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Ah, man... the concept seems interesting (and, obviously, quite the technical achievement!), but what I'm asking myself is how different can you really make it from the published run that, visually, accomplishes the same job?
I mean, if I understand all this right, you can input the correct answer off-screen while drawing whatever you want on-screen. But the published run, essentially, does the same thing (only, it embeds the answer within the drawing). Perhaps, I'm thinking, you could get far more creative with the drawings and, say, re-create the Mona Lisa? Or some other type of compelling theme?
I do think, though, that the technical feat is cool; and that it would make for an interesting presentation on how broken a game can truly get.
"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." - 1 Corinthians 2:9
I mean, if I understand all this right, you can input the correct answer off-screen while drawing whatever you want on-screen. But the published run, essentially, does the same thing (only, it embeds the answer within the drawing). Perhaps, I'm thinking, you could get far more creative with the drawings and, say, re-create the Mona Lisa? Or some other type of compelling theme?
The fun of the run does not come from the picture alone. It comes from the picture fooling the OCR.
If you are going to remove the fool-the-OCR element from it, you could just as well switch to Mario Paint.
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Warp wrote:
ars4326 wrote:
I mean, if I understand all this right, you can input the correct answer off-screen while drawing whatever you want on-screen. But the published run, essentially, does the same thing (only, it embeds the answer within the drawing). Perhaps, I'm thinking, you could get far more creative with the drawings and, say, re-create the Mona Lisa? Or some other type of compelling theme?
The fun of the run does not come from the picture alone. It comes from the picture fooling the OCR.
If you are going to remove the fool-the-OCR element from it, you could just as well switch to Mario Paint.
Or, you could ACE Brain Age and at the very last answer...input Mario Paint.
"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." - 1 Corinthians 2:9
I mean, if I understand all this right, you can input the correct answer off-screen while drawing whatever you want on-screen. But the published run, essentially, does the same thing (only, it embeds the answer within the drawing). Perhaps, I'm thinking, you could get far more creative with the drawings and, say, re-create the Mona Lisa? Or some other type of compelling theme?
The fun of the run does not come from the picture alone. It comes from the picture fooling the OCR.
If you are going to remove the fool-the-OCR element from it, you could just as well switch to Mario Paint.
You're well aware that the only difference between your definition of "fooling the OCR" and what they're planning to do is the location of the extra pixels they're drawing, right? You can literally do the same thing by placing extra lines or pixels within the lines you've already drawn, from my understanding (though admittedly, that process is slightly more complicated and requires more effort). This is just a more convenient way to do it consistently...
edit: the GDQ audience isn't going to give a single flying fuck how the OCR was fooled into accepting the right answer by the way, so I'm not sure why you're making such a huge deal out of this.
You're well aware that the only difference between your definition of "fooling the OCR" and what they're planning to do is the location of the extra pixels they're drawing, right? You can literally do the same thing by placing extra lines or pixels within the lines you've already drawn, from my understanding (though admittedly, that process is slightly more complicated and requires more effort). This is just a more convenient way to do it consistently...
The only reason OOB differs from edgebreaking manipulation is that there's two extra edges to account for. That's it. The fact that we are nullyfying the drawing by out of bounds makes doing drawings without out of bounds actually slightly easier, as you can just position the two edges on the top left and bottom right of the drawing, then manipulate with godspots to get your right number. The reason it is easier is because since we aren't doing out ot bounds, the keypoints we are making by drawing register. As such, as long as you have 3+ keypoints (complicated drawings would use around.. 40 to 200?), it is possible to manipulate almonst anything you want, and it becomes easier the bigger the drawing is.
The challenge here isn't manipulating big drawings and making them fool the OCR by some sort of wizardry: it's fooling very small drawings that give little in the way of manipulation. We have very big control over the drawings by just keeping track of the two edges of that drawing.
You're well aware that the only difference between your definition of "fooling the OCR" and what they're planning to do is the location of the extra pixels they're drawing, right? You can literally do the same thing by placing extra lines or pixels within the lines you've already drawn, from my understanding (though admittedly, that process is slightly more complicated and requires more effort). This is just a more convenient way to do it consistently...
Which part of "the fun of the run does not come from the picture alone, but from the picture fooling the OCR" did you not understand?
