51–60 of 85 posts
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> ...immortal being locked in a prison with just an Apple ][e... Sounds like me as a teenager.
I was about to post the same thing. People today can barely remember what time felt like before the invention of the Internet eradicated boredom.
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Unfortunately, a lot of strong chess players do not enjoy playing Chess960 because we've already invested hundreds of hours into learning openings and how those openings transition into a middlegame. While it's certainly fair (position is the same for both sides), it gives positions which are almost impossible to evaluate. This is exciting for spectators, but for me it's excruciatingly nerve-wracking. I can't play it…
I spent hours going through this list on wiki of chess variants. are there any on there that sound compelling to you or less nerve racking? there are even historical variants I've heard of, like one from the mongolian empire where there were "fortress" squares that were immune from attack. theres also a gimick version that sounds fun called "atomic chess" where when a piece dies, it takes out surrounding squares. and…
- normal chess, except you can't move the same piece your opponent just moved. So if I move a pawn, you must move a king/queen/bishop/rook/knight.
- check and checkmate are as normal, no need to capture the king. It's checkmate if the only move that would stop check is to move the forbidden piece. Stalemate also happens - king and queen is not enough to mate unless the kings are fortunately placed.
- castling is a king move
- pawn promotion counts as a pawn move when promoting, but a move with the promoted piece when considering the next player's move
- Black's e-pawn starts on e6 (alternatively, both players start the game with one free move)
My friend invented this as a way to play against beginners, where he plays with this restriction unknown to them. We refined it into an interesting competitive variant.
Ah, this is familiar. Decades ago, I had more or less topped out playing Othello against my Apple ][e. A game could be completed in under ninety seconds, with my moves being as fast as that of the computer. I took photos (with actual film) of beating the machine long before the board could be filled, but I was getting stale, essentially training myself to fight against this deterministic opponent who couldn't have be…
> I eventually settled on POKEing parts of the memory where the game was held. Typically, this resulted in an un-runnable program, or the program would place pieces on the lines rather than between them, all sorts of oddball behavior. Every so often, though, I would get a working game that would play against me using the usual rules, but differently enough that it would throw me off. And thus the idea of the Game Gen…
Randomizer speedruns are an awesome recent innovation in speedrunning, where the aim is to beat the game as quickly as possible (in a category called "true any%" [0]). For most popular speedrunning games, randomizers reward a completely different skillset than standard speedrunning. Typically, world record speedruns are a result of a community collaboration between theorizers, glitch finders, and routers, who devise…
Described in this way, it feels like a reasonable argument that humanity is like a paperclip-optimizing AI that just maybe just chooses random things to go deep on optimizing. We created a problem for ourselves that was fun -- games -- but once we'd beaten "games", the reward function kept running and now we're adversarially inventing new ways to "optimally" beat harder and harder versions of "games", ie new objectiv…
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How do they deal with the linearity of Zelda games, where you NEED a certain item to succeed in a dungeon, before you can then get access to more items later? If I need the hookshot to pass the water temple, but it gives me the floating-light-boots, how am I supposed to beat the level?
As others have noted, the logic is designed as such that it's always possible. It's a graph theory problem, although I don't know if it's coded that way or just a giant pile of if/else. One interesting thing to note is that some of them have difficulty settings. Certain item dependency chains are more difficult than others, and the locations can be done such that it will always give you easy seeds or always give you…
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I was about to post the same thing. People today can barely remember what time felt like before the invention of the Internet eradicated boredom.
Did the internet actually eradicate boredom or did it just eradicate focus?
Randomizer speedruns are an awesome recent innovation in speedrunning, where the aim is to beat the game as quickly as possible (in a category called "true any%" [0]). For most popular speedrunning games, randomizers reward a completely different skillset than standard speedrunning. Typically, world record speedruns are a result of a community collaboration between theorizers, glitch finders, and routers, who devise…
The problem with randomness in speed-based goals is that sometimes it’s harder than others. How can you compare two runs if the game could randomly give you zero opponents? It’s an extreme example, but the point stands that if the game’s randomness isn’t tuned to fall within a tight difficulty window, then run-to-run comparisons are useless. While still fun to do and watch, it takes a lot of wind out of the sails of…
1) There's lots of different categories to compete in. As new possibilities are discovered in the game, the community congrats around goals of speedrunning any given seed. In these scenarios, its generally about building the skills to be proficient at a particular goal in record time regardless of the seed.
2) most of the modern roguelites I play include a "Daily Seed," where every player gets to play the game exactly once each day and be ranked on a leaderboard. You compete on a given seed. If you want a global ranking system, you might consider it by track-record. Something like, "of the last 50 games this player played, what is their aggregate ranking vs other players' last 50 games played", or do that same comparison, but only in the cases where those players shared a seed for the RNG.
It's true that there's no absolute "best game", but there is "best game ever on this particularly interesting seed."
This leads me to believe that this approach can both make speedrunning continue to be new and interesting to participants as well as result in a scenario where the record can mean something. Yes, there are ways to cheat the system if you really want to cheat, in all but a live in-person audited game. It shifts the focus slightly from reverse-engineering of the game and towards being a better all-round player. And it's more interesting for machine solving, too: how can I build an AI that will take the optimal route regardless of seed? How can I know that the optimal route was achieved?
Randomizer speedruns are an awesome recent innovation in speedrunning, where the aim is to beat the game as quickly as possible (in a category called "true any%" [0]). For most popular speedrunning games, randomizers reward a completely different skillset than standard speedrunning. Typically, world record speedruns are a result of a community collaboration between theorizers, glitch finders, and routers, who devise…
Described in this way, it feels like a reasonable argument that humanity is like a paperclip-optimizing AI that just maybe just chooses random things to go deep on optimizing. We created a problem for ourselves that was fun -- games -- but once we'd beaten "games", the reward function kept running and now we're adversarially inventing new ways to "optimally" beat harder and harder versions of "games", ie new objectiv…
Not mention of classic DooM. Many "relative" modern mod WADs, add new variations of monsters and randomize the spawn of these variations. So playing the same map, never is equal. And for my, this make the game far fun and playable. Anyone, should try Complex Doom mod...
> And for my, this make the game far funnier and playable. It's interesting how little the English words "fun" and "funny" have to do with each other; a game like Doom is indeed fun, but it isn't funny in the slightest unless you have a very odd sense of humor. It's also interesting to see how this oddness between "fun" and "funny" translates into people trying to learn English and stumbling over it.