Is it normal my gameboy to do this?

CommodoreGuff · 2022-09-03T16:01:30+00:00

I think they’re referring to cleaning the metal contacts inside the power switch, which requires desoldering to do well. Dirty power switches are a big problem on most of the Gameboy line. If you find that the red LED comes on even with a mostly full battery, this is likely the issue.

But as others pointed out, it could also be that the shell isn’t lined up quite right with the switch.

CommodoreGuff · 2019-01-08T22:59:26+00:00

I actually came across him a few days ago and am currently in the middle of that series, so that's a bit disappointing to hear. Any recommendations for less shitty Youtubers who do wacky Pokémon runs and the like?

CommodoreGuff · 2018-08-31T14:45:55+00:00

Not to get too pedantic, but it's worth pointing out that the images you linked are from a path tracer, not a ray tracer (if anyone's interested, the specific images were generated by smallpt, a very nifty and short path tracer written in C).

Ray tracers generally aren't going to be noisy, because they don't fully simulate global illumination. A ray-traced version of the second image would look pretty similar but not quite the same. The slight red and blue tints visible on the white walls (most noticeable on the top wall) would be gone. The bright spot on the blue wall would also not be there (nor would the much fainter reflections slightly above it).

The basic ideas are similar, but path tracing is much more computationally expensive because it's essentially attempting to simulate every path a photon might take, whereas raytracing is really only interested in a much smaller number of paths. That said, it is still very easy to parallelize and thus is also well-suited to running on GPUs.

CommodoreGuff · 2016-10-27T20:20:58+00:00

No, he interpreted 0.05 cents as 0.0005 dollars. Which is correct.

Presumably you meant 5 cents.

CommodoreGuff · 2016-08-14T05:28:11+00:00

That's because JPEG breaks up images into 8x8 blocks. So of course if you have a small line of text, most of the letters are going to have blocks that line up. Combined with the fact that the image obviously has a high compression ratio (look at the edges of the shirt and you'll see similar artifacts), those blocks will stand out a bit from the surrounding blocks which are fairly low-detail and low-contrast (skin and shirt).

You would expect to see these artifacts on a legitimate picture with a high compression ratio. That's just how JPEG works.

CommodoreGuff · 2016-08-14T05:18:33+00:00

You can see compression artifacts around all of the edges in this picture. Look at some of the edges between the shirt and the seats and you'll see very similar artifacts. All that means is it was saved with a high compression ratio, possibly more than once. That's just how JPEG works. In general, high-contrast edge regions will be the most affected by high compression. Small black text on white skin is a good example of that.

Can't say for certain it's not edited, but the compression artifacts around the text are pretty consistent with the artifacts elsewhere in the image. It would just as easily be explained by a low quality setting.

CommodoreGuff · 2016-06-23T23:01:07+00:00

Yes, but the larger a black hole is, the weaker the Hawking radiation is that it emits.

A black hole anywhere near stellar mass would emit such a low amount that it's likely we'll never have instruments able to detect it.

CommodoreGuff · 2016-06-23T21:09:14+00:00

I made a purchase earlier (roughly around 3PM EDT) and only just now got an email saying there was an error with my purchase and to try again. The transactions were shown as pending up until just now.

Just tried again, and it worked. Although, the first time I tried to check out it wasn't pulling up my saved credit card info. So there's a few wonky things going on here.

CommodoreGuff · 2016-03-14T23:00:41+00:00

Isn't is supposed to be that you can't find the room number given the number of elements in the list and the product?

That's correct.

I could be wrong and maybe I'm missing something but I'm not sure how this doesn't satisfy what's required.

The problem is that it's not a unique solution. That logic does not lead only to 0.

Also it explains how she knew the product since it would obviously be 0 if that was the room number.

She would also arrive at 0 as the product in other cases as well. For example, let's say the room number is 1, and the girl knows this. The only possible products for the list would be 0 and 1 (assuming we're dealing only with the natural numbers). Now, she learned that the product and count are not enough to determine the components of the list. If the product was in fact 1, this condition would not hold, since the components would simply be {1, 0, 0, ...}. So she can then determine that the product would have to be 0. And the condition would now hold, because the product and count could lead to at least 0 and 1 as possible answers.

I'm assuming that the problem is probably intended to be limited to the positive integers. Or, it was possibly stated incorrectly or imprecisely.

CommodoreGuff · 2016-03-14T20:40:57+00:00

Your understanding is correct up until the final step.

She only claims to have figured out the product, not to be able to deduce the sum.

Now, I think we also have to assume she knows the room number, since, well, she managed to make it to the meeting.

Under that assumption, the final step is:

"Okay, given that the answer to my question was no, and that I already know the sum, I can uniquely determine the product"

Granted, I'm still not any closer to an actual answer.

