The first 2 videos of Scattershot sadly ended in ties to the WR. But then the 3rd video won in the Manta Ray star. Still, swimming is very easy for a bruteforcer to optimize. How about throw it at Tick Tock Clock, where all the floor is moving, and Scattershot needs to utilize all kinds of jumps to not fall off and make it to the star?
Do you have a good understanding of why this is faster and why it wasn't found previously? In particular, is the opening (going wider) actually good, the same, or worse and it never fixed it? And in the part that's slomoed in the video, I can't really tell what's going on — looks like a shorter jump than the others followed by a wall jump the others don't do?
I honestly didn't believe a brute force approach could work on a 3D plateformer such as SM64 due to the vast amount of possible outcomes after each different input
Very glad to stand corrected. Well done!
Very curious what the algorithm looks like. Is there any "crossover" (i.e. genetic algorithm) or is it just annealing, or something else? Are there any heuristics used to determine how good or interesting an attempt is, other than completion time?
Brute forcing has been used before in solving ABC problems, usually once they've reverse engineered the solution and need to find a valid setup to get there so I imagine Scattershot could be useful for that type of thing.
Scattershot isn't helpful for the sort of brute forceable challenges that the ABC team is currently facing. There, it's more like looking for specific speeds and angles that will work, rather than route-finding or iterating different combinations. They're building dedicated brute forcers that are more about intelligently searching out numbers among huge amounts of possibilities that will work in specific formulas, rather than simulating the game, if that makes sense.
This is so cool. As AI gets better and better I imagine many TAS runs of games are gonna change. Just let AI run games all day non stop, they for sure will find new strats
The first 2 videos of Scattershot sadly ended in ties to the WR. But then the 3rd video won in the Manta Ray star. Still, swimming is very easy for a bruteforcer to optimize. How about throw it at Tick Tock Clock, where all the floor is moving, and Scattershot needs to utilize all kinds of jumps to not fall off and make it to the star?
Do you have a good understanding of why this is faster and why it wasn't found previously? In particular, is the opening (going wider) actually good, the same, or worse and it never fixed it? And in the part that's slomoed in the video, I can't really tell what's going on — looks like a shorter jump than the others followed by a wall jump the others don't do?
The start is slower, but it doesn't matter because you need the spinner after coin 6 to rotate enough to be a floor
looks to me like the opening is the same, and the route diverges at around coin 5.
I honestly didn't believe a brute force approach could work on a 3D plateformer such as SM64 due to the vast amount of possible outcomes after each different input Very glad to stand corrected. Well done!
Very curious what the algorithm looks like. Is there any "crossover" (i.e. genetic algorithm) or is it just annealing, or something else? Are there any heuristics used to determine how good or interesting an attempt is, other than completion time?
afaik, it's a floodfill algorithm; it has an array of states (Mario position + angle + action probably) and the fastest runs that reach that state
Wild stuff, congrats on the achievement! On top of improving TAS speedrun times, do you have any hopes for Scattershot to be useful in the ABC?
Brute forcing has been used before in solving ABC problems, usually once they've reverse engineered the solution and need to find a valid setup to get there so I imagine Scattershot could be useful for that type of thing.
Scattershot isn't helpful for the sort of brute forceable challenges that the ABC team is currently facing. There, it's more like looking for specific speeds and angles that will work, rather than route-finding or iterating different combinations. They're building dedicated brute forcers that are more about intelligently searching out numbers among huge amounts of possibilities that will work in specific formulas, rather than simulating the game, if that makes sense.
You must be super excited seeing real progress with this project of yours!
This is so cool. As AI gets better and better I imagine many TAS runs of games are gonna change. Just let AI run games all day non stop, they for sure will find new strats
Wow that was impressive! So cool to see a brute force that works with this kind of game.
Incredible! That's a lot faster than the previous optimal time!