Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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Thanks for constantly comparing a site where people willingly share their work under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license to all sorts of commercial organizations' problems. Your examples don't help us come up with better policies. You even explicitly refuse to suggest a sensible rule that can be enforced on the site globally.
Since you're not suggesting any official improvements, your posts are basically just counter-productive whines.
- This site needs to censor votes!
- On what basis?
- I don't know (nor care).
And after all the explanations about little meaning of votes here, about vanishingly small possibility to abuse them for real and successfully, about lack of irreversible damage this may cause, you still religiously believe that this censoring should be enforced even when rules are not obviously broken.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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Can you please state clearly how we should determine if the case needs investigation in the first place?
p4wn3r wrote:
Besides, I really don't see what is abusive about sending a PM to some people asking "It was alleged that you voted on this submission to degrade the author. Is this true?".
I never said that can be abusive. Requesting investigations can be abusive.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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Ah thanks. But I'm still unsure how it's related to making sure a movie is "shortest possible".
The difference from the dictionary I see is this:
Sure, you can compare every memory state you get to all possible memory states, and disregard all the new input sequences that lead to some previously found memory state. But that doesn't tell anything about which memory state leads to absolute shortest movie. It's just not enough to check if the "word" you have is in the "dictionary" or not.
For example, let's say I have a savestate on frame 1000, I got there by executing certain inputs. It may be possible to reach this state sooner in the movie than in 1000 frames. Without testing all the possibilities up to that frame, I won't be able to prove that 1000 is the optimal frame for this state.
Then there's some movie after that frame. Let's say it beats the game in 5000 frames overall, so it lasts 4000 frames itself. I won't be able to prove that 4000 is the optimal movie length for the "game end" state without testing all other possibilities that are shorter.
Some of the search can be discarded based on this similarity, but not as much as in the "find all words" example.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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r57shell wrote:
Possible outcome: "my exhaustive search tells me that it's impossible."
Later someone: "It is possible, I found the way to do it."
It's very close to what happened with MrWint's and HappyLee's SMB submissions. MrWint used some search that's not exhaustive, thought that's it's "exhaustive enough", or maybe "it's not fun anymore", and voila, his (partially) botted movie is beaten.
Warp wrote:
feos wrote:
Games are different from words.
No, they aren't. Not in this context. In this case we are talking about an algorithm to take some input data and find an optimal result.
Can you please be more specific and tell why you think that finding the absolute shortest sequence of inputs that beats the game is the same task (in this context) as:
Warp wrote:
Suppose you are given, let's say, 20 random letters, and a large dictionary of English words (let's take the sowpods dictionary, which is used for official scrabble tournaments, and contains 276663 words), and your task is to find every single word in that dictionary that can be formed with any amount of those 20 letters.
The major difference I see is that the answer to your words task can be checked directly: you just look into the dictionary and clearly see whether the particular word you invented is present or not. The answer to "shortest possible" requires having data to compare to, without having 100% of the possible data you won't be able to prove it's the shortest possible.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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Ah I see now. It makes sense to tell people not to vote out of spite. It also makes sense to tell them to only limit their feedback in posts to actual movie contents. Discussing things not related to TASing of the game in question is basically off-topic in the Workbench. And explicit off-topic discussions can be just split, like it happened here.
As for investigating and punishing...
p4wn3r wrote:
Given that this submission has received an unusual amount of negative votes, we decided to investigate.
Where should the borderline for this be? Suspecting unfair feedback is a valid concern. But if there's no clear and sensible borderline to unfair feedback that has to be investigated, then requesting such investigations can also become abusive.
For example, some people suggest that cancellation in this case was done to manipulate the feedback and make people feel sorry. I don't know to what degree this is true, but that's how this decision was partially taken.
p4wn3r wrote:
However, in this case, suppose you open up the "No" votes and it appears that all come from users with the same IP address. That would be conclusive evidence that manipulation took place. Since it is possible for the violation to exist, it's not a witch-hunt.
This is already a ban case. Multiple accounts are not allowed exactly because they can be used to manipulate votes and ratings (and forum feedback). And this indeed can happen upon request.
p4wn3r wrote:
When do you start an investigation? When there's sufficient suspicion that a crime/violation happened. As was pointed out by many in the original thread, submissions such as those are usually uncontroversial, and the number of No/Meh was unusually large. There was nothing unusual with the number of Yes votes.
