(Tournament) a newt? honestly...
senon
must have gone through, going to all the trouble of
finding a newt to kill him on the astral plane was a
stylistic choice. :)
-senon
robin
Indeed. He's prepping a post for r.g.r.n now.
I can give you a preview now, though, and tell you that NetHack actually logged
his game as:
Alberta(0) 3.4.2 -2072701624 7 -5 52 -1 389 1 20031117 20031109 5021
Cav Hum Mal Neu eit_brad,killed by a newt
It seems he wrapped the points variable. ;-)
We'd apreciate y'all's opinion on what we did about that:
As far as I can tell, NetHack uses a long int for that variable. This means
that the maximum positive value for a score is 2,147,483,647 at which point it
would start counting up from minimum so subtracting the logged score from the
variable's maximum should tell us by how far he overshot. That gives 747,820
as the overshot value, so the score would be 2,148,231,467 (which addition I
had to do myself, since apparently my desktop calculator uses long ints as well
.. ;-)
It _does_ mean we're completely re-thinking the scoreboard for next year,
though.
Cheers,
-robin
David Corbett
74,782,023 overshot, surely. Which would give 2,222,265,670 points. If
he'd ascended, he'd have twice that plus change, which would bring him
right round the other side to about 150 million.
Sam Dennis
> robin wrote:
>> Alberta(0) 3.4.2 -2072701624 7 -5 52 -1 389 1 20031117 20031109 5021
>> Cav Hum Mal Neu eit_brad,killed by a newt
>>
>
2,222,265,672 is correct, with a 32-bit two's complement representation,
but you were close.
--
++acr@,ka"
Eric Wright
How do you possibly get that many points? I've done a genocide-free
extinctionist ascension and only scored 60,102,408 points.
Theron Mann
Great caesar's ghost! I'm dying to see brad's post.
Sam Dennis
>> > robin wrote:
>> >> Alberta(0) 3.4.2 -2072701624 7 -5 52 -1 389 1 20031117 20031109 5021
>> >> Cav Hum Mal Neu eit_brad,killed by a newt
>> >>
>
> How do you possibly get that many points? I've done a genocide-free
> extinctionist ascension and only scored 60,102,408 points.
Killing a rider for a few days without breaks, over and over, is meant
to be pretty effective, if you have OCD.
--
++acr@,ka"
Kevin R
I would have gone for a woodchuck, myself, but I agree anyway. :)
Bruce
> David Corbett <dcorb...@yahoo.co.nz> wrote in message news:<Mbuub.2207$VV6....@news.xtra.co.nz>...
>> he'd ascended, he'd have twice that plus change, which would bring him
>> right round the other side to about 150 million.
> Great caesar's ghost! I'm dying to see brad's post.
Why? It's just going to boil down to "I was an extinctionist, then I
trapped Pestilence between boulders and killed him 2,000 times."
--
Bruce Labbate | And my ex-boyfriend can't tell me I've
shiftless layabout | Sold out, because he's in a cult.
| And he's not allowed to talk to me.
| - Dar Williams
Rast
sev...@nuraldin.devnull.net>:
> It seems he wrapped the points variable. ;-)
> It _does_ mean we're completely re-thinking the scoreboard for next year,
> though.
As in coming up with a meaningful scoring system, or as in using more bytes
for the points variable?
--
One day she went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested
in the street at that time. She vanished without a trace and probably
died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards
got mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women's concentration
camps in the north. - Boris Pasternak
Bruce
> robin wrote on Tue, 18 Nov 2003 17:57:01 GMT in article news:<4v2q81-
> sev...@nuraldin.devnull.net>:
>> It seems he wrapped the points variable. ;-)
>> It _does_ mean we're completely re-thinking the scoreboard for next year,
>> though.
> As in coming up with a meaningful scoring system, or as in using more bytes
> for the points variable?
I would assume the former, as the latter wouldn't make a difference
without a change in the size of the points variable in the game itself
and robin isn't on the DevTeam.
--
Bruce Labbate | It can be kind of banal
shiftless layabout | But I dream of your red dress
| Riding down these dry canals
| - The Pixies
Sam Dennis
>> As in coming up with a meaningful scoring system, or as in using more bytes
>> for the points variable?
