I came across this yesterday, and it made me think of this thread:
Michael Larson (the middle guy) studied the "random" pattern of the board, and learned where it was going to land and how he could manipulate it. He went on to win over $100,000.
Check out wikipedia for more.
Joined: 8/31/2004
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Location: Falun, Sweden
I'd abuse programming errors to zip through the floor and roof and walls in Megaman style to simply apear and disapear over and over again. ^.^
I've heard it ought to be possible "by walking into a wall a trillion times you will occasionally miss all the atoms and simply glide through".
Bein' away for like five years, and not a single new post in the ZSNES forum... :'-(
Joined: 8/6/2006
Posts: 784
Location: Connecticut, USA
The first thing I would do would be to drive from point A to point B as fast as possible while obeying most traffic laws except for speeding. That way I could drive incredibly fast at a red light and it would turn green at the last second as I passed under it. Then some people watching would probably say, "woah."
I've heard it ought to be possible "by walking into a wall a trillion times you will occasionally miss all the atoms and simply glide through".
You'd need more than trillions of times to quantum tunnel any remotely significant amount of mass through any remotely significant barrier.
My dorm in college had a dorm-run vending machine, and a standing reward of 1 free soda to anyone who could manage to quantum tunnel through the wall into the storage room used to restock it.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Probably do mind/psychic based tricks which are impossible to do in real time like getting someone to shuffle a deck of cards and then guess each top decked card while blind folded. I could simply rewind back after someone has told me the correct information and then recite it back.
I'd do everything. I'd probably spend my first few years constantly rewinding the same day, reading some whole libraries. Then I'd learn to play lots of instruments. All before the end of the year. Maybe become a progamer, maybe become a superstar, maybe win the WSOP, maybe win the lottery just for fun. Stuff like that. ;)
You wouldn't be able to rewind to build up knowledge, because once you DID rewind you'd lose that knowledge.
Imagine you're a character in an RPG. You can't just grind, then go back 40 hours, and still have all your experience.
You wouldn't be able to rewind to build up knowledge, because once you DID rewind you'd lose that knowledge.
Imagine you're a character in an RPG. You can't just grind, then go back 40 hours, and still have all your experience.
This thought experiment breaks down totally if you take that argument to its logical extreme. You wouldn't be able to manipulate luck because you wouldn't remember what approaches failed. You wouldn't be able to use slowdown, as that would just slow down your brain too. You couldn't disassemble the workings of the world, since a character in a game wouldn't know how to do that. Etc. etc. So the 'real world TAS' would just be living normally! Realistic, but not much fun to think about.
No, for this thought experiment to work, you would need to be somehow sitting outside reality, controlling a character in the real world. Not very realistic, but at least then you can actually get some interesting situations.
If the character reads a book, he would forget the contents when rewinding, just as he would lose the benefit of exercising. But depending on whether the you, the player, can see the book as he is reading (sounds reasonable that you should be able to), then you would remember it, and be able to make the character act just as if he remembered it too.
You wouldn't be able to rewind to build up knowledge, because once you DID rewind you'd lose that knowledge.
Imagine you're a character in an RPG. You can't just grind, then go back 40 hours, and still have all your experience.
My conscious mind has to be nested outside of reality and I must be able to keep knowledge when rewinding or else you couldn't really call it "having TAS tools in real life". If rewinding made me lose all knowledge, I wouldn't even notice I had done a rewind and thus act in exactly the same way as before. Frame advance would also be useless because the chemicals in my brain would also be slowed down and thus it wouldn't make any difference at all. With both rewinding and slow-downs being useless, how could you call that "having TAS tools in real life"?
So of course if you had TAS tools in real life, you'd have to also be able to conserve knowledge during rewinds. It's an essential part of TASing.
For learning instruments, for example, of course it'd be more difficult because you'd also need to train your physical body for that. I see that as an analogy to grinding exp. All mental experience about the enemies' weaknesses and battle strategies or of the theoretical knowledge required to play an instrument gets conserved in both cases.
