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Comment by Scaless | Hacker News Reader

Sorry if I did not explain it well, TAS does not mean just small helpful enhancements.

In a TAS, the game is being played by the computer using a series of pre-programmed inputs. The fun in TASing is creating the most optimized set of inputs that completes the game in the shortest amount of time. There are often precise one-frame tricks or inputs that would not be possible for a human to perform but can be done easily when you can fully control what happens on each individual frame of gameplay.

Mixing TAS and non-TAS runs doesn't make much sense as humans would never be able to compete.

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No, I meant more like... I don't know if it's possible to verify if a run submitted for non-TAS leaderboard isn't secretly a TAS run and if not, the era of any integrity of non-TAS leaderboards would be over. So all non-TAS speedrunning would be non-competitive in the future, if there's such a thing as non-competitive speedrunning.

Frame perfect tricks are often fairly easy to spot, and heavy usage of then are pretty indicative of TAS runs.

Of course, there are folks who can do those frame perfect tricks, but if it ever does come to contention, then asking them to perform said trick live seems like a pretty easy way to confirm.

You just end up with a situation where there's intense competition to make cheatbots as good as possible, within the parameters of plausible deniability. People start meta-hacking to find tricks which don't improve the speedrun but keep it impossibly fast while making it look more convincingly human. People spend time obsessively training not to get good at the game, but to make it seem as though they would have been good enough to do a speedrun which was actually automated. Eventually you start to get false positives as the bar for cheating catches the most skilled and dedicated non-cheating players.

Then again some people still enjoy watching professional cycling so maybe it will be fine.

Some communities have required that you have recordings of inputs and recordings of your hands making those inputs as well. I don't know that it's perfect, but it does give potential to spot violations

It brings up the immensely boring tarpit of "What is sport?"; I don't care that e-bikes with enough power to climb Alpe d'Huez exist; It doesn't invalidate the cyclist's achievements (but doping does, and why is that?)

Sure, maybe this will be the case when the Halo speedrunning community starts paying millions of dollars in prizes... it's just not an issue. Speedrunning is a niche hobby, you don't get anything out of cheating, other than some temporary, minor clout.

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