>
> I would assume the former, as the latter wouldn't make a difference
> without a change in the size of the points variable in the game itself
> and robin isn't on the DevTeam.
That change would be fairly trivial, however. Being part of the devteam
is not a requirement for patching the game.
--
++acr@,ka"
robin
That's true, I suppose, but we're still only talking about the tournament
scoreboard. ;-)
Specifically, we're talking about getting rid of at 2/3 of the score-based
trophies and replacing them with a conduct-based set. We'll probably add other
changes as well.
We expect to post a _lot_ of requests for comments here in the coming year.
-robin
Yashichi
As someone who's finally managed to crack six digits for the second time
(and still not getting past the mino maze) I find either of your scores
rather mindboggling.
But my real question is: Why on earth is points a signed integer?
Brad Sagarin
Stylistic choice? Those little buggers ganged up on me!
Seriously, though, with last year's top three scores being wizards and
the top 37 scores being ascensions, I thought it would be fun to try
to achieve a high score with a non-spellcaster who ends his adventure
with an ignominious death.
The first challenge was how to accumulate points. I figured that the
most efficient repeatable technique for a non-spellcaster was killing
and reviving one of the endgame riders. Going hand-to-hand with any of
them in 3.4.2 seemed perilous, so I played around with distance
attacks. A valkyrie throwing Mojo was problematic because Mojo
occasionally hit her arm and destroyed her rings and wands. Worse,
this erratic behavior made it difficult to set up a reliable repeating
sequence of keystrokes. Then I started playing with polearms. They
work well over a distance, and they never have unintended side
effects. Unfortunately, quickly reviving a rider required pushing a
boulder into the corpse, and (unlike throwing Mojo) polearms don't
work if you cannot see the target. That problem was solved by wishing
for the Eyes of the Overworld.
The setup on the Astral Plane required one boulder and a bunch of tame
blue jellies. This meant arriving on the Astral Plane with the Eyes of
the Overworld, at least one wish (for the boulder), a couple of cursed
scrolls of genocide, some method of taming, and a polearm. It also
required filling the rest of the area with innocuous monsters, but
this could be done cheaply by reading scrolls of create monster while
confused.
I chose a caveman partially because cavemen seemed like the most
anti-spellcasting class and partially because cavemen can become
skilled in polearms. The game was pretty typical up to arriving on the
Astral Plane. No wishes other than the castle wand. No bones files.
Once on Astral, I quaffed a blessed potion of monster detection to
find which temple was guarded by Pestilence (the safest rider to
attack repeatedly, by my calculation). It was the left one.
I reverse genocided blue jellies in the bottom hallway to block the
other two temples and started clearing the area towards the left
temple. Eventually, I made it to the temple itself. I wished for a
boulder, reverse genocided blue jellies, and lured Pestilence into the
temple. Once in the temple, I killed Pestilence, stood on the corpse,
and filled the area with acid blobs. I then cleared the square behind
the boulder and two blue jellies and revived Pestilence. Since that
space was the nearest empty space, Pestilence appeared in the
boulder/jelly prison. After that, it was a matter of applying the
polearm until Pestilence died and then pushing the boulder into the
corpse. Every 10 to 20 million XPs or so, I'd displace one of the blue
jellies and step onto the prison square to pick up goodies and
polymorph down the pile. This was the one dangerous aspect of the
technique, because displacing tamed blue jellies can take a while, and
I had to go hand-to-hand with Pestilence a few times. The setup looked
like this:
---------------
|5..5..11..*21|
..---------.1-- --- --
.1|bbbjbjb|111-- -- -
2.|bbbjbbj|111%--- %
5 .3|bb@jjjj-.%$%1)
..|bAbjjjj|.111--- ) % -
5 4.|bbbj@`&|111-- -- ) --
..---------11-- ----|----
3|.5.5.bjqjj.11| | ) --------
4--------------- | % |
5 ------- ( --
| --
--- ----
|
-------
Eit_brad the Pioneer St:18/** Dx:23 Co:18 In:23 Wi:23 Ch:18
Neutral
Astral Plane $:0 HP:389(389) Pw:449(449) AC:-45 Xp:30/427121057
The numbers on the left edge of the screen are monsters that appeared
when a titan cast a summon nasties spell when the level was completely
filled. I've reported this as a possible bug to the devteam.
