Lunar Pool TAS done almost entirely by computer

[Jogurt the Yogurt]

This is via our old buddy Pluvius at another forum:

Originally Posted by Pluvius

Lunar Pool (known as Lunar Ball in Japan) is one of the rare video games that has no randomness at all; that is to say, if you set up a shot properly, you'll make that shot every time and the table will end up in the exact same position regardless of when you hit the cue. Because of this, someone thought it would be a good idea to write a computer program to play through it as quickly as possible. After lots of tweaking and "more than 8760 hours of 100% capacity work on 4 CPU cores" taking into account the fact that the game's scoring system becomes unbearably slow if you don't intentionally miss about half of your shots, they got what is essentially the video-game-nerd's equivalent of Deep Blue.

http://www.archive.org/download/Luna...as-bisqwit.mp4

Watch out for a neat glitch on Stages 40 and 60. To my knowledge, this is the first time that a computer program has discovered a game glitch.

Rob

For those not in the know, TAS means tool-assisted speedrun, which means this is essentially a video of one of the fastest possible clears of Lunar Pool. It's very neat to see these literally perfectly executed stage clears as discovered by computer algorithms.

I know it's not super relevant to the VC per se, but it's a NES game that's on there, so it's neat to see.

Thanks Rob!

[lordbowser]

I like how we're the first thing that shows up when you search "Lunar Pool TAS" on Google.

[Jogurt the Yogurt]

Originally Posted by lordbowser

I like how we're the first thing that shows up when you search "Lunar Pool TAS" on Google.

At least it's a roundabout way of getting to the Lunar Pool TAS itself.

VC-F must have some sweet Google cred.