People are not impressed by a TAS drawing a picture. People are impressed by how a seemingly unrelated picture is interpreted by the program as the correct answer. That's the fun and amazing part of it. Once you remove that aspect of it, then the picture becomes completely meaningless. Why is this so hard to understand?
Please explain to me (because nobody seems to have done that yet) what exactly is wrong with my suggestion, ie. have pictures being interpreted as the correct answer, and then as the last couple of questions have a blank picture interpreted as the correct answer (explaining that the answer is being drawn off-screen). What is the problem you are seeing in this idea? Why does it seem to be such an unthinkable thing? Please explain.
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zaphod77 wrote:
I agree that the original TAS was interesting because it hid the answers inside the visible drawings. Using invisible stuff that counts and visible stuff that does not is, well, cheating.
Here are good examples of what you can do with the new glitches that would be entertaining.
Write one wrong answer, cross it out, write another wrong answer, cross It out, write a right answer normally.
Somethinng like (OOB) hmm i wonder... oh, it's.. (normal) the answer.
write a wrong answer very CLEARLY and visibly, and the right one invisibly. this gives you the obviously impossible result of the game accepting an answer that's obviously wrong as correct.
Any number of other things. Combining visible ignored and invisible not ignored together when the visible ignored is a picture is definitely out of line.
I REALLY REALLY love these suggestions. We should use the invisible glitch, but we should do it in the most impressive way then. All will be happy. If it helps us draw an image so complicated that it wouldn't be possible to draw it without the glitch, it's perfectly fine. But not for everything. We need to be very smart in this.
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.
write a wrong answer very CLEARLY and visibly, and the right one invisibly. this gives you the obviously impossible result of the game accepting an answer that's obviously wrong as correct.
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Warp wrote:
People are not impressed by a TAS drawing a picture. People are impressed by how a seemingly unrelated picture is interpreted by the program as the correct answer.
Yes, some people will be impressed that a seemingly unrelated picture will be interpreted by the program as correct, *exactly* the same way the existing run does it (more on that later). Having said that, I have no intention of using the Brain Age TAS to impress people with our fancy OCR, I plan to use the Brain Age TAS to tell a story as described in the script micro500 wrote as linked from the first post (spoilers). The really cool technical elements will be weaved in but are not the focus of this particular portion of the TAS block.
Warp wrote:
Please explain to me (because nobody seems to have done that yet) what exactly is wrong with my suggestion, ie. have pictures being interpreted as the correct answer, and then as the last couple of questions have a blank picture interpreted as the correct answer (explaining that the answer is being drawn off-screen). What is the problem you are seeing in this idea? Why does it seem to be such an unthinkable thing? Please explain.
There is nothing at all wrong with your suggestion (although I do wish you had been a bit less aggressive in how you made it, but I digress... :) You, micro500 and I all agree that we can and should answer questions with a variety of techniques. Having said that, I've tried to make this point three times now and for whatever reason this keeps getting glossed over - the existing runs use aspects of these glitches under debate already and thus has already succeeded in fooling all of us. Since there seems to be such a vehement resentment of this technique, should the existing run(s) be placed in Gruefood? I think that would be a travesty - yes, there is a lot more novelty in the OCR finding the correct answer in the visible image but I seriously doubt that the GDQ viewers will ever care or even notice because the focus of what we're doing is on the story and not this one very minor technical nuance that only matters to those of us in this echo chamber. :)
I think we've more or less come to a conclusion in this thread that for the purposes of the GDQ event we will employ multiple methods but the question remains what to do with this run after we're done - there's still no way for us to submit it on the site, and I honestly think that's the biggest thing we still need to debate and work out how to handle.
the existing runs use aspects of these glitches under debate already and thus has already succeeded in fooling all of us.
If a currently published Brain Age TAS uses the described technique of drawing the answer off-screen, rather than fully using the visible picture for this, then that's certainly a disappointment, at least for me. (Of course I don't call the shots here, so I can only express my personal opinion. For what it may be worth.)
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Warp wrote:
dwangoAC wrote:
the existing runs use aspects of these glitches under debate already and thus has already succeeded in fooling all of us.
If a currently published Brain Age TAS uses the described technique of drawing the answer off-screen, rather than fully using the visible picture for this, then that's certainly a disappointment, at least for me.