The trick to fast point accumulation was to fill the paste buffer with
the keystrokes needed to reliably kill and revive Pestilence.
Fortunately, this sequence did not include the space bar. As a result,
I could repeatedly press paste until something interrupted the
sequence (a malignant aura, a monster appearing on the prison square,
etc.). This whole process got even faster once I realized that rings
of increase damage were metallic. I started munching them and by the
end of the game, I'd acquired an intrinsic +59 damage bonus. Combined
with wearing a +8 ring of increase damage, this meant that one hit
from my +7 halberd killed Pestilence every time. This translated into
accumulating approximately 1,000,000 experience points per minute. At
this rate, it took 4 hours and 10 minutes of play for 1 billion points
(assuming the game ends in death - ascension would double this to 2
billion points). In actuality, the game took quite a bit longer, given
the time it took to reach the Astral Plane and get things set up,
periodic forays into the prison for goodies, and time to recover from
occasional stupid moves.
My biggest moment of panic was when I forgot that I had copied a big
chunk of text from a different program into the copy/paste buffer. I
switched back to nethack, pressed paste, and watched in horror as the
game went crazy. Fortunately, the sequence didn't kill me, nor did it
leave me in an unrecoverable state. But I was a lot more careful after
that.
By the end of the game, I had accumulated a ridiculous inventory of
stuff, including:
29 amulets of life saving
164 scrolls of genocide
6 wands of wishing
32 magic lamps
11 randomly generated artifacts (Grayswandir, Fire Brand, Mjollnir,
Snickersnee, Giantslayer, Dragonbane, Frost Brand, Grimtooth, Sting,
Cleaver, Ogresmasher)
The last question was how to end the madness. A fellow member of Clan
EIT (http://homepage.mac.com/monstrouspudding/clan_eit/) suggested
death by grid bug. I really liked this idea, but, alas, I had acquired
shock resistance, which nullified the grid bug's attack.
Unfortunately, shock resistance is one of the few intrinsics that
gremlins won't steal. Next on the list was getting killed by a newt.
Turns out that losing a 30th level caveman with an 18 constitution to
a newt is no simple task. I stripped to my skivvies, reverse genocided
eight newts and stood around while they nipped ineffectually at my
ankles. Apparently, the 11 points of divine protection were too much
for them. A helm of opposite alignment fixed that, and many turns
later, eit_brad the caveman met his maker...
The newt bites! The newt bites! The newt bites! The newt
bites!--More--
The newt misses. The newt bites! The newt bites!--More--
You die...--More--
Do you want to see your attributes? [ynq] (n)
Final Attributes:
You were piously aligned.
You were fire resistant.
You were cold resistant.
You were sleep resistant.
You were disintegration-resistant.
You were shock resistant.
You were poison resistant.
You saw invisible.
You were telepathic.
You were warned.
You were invisible to others.
You had teleport control. (eating a ring of teleport control)
You could survive without air. (eating an amulet of magical breathing)
You had a +59 damage bonus. (eating a ton of rings of increase damage)
You were protected. (weird, I thought I had lost my protection by
changing alignment)
You were protected from shape changers. (eating a ring of protection
from shape changers)
You had polymorph control. (eating a ring of polymorph control)
You were fast.
You were very lucky.
You are dead.
Do you want an account of creatures vanquished? [ynq] (n)
Vanquished creatures:
Asmodeus
Baalzebub
Orcus
Juiblex
The Wizard of Yendor (11 times)
Pestilence (255 times) (many many more times than that)
...
3307 creatures vanquished.
Do you want a list of species genocided? [ynq] (n)
Genocided species:
chDHLNPRTUX;
67 species genocided.
Do you want to see your conduct? [ynq] (n)
Voluntary challenges:
You genocided 67 types of monsters.