None of this can serve as a policy. Relying on "usual" and "unusual" will not work, because those do not imply clear cut. They depend on one's notion, personal definition of these 2 words. Even if we try to define them once and for all, these terms are in their nature subjective.
Additionally, controversy shouldn't be relevant to feedback. If there's some past controversy that affects feedback, without people explicitly mentioning it as their voting reasons, it's impossible to determine that their feedback is based on controversy. If there's some current controversy, it should be split as off-topic. And only if it's unrelated to actual movie contents.
So far, "usually uncontroversial" and "unusually controversial" don't sound like a principle for a policy.
Here's what we have right now:
Site Rules wrote:
Abuse of the Voting/Rating System
People are free to vote however they want on submissions. However, users abusing the system for reasons that are clearly and intentionally beyond the scope of the movie in question will be dealt with. Additionally, rating multiple movies by the same author as a form of promotion or degradation will also be dealt with. As noted, this will only be in cases of clear, intentional, and obvious abuse.
Do you want any of this to change?
p4wn3r wrote:
Instead, we get lots of philosophical arguments about art [...] which lead nowhere at all.
This is outright false. In a thread where people are supposed to discuss one's artistic decisions in a TAS, on the site that is supposed to host these pieces of work and encourage people to be creative, talking about TAS art is 100% legit.
As for professionalism, what I said was closely related to this advice:
Nach wrote:
I recommend trying to understand why they're upset (even though it may be irrational), and working to make them less upset. Also don't take the negativity you see about your run so seriously, not everyone is being objective at the moment.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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Games are different from words. Right in front of us people find glitches that cause unexpected shortcuts. Not even necessarily something that instantly ends the game. Just basically any glitch can happen if truly exhaustive search is done, regardless of our assumptions of clearly useless input.
If we disregard glitches, then indeed the search can be made very limited and still work for the intended game engine. But look at memory corruption techniques. Setting up what variables will go where, and how they will be broken, takes time that a simplified bot might consider suboptimal, or even obviously useless. But a few minutes after you end the stage that'd take you 10 minutes.
Like I said, it doesn't even have to be a major skip. Some minor glitch with enemy subpixels that only appears in the next stage and lets you save more time than you lose right now by causing this glitch.
It's called routing, and it can be insanely complicated. Building full simulation is sometimes not feasible, so unless the search is 100% exhaustive, there's still possibility that a movie can be improved.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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What's with this decision to skip questions from staff about your suggestions to staff, HappyLee?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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HappyLee wrote:
I think maybe under circumstances like this, some administrator should come up and say something like: "People, place your votes seriously, and don't let your feelings take over the facts" (except I can't express it well).
Which circumstances exactly?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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Guys you see? One of the problems with polls is that anyone can have some special personal vision of what their votes mean, and it's impossible to enforce any defined vision, regardless of how far personal vision is from what we actually ask.
On the other side, we don't depend on polls in anything important, so I wouldn't mind any loose interpretation. Polls are just not damaging until someone decides to overreact, which can have any reason really; sometimes even contradicting circumstances cause the same overreaction from the same person.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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Warp wrote:
p4wn3r wrote:
To start off, I heavily object to the name "exhaustive search bot". Just by a simple calculation at the size of the NES RAM and the possibility of inputs, it's pretty obvious that with current technology it's impossible to make a bot that's truly exhaustive. The amount of possibilities is too much, even for a computer to check.
Technically speaking that's not true in all cases, but that conversation would be a bit off-topic in this particular thread. I would write an essay about it, but maybe that would be better in a thread that's more on-topic with that subject.
It's been split into a topic about bots, so it must be perfectly fine to resume this talk :)
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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TheProJamer wrote:
Certain Wii games, primarily those focused around you playing as your Mii such as Wii Party and Wii Sports, can have time saved by having custom Miis made in Mii Maker stored in Wii memory (so that the player isn't forced to go out of their way to use guest Miis), and certain categories are only possible with the existence of custom-made Miis. What is the current stance of ruling in regards to this?
I don't think there is any stance.
How does creation of them relate to Dolphin emulator movies (DTM)? You create them separately, share between consoles, and then when you start a movie, Mii is just already present there, and affects gameplay?