Yeah... that's what micro500 found, it was in his first reply:
micro500 wrote:
I believe the basis for the published run is the idea that the OCR in the game is so loose/broken that you can draw a picture and the game will accept it as the correct answer. You would probably think somehow the game is finding the answer in what you drew. Watching the run with that expectation leaves me entertained, because I enjoy seeing the game being broken in that way. For some of the answers that is exactly what happens, but for others I see that he added extra taps (both in and out of the drawing area), and also traced over some of his old work to trick the OCR.
In retrospect, I guess I just never assumed that the published run was always embedding the answer visibly and thus I came in with different expectations. I don't think you should think less of the run, though - yes, it used a different method than the one you thought it did but if anything I think that's interesting in and of itself. :)
Since there seems to be such a vehement resentment of this technique, should the existing run(s) be placed in Gruefood?
At the very least, I do not think it deserves a star. I also think a TAS that maintains some dependency between the drawings and the answers for every answer should obsolete the published run. As for unpublishing runs, my understanding is that this is nearly impossible to do (as in the site is not capable of functionally doing it).
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Weatherton wrote:
dwangoAC wrote:
Since there seems to be such a vehement resentment of this technique, should the existing run(s) be placed in Gruefood?
At the very least, I do not think it deserves a star. I also think a TAS that maintains some dependency between the drawings and the answers for every answer should obsolete the published run. As for unpublishing runs, my understanding is that this is nearly impossible to do (as in the site is not capable of functionally doing it).
Whoa now, hang on, we should *not* be removing the star from this run! Seriously, this echo chamber is getting really bad.
Consider an outside visitor who comes to the site and wants to see entertaining runs - Brain Age is most definitely entertaining, although if you wanted to rate it lower on a technical difficulty basis you're certainly welcome to. If anything, this debate continues to fuel my desire to get a tier for games that aren't about speed and are instead about doing fun things, playing around, creating new works of art, doing unusual things, etc.
At the very least, have a look at the published run's ratings and you'll see a very clear trend. New evidence that the run employed these glitches to accomplish this entertaining result should never fly in the face of 44 ratings amounting to an entertainment score of 8.5. I'd still continue to assert that the use of these glitches is absolutely worthy of a high technical rating as well, even if some people feel "cheated" by what they allow the game to become.
If we're talking about publications on this site, I'd personally like to see both the current run as a playaround (based off of one glitch) and one with this new trick being utilized for speed purposes (basically an Any% run). I don't see the issue with that.
Having said that, I have no intention of using the Brain Age TAS to impress people with our fancy OCR, I plan to use the Brain Age TAS to tell a story as described in the script micro500 wrote as linked from the first post (spoilers). The really cool technical elements will be weaved in but are not the focus of this particular portion of the TAS block.
Invariel asked the question in IRC "What is the point of demonstrating a TAS block at *GDQ?", and the answers seemed to agree on "validation". People want to see that the cool glitches we use in the emulator actually work on the console if you were a super-human. I think second to that we should entertain the crowd, if possible. We shouldn't pick uninteresting movies, or movies that only a very small portion of the crown may have heard of. TAS Block started with DarkKobold taking a NESBot to a GDQ and playing back a run, and the crowd was entertained to see that everything worked just as it did in the emulator.
This continued in 2014 with an example of an ACE glitch. We validated the ACE glitch on hardware, and second to that we entertained the crowd with a new game of snake. 2015 again continued this trend with another example of a ACE glitch, again validating that it does work on the real hardware. While the crowd is also looking to be entertained, I think they are also looking to see the real hardware being used (and abused), and I think this is why some of the responses to this year's SGDQ were rather negative. Some people were entertained to just see the TASes being played back as videos, but it seems that a majority wanted to see runs on the real hardware.
If the point of the 2016 AGDQ TAS block will be to tell a story, then why are we using Brain Age to do it? Surely we could find another game that is more suitable for drawing pictures. Maybe a game that lets us use colors, or vary the width of our pen. If this is just about the art, I see no reason to use Brain Age when there are other superior options available that would give us more freedom.
I disagree with your idea of focusing on telling a story, and instead think we should talk about our hardware implementation and let the story tell itself.
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micro500 wrote:
I disagree with your idea of focusing on telling a story, and instead think we should talk about our hardware implementation and let the story tell itself.