You used 26 wishes. (mostly rings of increase damage)
----------
/ \
/ REST \
/ IN \
/ PEACE \
/ \
| eit_brad |
| 22 Au |
| killed by a newt |
| |
| |
| |
| 2003 |
*| * * * | *
_________)/\\_//(\/(/\)/\//\/|_)_______
Goodbye eit_brad the Caveman...
You died in The Astral Plane with -2072701624 points,
and 22 pieces of gold, after 434075 moves.
You were level 30 with a maximum of 389 hit points when you died.
No Points Name
Hp [max]
1 108309360 bvowk-Wiz-Elf-Mal-Cha ascended to demigod-hood.
402 [422]
2 10748262 mit_pichu-Wiz-Elf-Mal-Cha ascended to demigod-hood.
526 [526]
3 178990 dreadnouga-Kni-Hum-Mal-Law died in The Dungeons of
Doom on level 22. Killed by a giant zombie.
- [86]
67 4 opx-Pri-Hum-Mal-Neu quit in The Dungeons of Doom on
level 1.
14 [14]
68 4 dreadnouga-Kni-Hum-Mal-Law quit in The Dungeons of
Doom on level 1.
11 [16]
0 eit_brad-Cav-Hum-Mal-Neu died on the Astral Plane.
Killed by a newt.
- [389]
Thank you for recording your gaming session.
The stored file for that session is "eit_brad.2003-11-17-17-26-50",
should you care to publish it for others' entertainment.
Would you like to return to NetHack?(y/n)
Nah, I think that's enough nethack for the moment. ;-)
- Brad
Antti Kuosmanen
> You died in The Astral Plane with -2072701624 points,
I am glad that someone demonstrated that the Nethack scoring system is
inheritantly broken. I don't mean that the devteam should add more bits to
the score counter, but that the whole system needs an overhaul. This
should have been obvious to the tournament organisers from the last year's
results already, though.
> - Brad
antti
--
Antti Kuosmanen | remove .remove.invalid to email ...
http://smurffi.dna.fi/~akuo/ @@.
o/~ Rock over London. Rock on Chicago o/~ ...
lmfback
bsag...@apocalypse.org says...
> My biggest moment of panic was when I forgot that I had copied a big
> chunk of text from a different program into the copy/paste buffer. I
> switched back to nethack, pressed paste, and watched in horror as the
> game went crazy. Fortunately, the sequence didn't kill me, nor did it
> leave me in an unrecoverable state. But I was a lot more careful after
> that.
Of all crazy people... :-)
After you mishap you probably should have chosen a more appropriate
death, let's call it "death by Guidebook", i.e. repeatedly paste the
Guidebook until you die of something. Or maybe the entire source...
Eskimo
--
//------------------------------
//Remove absolutelynos-p-a-m to mail directly.
//Ascended:W,V (genopolywish),P(ill ath), T,K,H,S,B,C,P,W
(naked),Ro,Ra,A,W,almost pacifist A
//In progress:PAIN
David Damerell
[the million squillion points game]
>Why? It's just going to boil down to "I was an extinctionist, then I
>trapped Pestilence between boulders and killed him 2,000 times."
Not even the former, if he was killed by a newt.
I wouldn't bother with extinctionist if I wanted to maximise score; why
undertake days of boring activity with a lower points/hour ratio than
killing a Rider? Once you've got all the stuff you need to be
self-sustaining on Astral, you may as well go for it.
--
David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?
David Damerell
>Specifically, we're talking about getting rid of at 2/3 of the score-based
>trophies and replacing them with a conduct-based set. We'll probably add
>other changes as well.
Let me suggest it again; maximum percentage of characters ascended over
some minimum number of games (so you can't start one Valk and get lucky)
with one of the following conditions;
a) random class selection (requires a small patch to note in the record
file that random class selection was used).
b) number of games played in any class not to exceed the number of games
played in any other by more than one.
c) number of ascensions in any class not to exceed the number of
ascensions in any other class by more than one.
For b) and c), if a player did not satisfy the criterion at the end of the
tournament, their score is taken after the last game they played where
they did satisfy the criterion. A Web-based checker to list the numbers
for reference during the tourney wouldn't hurt.
If two players have the same percentage the winner is the one with the
highest absolute number of ascensions, to encourage plenty of play.