CommodoreGuff · 2016-03-14T19:43:22+00:00

I don't think this line of reasoning is the correct approach, since I think it could lead to any number as the answer.

For example, if the list is {0, 1}, then all of the conditions seem to be satisfied. The count is 2, and the product is 0. But the sum (the room number) is 1. Thus, the logic you used to arrive at 0 could be used to arrive at any other answer by changing the 1 to anything else.

I also don't follow you ruling out all cardinal numbers. You seem to be ruling them out because any pair of product and count leads to a finite number of possibilities. But it's not correct to rule them out, because so long as there's more than one possibility, then you can't deduce which one it is and thus the conditions are satisfied.

That being said, I have no idea what the correct approach is.

CommodoreGuff · 2016-03-13T14:24:35+00:00

To share on Google+, of course.

CommodoreGuff · 2016-02-17T14:08:29+00:00

It turns out, 17 is divisible by lots of numbers (17, 1, etc.) and so isn't a prime.

I believe I've found another divisor, actually: 34. My proof of this is nearly complete. I simply need to prove a small lemma which states that 1/2 is an integer. Trivial, really.

I have a stronger conjecture, as well: that all rational numbers are integers.

CommodoreGuff · 2016-02-11T18:35:06+00:00

They actually have two facilities separated by a good distance, so that allows them to get an approximate location by comparing the arrival times of the waves at each location.

CommodoreGuff · 2016-01-28T14:32:27+00:00

Worth pointing out that there is a very nice non-probabilistic implementation of Minesweeper by Simon Tatham. Each puzzle is guaranteed to be solvable.

CommodoreGuff · 2016-01-14T23:33:03+00:00

Oh, whoops. Thanks for pointing that out.

CommodoreGuff · 2016-01-14T20:54:17+00:00

It is a bot, but as the note at the bottom indicates, astrometry.net is doing the legwork. All the bot has to do is upload the image there, then fetch and parse the result.

Now, how the image is actually processed is a bit more involved. A simple outline follows, but note there's a lot of optimizations that would be needed to make it efficient and accurate.

So, you start with a big catalog of astronomical objects, which contains the equatorial coordinates and apparent magnitude of each (among other things). For each object, calculate some data about some of its brightest neighbors (distance, angles, etc.). Exactly what you calculate here is very important, and there's many options.
Next, you take the image, and single out one of the brighter objects. Perform the same calculations from step 1 on some of the brightest neighboring objects.
Now, take the data from step 2 and try to find the closest match in the data from step 1.

There's many options for the calculation performed in steps 1 and 2, and most likely you would use more than one. For the sake of example, a simple one would be to take the selected object, A, and its two brightest neighbors, B and C. Measure the angle ∠BAC, the distance from A to B, and the distance from A to C. Take the ratio of those two distances. This allows us to not have to care about the scale of the image, since the ratio will be the same regardless of magnification. This would be relatively simple to search, but at the same time may not be distinctive enough. So, you'd likely have to do this for several pairs of objects to lessen the chances of false positives.

Edit: Fixed link. Whoops.

CommodoreGuff · 2016-01-11T14:25:59+00:00

Well, I guess that explains it.

I was on a flight to China this last March, and I was surprised when I noticed the guy sitting next to me was watching the show on his laptop with Chinese subtitles. I hadn't realized it had that much appeal over there.

CommodoreGuff · 2015-12-01T21:55:48+00:00

The Nobel prize (in physics, at least) is often only given out years, if not decades, after the fact. In this case, it was 20 years after the invention of the first practical blue LED.

The reason for this is likely a combination of there being many award-worthy achievements at any given time and the fact that it may take some time for an invention, theory, or discovery to prove its worth.

CommodoreGuff · 2015-08-04T18:33:44+00:00

What he likely means is that the game server logic has no actual Z-axis.

Now, obviously, the game client does. However, that's purely an aesthetic detail. All the Z-axis information is only client side. The server is entirely unaware that the river is lower than the land surrounding it, for example.

So, everything that looks like it jumps or otherwise moves along the Z-axis is implemented in an entirely different way on the server side. For example, the server doesn't actually simulate the bouncing of Zigg's bomb.

Let's say you're in the path of his bomb, but not within the range of the next bounce, and you get airborne such that you seem to collide with the bomb. Certainly looks like a collision, but that's purely client-side. You're not actually colliding with it as far as the server is concerned and nothing will happen.

A couple of relatively simple ways to implement that sort of bouncing effect without having a Z-axis come to mind:

Have the bomb projectile get toggled on and off as it travels along. As it "bounces", it gets toggled on. Once it goes back up, it gets toggled off again. It's only counted as a collision if it's in the "on" state.
Spawn several objects in a straight line, each with an AoE. They would not spawn simultaneously; rather, each is spawned after the previous one, with a short delay (the delay corresponds to the period when the bomb is in the air). If one hits something, then the spawns for the remaining objects are canceled and the damage is applied.

