'Super Mario Bros.' speedrunner hits nearly inhuman 4:55 world record • Hacker News Board

Re: 'Super Mario Bros.' speedrunner hits nearly inhuman 4:55 world record

#121

Post by mrob » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 4:51 PM UTC

kamkha wrote: post #119

dsamarin wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given 60fps games, with 5 minutes of play, and 8 NES buttons, it seems reasonable to search through just under 4,608,000 possible plays to find the shortest run! 5 mins * 60 fps * 2^8 button possibilities = 4,608,000 button possibility frames = 4,608,000 possible plays

Close! You swapped an operation there: it'd be (2^8 button possibilities) ^ (5 minutes * 60 FPS), or about 10^43348. A bit of a bigger space to search ;)

Only 2^7 button possibilities on a real controller, because you can't press up and down, or left and right, at the same time.

Re: 'Super Mario Bros.' speedrunner hits nearly inhuman 4:55 world record

#122

Post by LocalH » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 3:39 AM UTC

mrob wrote: post #121

kamkha wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Close! You swapped an operation there: it'd be (2^8 button possibilities) ^ (5 minutes * 60 FPS), or about 10^43348. A bit of a bigger space to search ;)

Only 2^7 button possibilities on a real controller, because you can't press up and down, or left and right, at the same time.

Worn controllers can allow it to happen, however, so I don't think it's worth discounting.

Re: 'Super Mario Bros.' speedrunner hits nearly inhuman 4:55 world record

#123

Post by LocalH » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 5:15 AM UTC

jamespo wrote: post #53

beaconstudios wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tool Assisted Speedrun. It means you perform input to the game programmatically meaning you can set the input perfectly on a per-frame basis.

what is the point of that

It started out for pure entertainment. Now, they sometimes work with realtime speedrunners to optimize their strategies.

Re: 'Super Mario Bros.' speedrunner hits nearly inhuman 4:55 world record

#124

Post by breakingcups » Fri, Sep 28, 2018, 8:19 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #79

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did he know, live, that he'd beaten the time?

I had wondered about this too and asked about it in r/speedruns [0] I originally assumed that speedrunners used some kind of special software/hardware that provide the watch counters displayed during their streams, but apparently, the displayed timer is controlled manually, via something like a foot pedal, and is not meant to be the official time (which is verified later through analysis) But for a game like SMB, in…

Actually, the special software you describe does exist and is often used in speedrunning. It is called an autosplitter.

It works by reading out known memory addresses of the game. At bare minimum this would be "start of level 1" and "game completion" but you'll often find more elaborate "splits" as the more popular the game is.

See this for an example: https://imgur.com/a/KDp7YFx

It shows the last three missions, the timestamp when it was completed and a comparison agains this speedrunners personal best.

It also shows the current mission and the one after that, along with a timestamp of when it was finished in the speedrunners personal best run.

Beneath that it also shows a whole bunch of stats, what the best possible time is the speedrunner could achieve at current pace based on all the best times in the earlier runs, how it compares to the world record, etc.

This works really well for PC games and emulators but is a lot harder on real hardware.