A man accused of cheating at video games may lose his Guinness World Record • Hacker News Board

Re: A man accused of cheating at video games may lose his Guinness World Record

#41

Post by dmix » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 3:34 PM UTC

CrystalLangUser wrote: post #38

TwinGalaxies had quite the extensive writeup on Todd's various cheating [1]. There was a staggering amount of evidence, including TAS (Tool Assisted Speedruns) proving that Todd's time is physically impossible . That blew up in a 274-page thread, but ultimately I believe it took Robert T Mruczek's writeup to finally ban Todd.[1] Not surprising as Mcruzek is part of the "old guard". I think this reflected very poorly…

Why does it reflect poorly on TG?

> Todd's "Dragster" performance is one that I have qualified as being one of the top five video game performances of all time within multiple forum posts and in several interviews.

I'd be curious to know what the other 4 performances were.

Re: A man accused of cheating at video games may lose his Guinness World Record

#42

Post by tomku » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 3:44 PM UTC

bbarn wrote: post #18

So, is the opinion that he just fabricated the photo, or that he had a knack for figuring these glitches out? Because as far as I know, glitching things is considered all well and good with speed runners, and lots of his other high scores imply some kind of glitching or another.

Twin Galaxies is notorious for banning glitches completely and it's one of the many reasons the speedrunning community abandoned TG. If he glitched, his runs would be invalid by TG's own rules.

As far as glitching in speedruns nowadays, it depends. You play by the rules of the category you choose to run, which may allow no glitches, some specific glitches or all glitches. To give an example, let's take a look at a popular speedgame, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time[1]. The "Any%" record, meaning beating the game with all glitches allowed, is 17m09s. The "Glitchless" completion record is 3hr48m38s. Categories like "No IM/WW" and "MST" are glitch limit categories where specific glitches are banned and the times are intermediate between any% and glitchless. Less-popular games will have fewer categories, but if there's interesting glitches, there'll usually be at least "no/few glitches" and "more/all glitches" categories.

[1]: https://www.speedrun.com/oot

Re: A man accused of cheating at video games may lose his Guinness World Record

#43

Post by xamuel » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 3:50 PM UTC

Jeema101 wrote: post #25

One thing that has maybe not been considered is that the Atari 2600 is susceptible to what's known in the online Atari community as 'frying', whereby cycling the power off and then back on very quickly while the console is running can lead to weird changes in the program state. Not saying this is what occurred, but it could be a possibility, depending on the code...

Reminds me of a controversial technique discovered in the TAS community. Start saving your savefile, then cut the power mid-write. Usually creates a savefile with a bad checksum, but with certain timing on certain games, can result in playable corrupt savefiles which can be used for a faster win.

One of the reasons this idea is so controversial is the TAS community always assumes games should be played frame by frame, but this technique would open sub-frame "gameplay" (timing when you cut the power with much higher precision)

Re: A man accused of cheating at video games may lose his Guinness World Record

#44

Post by xamuel » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 3:58 PM UTC

tomku wrote: post #42

bbarn wrote: post #18

So, is the opinion that he just fabricated the photo, or that he had a knack for figuring these glitches out? Because as far as I know, glitching things is considered all well and good with speed runners, and lots of his other high scores imply some kind of glitching or another.

Twin Galaxies is notorious for banning glitches completely and it's one of the many reasons the speedrunning community abandoned TG. If he glitched, his runs would be invalid by TG's own rules. As far as glitching in speedruns nowadays, it depends. You play by the rules of the category you choose to run, which may allow no glitches, some specific glitches or all glitches. To give an example, let's take a look at a po…

>banning glitches

How can you even define glitches?

In the original Super Mario Brothers, you could dash and then crouch and then slide through narrow tunnels while crouching. It wasn't documented in any official manual or anything, but everyone did it. Is that a glitch?

Re: A man accused of cheating at video games may lose his Guinness World Record

#45

Post by acomjean » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 4:09 PM UTC

vanadium wrote: post #35

xelxebar wrote: post #26

This reminds me of the slimy feel I get about Billy Mitchell every time I see a video of him.

Reportedly, that's just a persona and he amped it up for the King of Kong film. But I definitely get where you're coming from.

The King of Kong film makes him look bad. He clearly fills a kind villain role.

In the movie extras he's seen delivering a Q-Bert machine to a excited senior citizen so she can practice for a tournament. Seemed oddly out of character from the way he was portrayed in the movie.

I don't know him personally, but he keeps showing up at video game events and clearly is enthusiastic about them.

Re: A man accused of cheating at video games may lose his Guinness World Record

#46

Post by balls187 » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 4:13 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #23

ranger207 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the analysis proves 5.51 is impossible, and it's been confirmed that 5.57 is the best possible time through the use of an emulator with preprogrammed inputs, meaning that it plays the game perfectly. Todd Roger's response is that the analysis failed to consider the "human element" and how the console would respond to that.

Ah, yes, the "human element", the same thing that leads people to believe they can beat a chess AI by "confusing it" by moving randomly. Still a surprisingly popular belief despite how easy it is to test the theory.

Didn't the inverse happen, Chess AI made a bunch of seemingly random bizzare moves, which confused their human opponents?

Re: A man accused of cheating at video games may lose his Guinness World Record

#47

Post by balls187 » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 4:17 PM UTC

xamuel wrote: post #44

tomku wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twin Galaxies is notorious for banning glitches completely and it's one of the many reasons the speedrunning community abandoned TG. If he glitched, his runs would be invalid by TG's own rules. As far as glitching in speedruns nowadays, it depends. You play by the rules of the category you choose to run, which may allow no glitches, some specific glitches or all glitches. To give an example, let's take a look at a po…

>banning glitches How can you even define glitches? In the original Super Mario Brothers, you could dash and then crouch and then slide through narrow tunnels while crouching. It wasn't documented in any official manual or anything, but everyone did it. Is that a glitch?

Speedrunslive defines a glitch as an "unintentional mistake in games code."

In your example, the dash-crouch in SMB is a glitch.

Re: A man accused of cheating at video games may lose his Guinness World Record

#48

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 4:25 PM UTC

ginko wrote: post #16

bspn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some background from a TG insider: "I seem to recall Walter Day had sold the rights to TG a couple years back. I used to work for TG some years ago, but hated it. My brother I and were constantly having to fight with what I call "the old guard" comprised of record holders from the early 80's. First, they resisted every one of our innovative new ideas like speed-gaming records for consoles, and then later we di…

Having watched The King of Kong, this doesn't surprise me that much.

[deleted]

Re: A man accused of cheating at video games may lose his Guinness World Record

#49

Post by madshiva » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

Ok guy, Todd say : "that he wasn't starting at first gear but second". I'll try to do that and hope restore some easy juding.

Do you dumbly follow rules if you need beat the time? No you start to dig solution. Pretending that it's not possible is easy, doing it is a lot harder. Finding a solution that nobody has taking in count, and that you win 0.1 secondes why he even need to justify this? to give you his trick?

I can totally agree with other cheats that he propably did on other game, but this is not relevent if he cheated on these, because the subject is this score not every score. It's like you will be a cheater your whole life because you cheated at a family party.

Once upon a time, I have finished mario bros 3 with one life, I can't do this again, and I was at level 2-2 or 2-3 with no warp zone near me. No way to prove that, but I know that I have make it.

Re: A man accused of cheating at video games may lose his Guinness World Record

#50

Post by wnevets » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

>Rogers’s record on the classic Atari arcade game Centipede, for example, had been listed on the Twin Galaxies site as being 65,000,000. The second-highest score, 58,078, barely comes close

Wow and nobody thought that was a bit suspicious?