The Saiyaman arc up until the tournament is probably my favourite stretch of Dragon Ball Z, and Videl is my favourite character in the entire series. Buu saga has its moments (they do good things with Mr Satan and Vegeta), but I found it to be a huge letdown. In particular, they completely drop the ball with Videl after these episodes.
I guess we'll see what Jeff and Dan think soon enough, but I don't think they've seen enough to be confident that it'll pan out well.
Curious about the mechanics. (Which is something I didn't expect to be saying about a new DOA.)
Might just be trailer effects, but they seem to be showing off some sort of powerful bursty unreactable stuff. Are these pressure tools that you get to pull out to frame trap outside of typical pressure range? Is there meter involved? Looks cool.
Dan's comments on story-focused "non-game" games seemed pretty tame. Considering how ruthless and inconsiderate most of the crew gets when shitting on the N64, I think the narrative game crowd is getting off lightly.
The thing that bummed me out a little in this episode was the massive celebration of being too simple-minded and anti-intellectual to appreciate the birthday paradox. It made me have kind of one of those "why am I wasting my life with video games" moments that Austin has talked about in the post president Trump world -- in my case, I could be spending this time in the math crowd using Chernoff bounds to solve deep and interesting problems about the nature of things that actually matter, rather than squandering my time listening to people who have some weird animus against mathematical thought talk about video games and random stuff. That maybe sounds shitty and elitist, which is kinda adjacent to my point: that kind of shitting on math can make gaming seem like a shallow distraction and make STEM people disengage.
ALttP was made at a time when Nintendo still thought that "key hidden under a skull-shaped rock" was an acceptable, endlessly repeatable puzzle. It's a bad game.
As soon as I heard Austin mention quantum computing I immediately knew deep down that the traveling salesman problem was coming, and when it came, I felt so goddamn satisfied when he mentioned it 10 seconds later.
Really? I groaned in exasperation. The idea that quantum computers can solve TSP by investigating every route in parallel is one of the most pervasive, misleading, and even damaging myths about quantum computing out there. (Maybe the idea that D-wave have actually constructed a legitimate quantum computer is slightly worse?) Currently there is no known way to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem efficiently using a quantum computer, and it seems unlikely that any physical process will ever be capable of doing so, either -- in fact, "TSP and other NP-complete problems cannot be solved efficiently by any physical process" has been proposed as a fundamental principal of the universe, much like the law of conservation of energy.
I mean, sure: you can take a superposition of all possible routes as your input state, run the classical checker algorithm on that superposition, and (a whole lot of fudging aside) receive a superposition of the results of the checker being run on every possible input as the output state. But then you go to look at that output, and...get one of those outputs selected at random. So it's like, just selecting one of the possible routes at random beforehand and just checking it on a normal computer.
The important difference with quantum computing is that those "threads" can interfere with each other -- they can cancel each other out, or amplify each other (i.e. make more likely to be the random state selected at the end) if their states become identical midway through the computation. It's those interactions between "threads" from which quantum computing derives its power. In the case of trying every route of a TSP instance, Grover's algorithm can achieve an improvement over classical algorithms by amplifying the "good" routes and minimizing the "bad" routes, so you're more likely to see a good route when you check the answer. But the improvement isn't all that great: it's like being able to handle 100-city instances, where classical algorithms might handle 50-city instances. When people are trying to deal with instances containing tens of thousands of cities, this is barely a drop in an ocean.
In fact, the guys mentioned a far more promising approach for TSP: approximate solutions. If you are willing to give up on having the exact optimal route, there are algorithms which can give you routes that are very close to optimal, with high probability, on instances containing millions of cities.
Unfortunately the same probably can't be said for the maximum clique problem: given crowd of people and their Facebook friends lists, find the largest group of people within that crowd who are all friends with one another on Facebook. If you can find even a really poor-quality approximation algorithm for max clique, you can call the Clay Institute and collect your $1million bounty.
---
Also, this got long. I might try to send in an abridged correction that tries to make this stuff briefer and more intuitive, but in case I don't, @austin_walker
I really dislike that announcer voice, wonder if you can turn him off.
You can spend a little KI gold and buy the original announcers voice from the classic Arcade KI. That announcer is better IMO.
KI gold? Almost certain the two alternative announcers (original and ARIA) are free, and that there's nowhere in the store to buy announcers. (It'd be cool if they sold announcer DLC, though.)
@sethmode: it'd also be nice if the video player was better. I actually try to wait for the youtube version for that very reason, even though most videos are up here for a few hours before they get them onto youtube.
fnrslvr's comments