A man accused of cheating at video games may lose his Guinness World Record
washingtonpost.com
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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 on TG and I have no intention of using them in the future.
[1]: http://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/175364-Dispute-Di...
> 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.
Wow and nobody thought that was a bit suspicious?
To be considered a reputable organization and not even question scores like this is laughable. And there were multiple this absurd.
Many of their arcade "high scores" for lesser known titles are easily broken by someone practicing for less than a week, but happen to be long held by TG regulars, with hundreds of "high scores".
Particularly on the MAME (emulator) side of arcade scoring - on a previous incarnation of the TG website, the rules for submission to a game were not public until a score had been submitted for that game. Some folks with many high scores were simply submitting any score at all so that others could even play along.
There has been years of doubt about Todd's scores, among those by other gamers. TG was recently purchased by a new owner. That new owner launched a 'dispute' system whereby any score could be challenged and examined by the community. There was never a formal process until now that would have allowed for this, regardless of how many doubters there were.
I didn't understand this sentence: it means that, looking at the code and calculating all possibilities of gear changing moments, it would be impossible to achieve 5.51 ? If so, why would any other evidence be necessary ? Or, if it wasn't such analysis (and I think that this one would be definitive), why wasn't this one done ?
"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 discovered a lot of the records from the '80s were bogus because video proof was not required back then. The worst was "Mr. Activision" (aka Todd Rogers), where I and several others were able to prepare a case and conclusively prove Todd had been completely fabricating world records for various Atari games. To name a few:
Barnstorming (2600): Todd's record, which stood for many years, was proven to be impossible once we broke down the game code and stripped the stage of any obstacles. With the stage completely blank, flying a straight line to the finish was slower than Todd's record. When we presented this evidence, we were attacked by fans and supporters of Todd, and eventually an excuse was cooked up that I lovingly refer to as "the coffee stain excuse". Yes, after being attacked and told we were clueless about how good Todd was, one of the referees covered for him and claimed the 'document' detailing his record had a coffee stain on the part where the record time was listed. Instead of throwing the record out and forcing Todd to do a legit one on video tape, they just simply adjusted the record to be MAYBE possible by adding a half-second to the time."
Source: http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=31&thread...
The score has also been achieved by humans on real hardware.
An emulator with preprogrammed inputs doesn't mean it plays perfectly. It just means that it plays reproducibly. Whether or not it plays perfectly depends on the preprogrammed inputs.
How did they choose the inputs?
Looking at the game manual, it comes down to deciding when to shift, and deciding how to use the gas pedal.
Shifting looks like it is easy to deal with in emulated testing. You have neutral, 1, 2, 3, and 4. You start in neutral. So, an optimal run will start with you shifting once at t=0. You cannot down shift, so your only choice when shifting is up, and once you reach 4 you can no longer shift.
From another comment, it seems the game works in ticks of 3/100th second. That means that for a 6 second race, there are around 1.3 million possible shifting timings, assuming that you cannot skip gears.
For using the gas pedal, it looks like if you are not red lined, there are no circumstances where it would be better to not give it the gas. When red lined but at a time when your shifting plan calls for staying in the current gear, I can't tell from the manual what you should do. It says if you go past that you risk blowing the engine. What it doesn't say is if you get more power when going past the red line, so that it may be worth it.
Assuming that red line is max power, then when at red line but not shifting optimum would be to modulated the gas so as to keep it right at the red line.
For each shift pattern, it should be relatively easy to figure out when the gas has to switch between steady and modulated. Putting it all together that would give 1.3 million candidate inputs, one of which should be optimum.
If going past the red line does give more speed (at increased risk of engine blow out), it is more difficult. If engine blow out is probabilistic, you have to worry about the possibility that someone could get insanely lucky.
At that point, you probably need to analyze how the random number generator works, and how it is used, and how user inputs affect it. One particularly worrisome possibility would be that the timing of user input affects it. For example, if whenever the user presses or releases the gas it uses a random number to pick from several sounds associated with that action, that could be bad news. It would mean that the earlier analysis that the gas would optimally in each gear start out as constant and then switch modulated at the red line is no longer applicable. It could be that there is a run where if someone releases briefly the gas during the "constant" phase, that happens to get the random number generator to a position where they will get very lucky on the engine blow out rolls later.