Also, in order to replay a DTM, if you don't have the custom Mii used by the author, what do you do to properly replay such a movie?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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They don't waste all the lives they have, they just share them to effectively prevent real game over where both players lose a continue and start the level from scratch. The same thing as here also happens in [983] NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project "2 players" by Xipo in 30:30.87, where one player constantly gets game over (to reduce enemy spawns) and borrows lives from the other. So yes, it's not "the game over", lives can be refilled, the game keeps progressing as long as at least one if alive.
Additionally, the game still gets beaten.
Finally, there's no appearance of the string "game over" in the Movie Rules. Arcade continues are mentioned, and even they, as DarkKobold, senior judge at the time, originally stated, may be allowed on the case by case basis (hence "These rules are not strict"). More info here:
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=469917#469917
So I don't see any points against what is actually present in this movie.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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The dedicated page for this game doesn't tell anything about its end goals, so we can't rely on official requirements regarding game end here. Which options do we have then?
Splitting this into 2 movies doesn't make much sense, because the game has no SRAM, therefore no newgame+ kinda branch. So we either use an emulator savestate, which is outright banned, or play the game twice. Or refuse the second quest altogether, just like with Gosts'n'Goblins.
But unlike in GnG, this game features significant gameplay difference, so beating it the second time showcases more of what it has to offer. Even if the levels are the same, main mechanic is still different. And yes, since the game explicitly recognizes your second completion by stopping itself, we can say that it's an intended stopping point for this game.
Some games allow SRAM or passwords to be used to reach the second quest easier, and maybe the original plan for this game was indeed to provide such a method, but as it is right now, there's no other way to reach the full stop. So we just have to play the game twice.
And drop the branch label.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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Dacicus wrote:
LitePC has software that can help eliminate some of the features. I've used the trial version of the 98lite product to install WinME in MAME on ct486. Information is available in this thread; I ran into the same problem as that guy about only being able to have VGA display in 16 colors.
This is really nice! I think the problem you had is only really a problem for MAME, PCem just lets you run later hardware, so that problem isn't there. We can still make a guide how to optimize Windows using this tool, to standardize is as much as we can.
teapartycthulu, thanks for participating!
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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I updated the OP. tl;dr: P C E M ! ! !
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
I tried a few "alternatives" before. We need implementation quality capable of running this one game:
https://yadi.sk/d/abD5JnQG3RpJUw
Can you test it on them?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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I have ALL FP versions. Which one doesn't require that?
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[08:32] <feos> usually there's an answer, but it's so fucking hard to find it
[08:45] -> DrD2k9 вошёл в tasvideos
[08:46] <DrD2k9> @feos, you around?
[08:48] <DrD2k9> guess not. I'll catch you later.
[08:48] <- DrD2k9 вышел из tasvideos
[08:48] <Spikestuff> lol
[08:55] <feos> amazing
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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c-square wrote:
Not applicable to the current question, but related: is it allowed to glitch into a cheat/debug mode?
An example I've been thinking of recently is how many Sierra games have a debug or cheat mode. I know it's not permitted to enter the code to use that mode, as the code was never given in the instructions, nor was it ever intended to be part of normal gameplay. But what if you found a glitch that allowed you to take advantage of some of the code in the cheat mode? Is that allowed?
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If it happens without sacrificing entertainment, we'll label both anyway. They use and avoid warps not because it makes walkathon faster, but exactly for entertainment.
To clarify history behind this, warpless walkathon clearly aims for entertainment with its warpless part of the goal. It explicitly avoids warps to be more impressive. So we label it as warpless. Warped walkathon is a counterpart run. We don't care if it's obsoleted or published alongside. We have both, one of them explicitly aims for entertainment, another one is a counterpart, so we label both. Not doing so for any of them would cause questions from those less familiar with the situation. Also, providing more info than needed for those familiar with the situation is less harm than not providing it to the former people.
For City Connection, warpless and warps are not compound goals. Therefore when it comes to labeling, we don't care about speed-orientation. And we don't care about entertainment. We only care about whether it's an internal goal or not.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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That's only because you define it as "aims for fastest speed". It doesn't help with labeling when there are countless scenarios that need to be resolved sensibly.
This example of yours counts as counterpart branches. As long as they both exist, even though one is obsoleted, we label both to communicate the difference between them.
Here's a compound goal example, but it shows the solution:
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