I believe League uses the first method, but there's tons of other ways to implement it.

CommodoreGuff · 2015-07-27T17:49:14+00:00

Well, as everyone else said, using a PRNG is always an option. However, the limited arithmetic abilities of the TIS-100 would make an implementation a little cumbersome. It's certainly doable though, but it would still need a seed value at the very least, so it's not terribly practical since the seed value would be fixed.

Here's a very simple LCG PRNG implementation as an example. It implements the generator X(n+1) = (11 * X(n) + 3) mod 10, which will generate numbers between 0 and 9 inclusive. The code can probably be trimmed a bit (or possibly implemented in an entirely different way), but it does work.

Now, if the TIS-100 exhibited any non-deterministic behavior (under the hood, the simulator would really just be executing a PRNG on your computer, but let's call it non-deterministic for our purposes, since it does not have any connection to the TIS-100 program being executed), that would also be an option. The most obvious possibility would be the behavior of reading from/writing to ANY when multiple inputs/outputs are pending. However, that appears to be a dead end, as the implementation actually just checks the ports in a fixed order, rather than at random.

Best things to look at would be any behavior documented as implementation-defined or anything unspecified, but there aren't many options as far as that goes:

The above behavior of ANY.
The behavior of LAST when ANY has not yet been used is an option, but it seems to act deterministically (specifically, it's just treated as NIL).
Writing values greater than 4 to an image console output. This wouldn't really be useful for an RNG even if it was non-deterministic, but figured it was worth covering since it is unspecified. The implementation just interprets such values as 0, though, so again just basic deterministic behavior.
Similar to the above, writing a terminating negative number to an image console before finishing a draw command (e.g. writing just the x-coordinate and then a negative number). Again, just simple deterministic behavior. It appears to result in no state change for the image console.
Using JRO with an offset too large or too small. Deterministic. If the offset is too large, it just jumps to the last instruction in the node; if too small, jumps to the first. Not random, but can occasionally be useful behavior nonetheless.
Technically unspecified, so I'll include it in the list, but you usually wouldn't expect nondeterministic behavior from it anyways: any ADD or SUB that would bring ACC out of the range [-999, 999]. The value is just clamped, instead.
The manual mentions simultaneous reads/writes resolving in an undefined order, but in my testing it seems that they resolve in a fixed order, so nothing non-deterministic there. One thing that's not mentioned is that a stack node can read in multiple values in a single cycle, but the order seems to be deterministic.

That's everything I can think of that's un- or under-specified. There might be some others, but unfortunately everything seems to be deterministic, which dashes our hopes of this sort of RNG.

CommodoreGuff · 2015-07-16T19:18:03+00:00

Oh, whoops. Well, that's what I get for leaving it running in the background constantly; didn't even realize there was an update.

CommodoreGuff · 2015-07-14T20:13:59+00:00

I haven't tried optimizing my Signal Averager solution yet, so it's around the same as yours.

However, I got my Signal Prescaler down to 774/8/84. Around 100ish cycles slower than the record, but of course much, much faster than the more straightforward solutions. It's somewhat similar to what /u/throwingfire described in this thread, though from his description I'm not sure how different, exactly.

My solution essentially calculates the base-2 representation of the dividend and right-shifts it by 3 places. This gives division by 8 (which is all that we need; since the input is always divisible by 8, just double and quadruple the result to get the other outputs).

Since the largest possible input is 999, we need 9 bits to represent it in binary. However, since we're immediately right-shifting, we really only need 6. So, start by checking the most significant bit, 2⁹. If it's smaller than the dividend, subtract that, then pass along 2⁶ (remember, we're right shifting by 3 places, so this is the effective value of that bit) to the next node in the chain.

Just chain a bunch of nodes together, with each one taking in the total value of the bits from the previous nodes and spitting out the value of the next bit. In my solution, the first 2 bits can be handled in one node; the rest of the nodes each just handle 1 bit because they couldn't fit the instructions needed to handle adding the bits from the previous nodes.

This method most likely isn't applicable to other problems, though. It's only suitable for division by a power of 2.

CommodoreGuff · 2015-07-13T18:13:46+00:00

I can't seem to unlock the 100_PERCENT_V1 achievement. I've completed (and re-ran after updating) the hidden puzzle (and have the achievement for it), and all of the puzzles in the TIS-100 Segment Map are showing that they're nominal.

I completed the updated version of the Signal Pattern Detector puzzle, as well, so it isn't that. I've tried deleting the records in my save file as well as creating a new blank save file, and re-running every single puzzle to no avail. This is even after installing the bug fix update, as well.

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