If that meant we had to try every possible gas pattern, instead of just "constant followed by modulated", we'd have a combinatorial explosion.
Probably the best to do in this case (the "past the red line gives more speed, and the random number generator has a lot of user provided entropy" case) would be to tweak the emulator so that the engine cannot blow out, change the gas pedal input to simply be full gas all the time, and see what the results are. That would at least give us a lower bound on what the luckiest person in the universe could conceivably achieve.
Based on that code, the alleged record was not possible.
Todd Rogers however has multiple impossible scores which are still considered "records" even though they can't possibly be obtained, some of them are stupidly obvious, like games in which the score increases in steps of five, yet he has a number not evenly dividable by five and such stuff.
I guess nobody really knows why he still holds these records.
The reason that Twin Galaxies didn't accept that analysis is because they're run by members of a clique of old-school gamers who stayed behind when the speedrunning community abandoned TG, and Todd Rogers is part of that clique. The analysis was largely done by Omnigamer, who is a well-respected speedrunner outside of TG but isn't part of the clique. TG's staff chose to believe their own in-group rather than a evidence-based challenge from an outsider until their hand was forced by a viral Youtube video[1] calling them out.
This kind of behavior isn't new for Twin Galaxies. They have a long history of mismanagement and corruption. Most of the times/scores posted on their site lack any publicly-viewable proof because until very recently, proof only had to be shown to TG staff "referees" so that people could keep their special techniques secret from the competition. Modern speedrunning eschews secrecy and requires publicly-viewable video proof for all runs.
There are some good mods at TG, but I find that many, if not most of them, treat it like an elite social club instead of the supposed impartial record authority that they promote themselves as.
While that's deplorable, it does not logically follow that a child molester is necessarily an unreliable referee.
I'd nearly argue that it would be in his worst interest to participate in defrauding something since it might have revealed his horrible offenses.
Nobody said that
> they are a horrible, detestable human
Nobody said that either
All that's being said is that it's more likely he would do something nefarious, given his background.
No one is arguing a child rapist is okay; the issue other posters are having is that it is a incorrect argument.
Any further "but what if's..." are simply assumptions that do not have proof.
1. The issue is that "child rapist" implies "poor judgment of character". This implication cannot be made because there are plenty of accounts where "child rapist" have "good judgement of character".
or
2. The issue is that "poor judgment of character" implies "child rapist". This implication cannot be made because there are plenty of accounts where "non-child rapist" have "poor judgement of character".
being at least a logical (regardless of correctness) statement
The statements "child rapist" implies "poor judgement of character" and "poor judgement of character" implies "poor ability to be a referee" can be negated if the person turned out to be a qualified referee. The gray area is what people agree to be what constitutes good/poor "judgement of character". This is where I believe what AdmiralAsshat is attempting to argue in his post "While that's deplorable, it does not logically follow that a child molester is necessarily an unreliable referee."
But only because that'd be pretty hard to pull off.
Carl was arrested for molesting his nine year-old son. He committed suicide in jail awaiting trial.
With that said, do we disregard all of the learning materials he created? Is their value inherently reduced to zero now that we know they were the product of a sick individual?
This isn't just an thought exercise. Carl was a real person. He had a Reddit board dedicated to his lessons and instructing people. His website has since lost its host and pretty much all the videos are gone from the web, save for p2p torrenting, because no one will be caught dead hosting videos from a child molestor, not matter how innocuous the videos themselves were.
But for a referee putting down high scores from a video game, the referee's value stems entirely from the idea that the referee is a trustworthy observer.
Distributing knowledge, like Carl H was doing, does not involve the kind of sensibilities required to be a referee, judge or notary.
Were Carl H a federal judge, his crime would definitely put all trials presided by him under scrutiny.
In the latter case, his inability to make fair decisions in life is directly relevant to his qualification for a job that involves making fair decisions affecting other people.
Unfortunately I don't think this thought experiment is very relevant.
