
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thatguy
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Okay, one tiny question, what's the point X-attacking on the Archie fight? It raises the attack stat from -1 to 0 (because Intimidate) but then you crit anything anyway which ignores the attack drop you would have had without the X attack.
Posted: 12/4/2016 1:53 AM
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thatguy
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Borderline star material here. Somewhat reminiscent of Ivy the Kiwi, if anyone remembers that TAS.
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