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from the what-a-wicked-web-we-weave-when-first-we-practice-to-deceive dept.
Twin Galaxies, the long-running video game high score tracker recognized by Guinness World Records, has banned Billy Mitchell and removed all of his past scores from its listings after determining that two million-plus-point Donkey Kong performances he submitted were actually created with an emulator and not on original arcade hardware as he consistently claimed. The move means that the organization now recognizes Steve Wiebe as the first player to achieve a million-point game in Donkey Kong, a question central to the 2007 cult classic documentary The King of Kong.
Nearly two months ago, Mitchell's scores were also removed from the leaderboards at Donkey Kong Forum. Forum moderator Jeremy "Xelnia" Young cited frame-by-frame analysis of the board transitions in Mitchell's Donkey Kong tapes, which showed visual artifacts suggesting they were generated by early versions of the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) and not original Donkey Kong arcade hardware.
[...] The ban has no effect on the current world record in Donkey Kong, which currently sits at the 1.247 million points [score] set by Robbie Lakeman in February.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday April 13 2018, @11:48AM (5 children)
Should anyone care about chess? The Soviets helped elevate chess from just a game to the premier measure of intelligence of individuals and entire nations. Their superiority at chess was supposed to be a reflection and product of their superiority in other areas. Then, on the heels of losing the race into space when the US landed men on the moon, Bobby Fischer embarrassed them at chess. A whole lot of people cared a lot about chess, thought it meant something to be the best.
The AI community certainly bought into the mystique. Hoped that if a computer could play chess well, it would be a short step from that to general intelligence. It took far longer than the overly optimistic hoped, but now computers have surpassed humans at chess. By doing so, they have shown several other things, and the main one is that chess isn't such a good measure of intelligence after all.
Nevertheless, Game Theory is an important area.
Our games tend to be much more deterministic and structured than reality, and that makes them amenable to computer players. Players have very well defined and very limited choices. On any particular turn in a chess game, a player will have at most only a few dozen choices of moves. We're beat at chess. Arcade games have only a little wider range of play, so I don't doubt that if it isn't already, AI will be better than us at all those kinds of games.
Meantime, I am impressed at the dedication of these players, to explore corner cases most of us never come near. It's cool. Sorry you don't see that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 13 2018, @01:09PM (3 children)
The Soviets didn't lose the space race, the moon wasn't the goal until the US moved the posts and said it was.
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Friday April 13 2018, @02:27PM (2 children)
More accurately, the Soviets didn't lose the space race because every "space first" (first satellite, first manned flight, first manned orbit, first probe to the moon, first probe to another planet, first useful space program that actually did something besides explode, etc.) except "first man on the moon" was achieved by the Soviets. They were simply space awesomesauce.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday April 13 2018, @03:05PM (1 child)
Including the first people to die in space [wikipedia.org] :/ And a few dogs.
If the N1 [wikipedia.org] had worked better instead of its innards ripping apart and catching fire whenever they launched it they would've had half a shot at beating us to the moon, even.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday April 13 2018, @05:29PM
To be fair, there have also been quite a few American lives lost in our efforts to master space travel. Difficult and dangerous objectives come with a risk attached. That the Russians have had casualties - perhaps in their haste to beat the US, or simply because of accidents that could not be foreseen - doesn't diminish their achievements in space.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday April 13 2018, @02:40PM
Chess is good. I'm only a mediocre player, but chess is good. Yes, it's alright to care about chess. It's even alright to enjoy a goofy song about playing chess in some town in Asia. I think it's even good to enjoy a little ass with the song . . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBu-ewMRhkA [youtube.com]