Author: Matthew Heick

Sethbling, Sethbling, wherefore art thou Mario

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

This has been quite an interesting series of Youtube videos. Allow me to explain:

It started off with a Fark article lovingly entitled Guy creates an artificial intelligence that learns how to play and beat a Super Mario Bros. level, of which the guy was the one and only Sethbling. Sethbling has been an amazing staple in the Minecraft community, and previously unknown to me is also a Super Mario Brothers speed runner.

He explains MarI/O (Mar + I/O, for those keeping up), in which he uses an emulator, some LUA, and a method of artificial intelligence to play and finish the first level of Super Mario Brothers.

The actual article from the University of Texas and the subsequently linked Wikipedia Pages (Neuroevolution, Evolutionary Algorithm, and Artificial Neural Network) are excellent readings.

This led me to the Credits Warp method. For speed runners, their goal is to finish the game as soon as possible, and with the Credits Warp this method is now the fastest.

The whole “Credits Warp” got me thinking about how this was actually done, so I found an amazing explanatory video on this specifically.

Rewriting a SNES using the console controller sounded amazing, and led to the next video on the list from tasvideos (the explanation) and the tasvideo where arbitrary code was executed for an amazing result (Starts at 32:00):

So, now i’m chilling with an amazing TAS execution of Super Mario World being fully run, and it’s pretty cool to see how people could just let computers do their thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9Y2voAvVz4

DOOM ][

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

Killing time on beautiful monday night before my tuesday morning work and I realize that my train of “links” tonight span 15+ years and need mentioning.

I was killing 10 minutes in World of Warcraft when I came across a quest to “Subdue 6 Clefthoofs”, but there was a counter from 1 to 5. Typical bug that has existed for 6+ months in an MMORPG. I ended up looking this thing up, and while “Subduing” you get to use a gun called the Blixthraz’s Frightening Grudgesolver, or BFG for short. Long story short, this gun that subdues actually nukifies these Rhino-type mobs, and then the night begins.

A comment on Wowhead links me to DoomWiki’s BFG9000 Page, which takes me back many, many years. I ended up eating dinner while spending 40 minutes watching a Doom 2 Speedrun:

So, I ended up attempting to play Doom 2 from my computer, only to be disappointed in the 32/64 bit issues with the old DOS/4G program. I fired up Doom95 only to get a stupid DirectX error. Thanks to overclock.net it was as simple as copying dplayx.dll to dplay.dll in my C:\Windows\SysWOW64 and i’m Doomin’ away!

After getting a bit bored of actually playing it and reminiscing too little, too late, I found SLIGE and Doom][ Control and kept thinking to myself “Man, alot of these websites look to be going the way of the Dodo”.

I’m just glad I could walk down memory lane, finding expected dead links and surprising live ones.

5 Years ago – Marina Abramović

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

Facebook has an amazing way of propagating really cool information. It was a post from a friend that led me to the Grandmother of performance Artists, Marina Abramović.

5 years ago, from the 14th March to the 31st May Marina did a live art performance at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, New York City called “The Artist is Present”. In this, she sat silent and immobile at a table and spectators could sit across from her. On the opening night, Ulay took a seat across from her and then another story took place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAID_2iKO5Y

The story of Ulay and Marina is simple. They are both artists that worked together back in the 1970’s, and did many performance pieces that garnered much attention. Once specific one was Breathing In/Breathing Out, where they kneeled in front of each other attached at the lips and breathed each others breath until their lungs were full of Carbon Dioxide and they both feinted.

The night of “The Artist is Present” and Ulay had me look back on the why this was the way it was, and the story is a bit emotional. After their many years of their relationship began to break down, they decided to end their bond in one of the best ways imaginable. In 1998, they each walked the Great Wall of China, Marina from the Yellow Sea side and Ulay from the Gobi Desert side. After 2500kms of walking they met in the middle, embraced one more time, and then went their separate ways.

30 years later, on the opening night of “The Artist is Present”, Ulay showed up without Marina knowing. The rest is performance art history.