Child crimes are crimes that involve the abuse of trust in most cases. Like embezzlement, someone trusts you not to steal money or molest children given a situation with ample opportunity for you to do so, but you do it anyway. You demonstrate a lack of integrity when you commit a crime of this nature.
So why we should also trust him to be a living authority of a particular record? He has proven that trust in him is misplaced.
> Despite Omnigamer’s claim, as previously mentioned, Activision supposedly had created a machine-assisted run that determined 5.54 a perfect score, which is .03 better than Koziel’s model, thus making it impossible in his determinations. Crane explained to me that the “Dragster timer is .03 seconds per tick, so the difference that is being discussed is one tick of the game clock in a record set 35 years ago.”
http://www.twingalaxies.com/feed_details.php/87/dragster-des...
And this same gamer lied about other games with scores that are impossible to get.
Reference: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0kQ1V1Z...
Not saying this is what occurred, but it could be a possibility, depending on the code...
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)
But something like this has to be given its own category. There's a Super Mario World category that allows for that "Credits Warp" glitch. The other categories have different rules for what you can and can't do.
So it's possible that Todd did something funky, but that would still make his scores illegitimate.
This is the current state of the world. 10 years or so ago and before, there was a much stronger presumption of glitchlessness. Though you'd still encounter the problem that rigorously defining "glitch" can be quite challenging.
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.
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?
In your example, the dash-crouch in SMB is a glitch.
Like how some competitive gaming communities often have informal rules to keep competitive play interesting by banning specific overpowered mechanics, the more important reason for allowing/banning specific glitches or types of glitches is to keep the competition interesting for speedrunners and viewers.
Obviously some games are more interesting than others to speedrun, but like in the example of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, by ruling out specific glitches you can make sure that speedrunners continue to explore the surface area of the game rather than only trying to optimize a specific glitch with outsized impact on run-time.
In the community I'm most familiar with (Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past), we assume that the devs did not intend for you to wiggle through single-pixel diagonal holes in sloped walls to get out-of-bounds or trigger the flute you may not even have by using a potion on the same frame you go through an east-facing door, and because those techniques allow you to play the game very differently than designed, we consider them major glitches and put runs using them in different categories.
There are several glitches that we classify as "minor" and allow in every category like item dashing and spin speed. Some people argue whether bomb jumps are glitches or not, but they're also allowed in every category.
At the far glitchy end, there's something called the "exploration glitch" that allows you to change Link's sprite's layer to one that allows you to walk semi-freely between map tiles. Exploration glitch is banned in all but a few very specific categories because it completely trivializes the game and lets you walk to the Triforce room within 90-120 seconds of starting the game.
The point of all this isn't to determine the single valid way to play the game (hi Twin Galaxies!) but to allow for sets of rules that make the speedrun more interesting. The same goal (reach the Triforce room) takes 1m31s with no restrictions, 26m50s with the "worst" game-breaking glitches banned and 1hr23m19s with all major glitches banned, and all three are completely different experiences.
Edit: some extra info on minor glitches (https://pastebin.com/zYM6TPmS) and major glitches (https://pastebin.com/bb0vHjcm) as defined by the ALTTP community, and the leaderboard with all the categories: https://www.speedrun.com/alttp
The game runs at NTSC rates, which we'll round up to 60Hz. We'll also say that 6s of inputs need to be considered, and scores which are above 6s will be discarded. We'll finally say that the possible input states consist of the joystick in either left ("shifting") or neutral ("popping") position, and the gas button either up or down. This generates four possible input states.
The number of possible input states in total will be 60 * 6 = 360, and so the total input space is 4 * * 360 = 2 * * 720, which is a little big for brute-force exploration. Many of these states suck; after all, the total number of shifts is not ~300, but ~5. So a guided search is likelier to pay off.
Edit: Thanks HN for eating asterisks and having no math mode.
http://www.twingalaxies.com/feed_details.php/87/dragster-des...
Contains some interesting insights about the Activision's spotty history of archiving game records. The most surprising thing to me about all of this is how Dragster's creator, David Crane, feels so sure that the record is sound: "I have no doubts, then or now".
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.