Fair enough, and I've certainly been the first to defend that this *is* technically challenging, it's just that the focus should be on what we're able to do with the game and not this one little nuance of technicality. Yes, the story should tell itself, although I suspect there will be a decent amount of interactivity.
the focus should be on what we're able to do with the game
Brain Age gives us a fixed pen size (4x4), and our only color choice is black. We aren't able to do much with the game. Why are we using Brain Age instead of Mario Paint, Color a Dinosaur, or Flipnote Studio?
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micro500 wrote:
Why are we using Brain Age instead of Mario Paint, Color a Dinosaur, or Flipnote Studio?
I think the appeal here is that using Brain Age to draw/tell a story is completely unexpected. Using something specifically made to draw/tell stories wouldn't have the same sort of impact. Sure, you could TAS Mario Paint, do some really nice drawings for a few minutes and call it a night, but where's the fun in that? Think of it this way: You could've programmed a couple basic games in Game Maker and you would've gotten more freedom to do what you want, but the fact that these games were specifically coded into Super Mario World was what made it incredibly fascinating.
To put my point more eloquently: It's not about the art, it's about the canvas.
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You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
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Samsara wrote:
To put my point more eloquently: It's not about the art, it's about the canvas.
I think this is more or less what I've been trying to say as well - the only thing that I've been going around and around about is that this particular combination of glitches should not be the focus of the run. The fact that we're using something that should only recognize numbers to draw full-on pictures is really cool, it's a canvas where one wouldn't expect to find one, and there is definitely value in that. I apologize if some of my comments in this thread weren't the most helpful in conveying this, and my thanks goes to Samsara for summing it up so well.
To put my point more eloquently: It's not about the art, it's about the canvas.
I think this is more or less what I've been trying to say as well - the only thing that I've been going around and around about is that this particular combination of glitches should not be the focus of the run. The fact that we're using something that should only recognize numbers to draw full-on pictures is really cool, it's a canvas where one wouldn't expect to find one, and there is definitely value in that.
This is exactly the point of using this game. We are drawing pictures in a mathematics which was designed to only accept numbers. In addition to that, the game is also being tricked into accepting those pictures as the answer! Part of the challenge of this canvas is that the game is watching everything we do, drawings and all. If we use the glitch to have the game ignore our drawing it's as if we are avoiding the canvas that we purposely picked. The audience may have no idea, but this feels wrong to me, and I think it would feel wrong to the audience too if they knew what was really going on.
I believe this glitch should be avoided to the best of our ability*. I want at least a majority of the answers shown at AGDQ to be done without the glitch, otherwise I would not feel comfortable showing the run. If we end up with a majority of the drawings not using the glitch we will explain to the audience how difficult it is to trick the OCR and that we did our absolute best to trick it in the time we had, but in the efforts of time we used the glitch to get the run ready for AGDQ. But this explanation doesn't work if most of the pictures use the glitch. At that point the show ends up looking more like "we kind of tried, but then we cheated for the rest of them", and we end up looking bad. If time is such a problem maybe we should save this run for the next year when we've worked out a way to not use the glitch.
* We are still definitely going to use it to make a blank answer, because a blank answer is hilarious!
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So it's now about the degree, right? Options like "no glitch at all" and "everything with the glitch" were obviously refused. "Do half of the answers with it and half without it" doesn't sound too smart either, because it's arbitrary. micro500 suggests (and I used to suggest) "only 1 answer with the glitch".
So how much should we use it then? I still think (after seeing zaphod77's ideas) that we should limit it, but we must use it for anything that is actually better with the glitch. Like really complicated drawings or mere funny answers like crossing stuff out, or drawing "Pffffff I give up", or things like that, and getting accepted. Drawing 42 to answer the least likely question is also a great idea.
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.
Consider an outside visitor who comes to the site and wants to see entertaining runs - Brain Age is most definitely entertaining
Even at the risk of sounding like a broken record, it's entertaining because it appears that the program is being fooled with the visible picture into thinking it's the correct answer. That's what makes it so awesome and fun. It's the whole idea.
The pictures are not all by themselves all that fun. It's what they (seemingly) are doing, ie. fooling the program. I honestly cannot understand why this is so hard to fathom. It's quite clear.
echo chamber
Btw, you keep repeating that expression. I'm curious to know what you think it means (because, and pardon the pun, I'm not sure it means what you think it means.)
