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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

People figuring out ACE in old games utterly fascinates me. I remember seeing this in Super Mario World a couple years ago and I became a bit transfixed on how that was even possible.

I mean this in the best way, and I am being complimentary, but it's going to sound like I'm being a jerk: I love when really smart people spend a lot of time and effort doing completely useless things.

Is there any reason, at least immediately, to inject code into NES Tetris? No, I doubt it, but that's not the point. The point is figuring out what's possible, and figuring out what you can force some old code and a primitive computer to do. It might not be "useful" in the classical sense, but neither is a Sudoku puzzle or a crossword puzzle or playing NES Tetris to begin with.

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> Is there any reason, at least immediately, to inject code into NES Tetris?

It’s somewhat obscured by all the technical details but doing this exploit does have a practical purpose: it allows highly skilled players to play longer since they can now have a way to prevent a crash that prevents them from playing past certain points. For the average player there’s no practicality to this but for those who want to compete for the highest scores this solves a limitation and opens new opportunities for competition.

If you have ACE, what’s the difference between fixing the kill screen bug and `score = SCORE_MAX`?

I guess that's an open question that the community will decide. I can't speak for anyone in particular, but if you watch live streams of fractal, bluescuti, etc. their primary drive seems to be to have more game to play, not less. They already go far beyond the 'max' score that the UI can display. For them to "beat" Tetris is to play so long that there's no more game left to play not just to get the biggest number.

Relatedly, this is why zfg, a famous (debateably the best) Ocarina of Time speedrunner, doesn't do Any%, and has also opted out of the 100% category. He'd rather play the game than not play the game.

the difference right now is that score=max hasn't been shown possible yet

> I love when really smart people spend a lot of time and effort doing completely useless things.

Many scientific discoveries happen this way. Number theory was originally considered useless but now powers basically all public key crypto.

There’s that quote Adam Savage always says that goes something like “the difference between ‘science’ and ‘goofing off’ is writing it down”.

I’ve always liked that sentiment, since it sort of works to “ungatekeep” science. It’s easy to be intimidated by the seeming monolith of “science”, but fundamentally science basically boils down to “doing, testing, and measuring something” and it doesn’t really matter what that “something” actually is.

> I love when really smart people spend a lot of time and effort doing completely useless things

It's not useless: they like doing it.

Any use other people might derive from the things you don't like doing (but still do) is either a happy accident, or something that benefits you indirectly (money so you can live, recognition, etc).

Doing something because you like it is the most immediate form of usefulness to the person it matters most: you.

> I love when really smart people spend a lot of time and effort doing completely useless things.

That is the epitome of this guy's YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@tom7

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