Eric Wright
> The trick to fast point accumulation was to fill the paste buffer with
> the keystrokes needed to reliably kill and revive Pestilence.
Now, why have I never thought to use the paste buffer? That makes
altar camping much less dangerous... just put #o^Jy into the paste
buffer. Drag your corpses to the altar, drop them, and paste... No
chance of accidentally typing #p^Jy instead and praying when you're
not supposed to. Thanks for the tip!
[Note: ^J is the ASCII code for Enter on Unix machines... to get
this, shell out to the command line. ^J is created by holding down
ctrl while typing vj]
E
Michael Clarke
I suspect a far more useful patch would be divide the score gained for
killing a monster by the number of them you have killed. It means
maintaining the kill counters for all monsters, not just those that
can become extinct, but seriously reduces the points gained for
killing, especially repeatedly killing the same monster...
Mik
Dylan O'Donnell
> I suspect a far more useful patch would be divide the score gained for
> killing a monster by the number of them you have killed.
Code for this has existed in the past (stubs from it remain); as far as
I can see, it was never fully integrated, and was removed in 3.2.
--
: Dylan O'Donnell http://www.spod-central.org/~psmith/ :
: "Its habit of getting up late you'll agree / That it carries too far, :
: when I say / That it frequently breakfasts at five-o'clock tea / And :
: dines on the following day." -- Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark :
eit_cyrus
>
> Why? It's just going to boil down to "I was an extinctionist, then I
> trapped Pestilence between boulders and killed him 2,000 times."
>
WAtch your words, LLAMA!!! Dissing clan EIT is asking for a
major FRAGGING!!!
eit_cyrus
james
Eric Wright <ewr...@nc.rr.com> wrote:
>bsag...@apocalypse.org (Brad Sagarin) wrote in message news:<ba6d89a0.03111...@posting.google.com>...
>
>> The trick to fast point accumulation was to fill the paste buffer with
>> the keystrokes needed to reliably kill and revive Pestilence.
>
>Now, why have I never thought to use the paste buffer? That makes
>altar camping much less dangerous... just put #o^Jy into the paste
It doesn't really make anything less dangerous, just exposes a different
set of dangers. In my early game I always start out pacifist, which
means I have a keystroke for "E-y Elbereth" and another one for
"Elbereth", and a couple of other things. I know this is dangerous,
but, I don't care.
Kent Paul Dolan
> Or maybe the entire source...
Oo, oo, oo! Remember those programming challenges where
the idea was to write a program that printed itself? How
about this for an adult version of the same problem:
write a roguelike game that wins itself on the last character,
when the source is input as the controls stream. No, this
does _not_ mean: with the RNG turned off, but it might mean
that you need a conditional execution thingie in the command
stream, much like the run commands for "run _until_ something
interesting happens". You could even start with a level that
is just boulders and undug rock, and make the starting character
an archeologist, so that that level could potentially be used
as a Turing machine tape.
xanthian, why try to _lose_, when with infinitely more effort,
you could try to _win_! SPOILER: think "comments". ANTI_SPOILER:
think: winning exceeds the lifetime of the universe.
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Erik Hesselink
> You were protected. (weird, I thought I had lost my protection by
> changing alignment)
You still have protection afterwards, it's just set to 0, IIRC.
> You died in The Astral Plane with -2072701624 points,
And congrats for this stylish proof that the score system is broken!
Erik
Igor D. WonderLlama
Would this challenge have on of the same stipulations as the original,
that you are not allowed to use file IO? I think most roguelikes do.
Kent Paul Dolan
> Would this challenge have on of the same stipulations as the original,
> that you are not allowed to use file IO? I think most roguelikes do.
Good point. Hmmm, I'd guess the best compromises would be:
1) The game would have to be attractively playable and it not be
blatantly obvious that it had some devious other agenda.
2) You could bring in by file I/O such stuff as preferences files
or level design files, but I think bones levels would make it
too easy to cheat.
3) Probably, however, to bring things back into balance, you'd
have to make the winning input the catenation of the source
code and all of the predefined files allowed as input.
That's about as much of this silliness as I can handle.
xanthian.