This thought experiment breaks down totally if you take that argument to its logical extreme. You wouldn't be able to manipulate luck because you wouldn't remember what approaches failed. You wouldn't be able to use slowdown, as that would just slow down your brain too. You couldn't disassemble the workings of the world, since a character in a game wouldn't know how to do that. Etc. etc. So the 'real world TAS' would just be living normally! Realistic, but not much fun to think about.
Even if the "TASing" was limited somehow, eg. you could only rewind a few minutes at a time, and could only remember your last attempt but no further (or, alternatively, you could remember only a limited amount of time before you forget), it would still be useful. For example, you could score 3 points in basketball 20 times in a row for an amazing feat (which you could bet on). It could also save your life in dangerous situations.
Joined: 8/6/2006
Posts: 784
Location: Connecticut, USA
How would frame advance work in real life? There are obviously more than 60 "frames" per second in real life, but the question is, are there infinitely many? I honestly don't know the answer, as I have never studied physics in great detail.
You really wouldn't want to advance at a rate of one Planck time per step. You would go mad of boredom before you would advance even one billionth of a nanosecond.
This thought experiment breaks down totally if you take that argument to its logical extreme. You wouldn't be able to manipulate luck because you wouldn't remember what approaches failed. You wouldn't be able to use slowdown, as that would just slow down your brain too. You couldn't disassemble the workings of the world, since a character in a game wouldn't know how to do that. Etc. etc. So the 'real world TAS' would just be living normally! Realistic, but not much fun to think about.
No, for this thought experiment to work, you would need to be somehow sitting outside reality, controlling a character in the real world. Not very realistic, but at least then you can actually get some interesting situations.
If the character reads a book, he would forget the contents when rewinding, just as he would lose the benefit of exercising. But depending on whether the you, the player, can see the book as he is reading (sounds reasonable that you should be able to), then you would remember it, and be able to make the character act just as if he remembered it too.
IMO the only one way to slowdown is to make our brain work faster, since our brains are barely controlled by us (about 10%-15%, the other 90% is mostly controlled by subconscious, such as heartbeat, muscles strenght [35%], etc.) so you are thinking faster (or normally in slowdown, depending the point of view) which seems possible (theoretically).
rewinding is something totally different
You can't rewind, but If we consider the wormhole theory that it should let us travel in time (again theoretically) It should be possible to use savestates by making travel the information we are thinking through the brain ,(remembering something) and intercepting it with one wormhole that goes to the same place in the brain in the past, and supposedly have the information.
How would frame advance work in real life? There are obviously more than 60 "frames" per second in real life, but the question is, are there infinitely many? I honestly don't know the answer, as I have never studied physics in great detail.
Actually, it is not like a console executes code at a 60 fps resolution either, and one frame is not the smallest timestep it is possible to take in an emulator. A common smaller one is a single CPU instruction, but actually, these instructions are built up by microinstructions, so one could use these as steps too. Also, a console contains numerous chips running at different rates, so the smallest useful step should match those too.
But in a console, input is usually checked no more often than 60 fps, so that makes it a useful step size, as does the fact that some of the output (the video) is displayed at this rate. So my point here is that a useful step size doesn't need to be the smallest possible one.
For the real world TAS, 0.01 second would probably be more than sufficient most of the time. If I were to implement the interface, though, I would make buttons for increasing or decreasing the step size. That way one would get high resolution when needed while avoiding needles tedium in sections that don't require as much precision.
A common smaller one is a single CPU instruction, but actually, these instructions are built up by microinstructions, so one could use these as steps too.
Only perhaps the newest consoles. Certainly not the oldest ones. Dividing opcodes into microinstructions is a modern invention. Back then there weren't even pipelines or caches, much less "microinstructions". Each machine opcode took an exact amount of clock cycles to execute, so a clock cycle is the unit of time in older processor (in way, in modern ones too, although it's a bit more complicated).
