Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

When Rogue reached Caltech in the '80s it quickly became so popular that it got banned during the daytime so people doing real work could use the computers.

The version of Rogue then was quite a bit harder than later versions and it was almost unheard of for anyone to actually get the amulet and get back out. Then this one student started regularly making the high score list, and soon had pushed everyone else off. Then he got the amulet and got out. Then he did that enough time to have the high score list full of games where he got the amulet.

Then he stopped playing, until someone else would get on the high score list. Then he'd come to the computer center and play for maybe a half hour until he'd pushed them off the high score list.

This was driving everyone else completely nuts because he was, as mentioned, playing in the computer center. The way the terminals were arranged there was no privacy. Everyone else could watch him play, but no one could figure out why he did so much better than the rest of us.

He eventually explained it. He didn't actually do any one thing significantly better than the rest of us. For any given thing he was just slightly better. But he was slighted better at many things and that added up.

For example if most people were coming back through a room they had passed through the other way earlier they would take the most convenient route between the doors. That generally would not be simply the reverse of the route they had taken the first time through, because the first time they were exploring the room.

He on the other hand would take a route that only involved stepping places where he had stepped the first time through. That way he never sprung any new traps on the way back, unlike people who stepped in new places.

That's true of so many things, including science and programming. We can deal with the fact that some people are geniuses and just orders of magnitude better than us, but often it's people who are just slightly better than us in most things that end up doing the thing we want to do before us.

... and the compound interest of being consistently slightly better makes these people much better than others in the long run.

Learning to consistently win nethack completely changed my intuition for low chance risk. Common actions that are 99% reliable but with serious consequences for failure are sure to be run-losing. Even something 99.9% is too dangerous to do more than a handful of times per run if you're trying to streak.

Of course you don't know these numbers directly unless you get deep into the wiki/source. But you don't know the odds when driving on a rainy night either.

Nice! Crossing avalanche terrain (eg: backcountry skiing) is a low chance/high consequence activity. It is easy to learn the wrong thing: I did this before and it was fine, therefore it is safe.

You counter that with observations, forecasts and incident reports, but intuition based on personal experience leads you astray.

A game is much better because you can fail and you just have to restart the game. Make an RDR2 mod.

(edit: more intuitive anyway. It might not be easy to accurately show different snow conditions while also being fun to play)

> He on the other hand would take a route that only involved stepping places where he had stepped the first time through. That way he never sprung any new traps on the way back, unlike people who stepped in new places.

Maybe that gives you a slight edge, but it involves having near perfect recollection where you've stepped. That's not a small feat.

Not if you construct your paths in a systematic way. I think in rogue all rooms are rectangular, so it should be easy enough to construct a memorable réversible algorithm.

Go clockwise, along the walls. Want to reach something in the middle of the room? Go straight down from the top wall. If there's stuff in your way, go around it on the left side if possible, else right.

Going along the walls means you'll take far longer to traverse wide and shallow rooms. That means running into more traps and using up more food. This dual pressure of traps and food puts a very strong emphasis on economy of movement. Generally you should be taking the shortest path between points of interest (doorways, loot, stairs).

My bad high score list experience came when I was running rogue under a debugger.

I'd figured out where the score was held, and quickly poked "-1" into it so I wouldn't draw attention to my unconventional approach by getting on the high score list, and then tried to see if I could figure out what was going on with scroll/potion naming...

...and then I quaffed something bad, and died, and when the tombstone came up, I discovered score was unsigned.

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