
A man accused of cheating at video games may lose his Guinness World Record - danso
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2018/01/29/a-man-accused-of-cheating-at-video-games-may-lose-his-decades-old-guinness-world-record/
======
CrystalLangUser
TwinGalaxies had quite the extensive writeup on Todd's various cheating [1].

There was a staggering amount of evidence, including TAS (Tool Assisted
Speedruns) proving that Todd's time is _physically impossible_. That blew up
in a 274-page thread, but ultimately I believe it took Robert T Mruczek's
writeup to finally ban Todd.[1] Not surprising as Mcruzek is part of the "old
guard".

I think this reflected very poorly on TG and I have no intention of using them
in the future.

[1]: [http://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/175364-Dispute-
Di...](http://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/175364-Dispute-Dick-
Moreland-Atari-2600-VCS-Dragster-NTSC-Game-1-Difficulty-B-Fastest-Time-Player-
Todd-Rogers-Score-05-51?p=945909&viewfull=1#post945909)

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
Wait what? I was with you until the last line and now I'm confused. Why does
this reflect poorly on TG if they removed it when there was good evidence it
was false?

~~~
viridian
The evidence had existed for games like centipede many years, and the dragster
game had been taken apart and proven fake via the actual machine code for 6+
months. TG didn't act on it until one of the inner circle got involved, that
is the shameful bit.

------
wnevets
>Rogers’s record on the classic Atari arcade game Centipede, for example, had
been listed on the Twin Galaxies site as being 65,000,000. The second-highest
score, 58,078, barely comes close

Wow and nobody thought that was a bit suspicious?

~~~
BoiledCabbage
I don't follow this stuff, but Twin Galaxies deserves zero respect after this.

To be considered a reputable organization and not even question scores like
this is laughable. And there were multiple this absurd.

~~~
fortythirteen
Yet try to submit legitimate high scores as an _unknown_ and you'll find them
repeatedly dismissed on "technicalities".

Many of their arcade "high scores" for lesser known titles are easily broken
by someone practicing for less than a week, but happen to be long held by TG
regulars, with hundreds of "high scores".

~~~
hanasu
To be fair, many of those games are rather uncommon and may just not
accessible for public play by anyone. TG arcade scores must be done on
original hardware. So some scores are a testament to rarity more than
anything.

Particularly on the MAME (emulator) side of arcade scoring - on a previous
incarnation of the TG website, the rules for submission to a game were not
public until a score had been submitted for that game. Some folks with many
high scores were simply submitting any score at all so that others could even
play along.

------
woliveirajr
> Beyond the software analysis evidence, which speaks directly to Todd
> Rogers’s Dragster 5.51 score time

I didn't understand this sentence: it means that, looking at the code and
calculating all possibilities of gear changing moments, it would be impossible
to achieve 5.51 ? If so, why would any other evidence be necessary ? Or, if it
wasn't such analysis (and I think that this one would be definitive), why
wasn't this one done ?

~~~
ranger207
Yes, the analysis proves 5.51 is impossible, and it's been confirmed that 5.57
is the best possible time through the use of an emulator with preprogrammed
inputs, meaning that it plays the game perfectly. Todd Roger's response is
that the analysis failed to consider the "human element" and how the console
would respond to that.

~~~
tzs
> Yes, the analysis proves 5.51 is impossible, and it's been confirmed that
> 5.57 is the best possible time through the use of an emulator with
> preprogrammed inputs, meaning that it plays the game perfectly.

An emulator with preprogrammed inputs doesn't mean it plays perfectly. It just
means that it plays reproducibly. Whether or not it plays perfectly depends on
the preprogrammed inputs.

How did they choose the inputs?

Looking at the game manual, it comes down to deciding when to shift, and
deciding how to use the gas pedal.

Shifting looks like it is easy to deal with in emulated testing. You have
neutral, 1, 2, 3, and 4. You start in neutral. So, an optimal run will start
with you shifting once at t=0. You cannot down shift, so your only choice when
shifting is up, and once you reach 4 you can no longer shift.

From another comment, it seems the game works in ticks of 3/100th second. That
means that for a 6 second race, there are around 1.3 million possible shifting
timings, assuming that you cannot skip gears.

For using the gas pedal, it looks like if you are not red lined, there are no
circumstances where it would be better to not give it the gas. When red lined
but at a time when your shifting plan calls for staying in the current gear, I
can't tell from the manual what you should do. It says if you go past that you
risk blowing the engine. What it doesn't say is if you get more power when
going past the red line, so that it may be worth it.

Assuming that red line is max power, then when at red line but not shifting
optimum would be to modulated the gas so as to keep it right at the red line.

For each shift pattern, it should be relatively easy to figure out when the
gas has to switch between steady and modulated. Putting it all together that
would give 1.3 million candidate inputs, one of which should be optimum.

If going past the red line does give more speed (at increased risk of engine
blow out), it is more difficult. If engine blow out is probabilistic, you have
to worry about the possibility that someone could get insanely lucky.

At that point, you probably need to analyze how the random number generator
works, and how it is used, and how user inputs affect it. One particularly
worrisome possibility would be that the timing of user input affects it. For
example, if whenever the user presses or releases the gas it uses a random
number to pick from several sounds associated with that action, that could be
bad news. It would mean that the earlier analysis that the gas would optimally
in each gear start out as constant and then switch modulated at the red line
is no longer applicable. It could be that there is a run where if someone
releases briefly the gas during the "constant" phase, that happens to get the
random number generator to a position where they will get very lucky on the
engine blow out rolls later.

If that meant we had to try every possible gas pattern, instead of just
"constant followed by modulated", we'd have a combinatorial explosion.

Probably the best to do in this case (the "past the red line gives more speed,
and the random number generator has a lot of user provided entropy" case)
would be to tweak the emulator so that the engine cannot blow out, change the
gas pedal input to simply be full gas all the time, and see what the results
are. That would at least give us a lower bound on what the luckiest person in
the universe could conceivably achieve.

~~~
gamblor956
They analyzed the actual code of the game to determine what the optimum inputs
would be...

Based on that code, the alleged record was not possible.

------
fortythirteen
"It's unethical!" cried the group so obsessed with protecting those in their
inner circle that they regularly find loopholes to keep from recognizing legit
records.

There are some good mods at TG, but I find that many, if not most of them,
treat it like an elite social club instead of the supposed impartial record
authority that they promote themselves as.

------
Vadoff
Here's a good video summary about Todd Rogers:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e-H4sEHB54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e-H4sEHB54)

~~~
xutopia
For those who can't watch. Some games were scored in increments of 5 and he
somehow got a score finishing with an 8. Many scores were ridiculous like
650000 for a game that goes in increments of 100 and the second highest video
verified score was in the 90k range. Then the fact that all his records were
referee verified instead of video verified. The referee is serving a sentence
for child rape. Then there is the lie about the videos being taken by the
police department and never returned which was proven false by a call to the
police department. Then the fact that the record holder had direct access to
the Twin Galaxies database and ent3ered his own records though he says he only
did it once.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
> Then the fact that all his records were referee verified instead of video
> verified. The referee is serving a sentence for child rape.

While that's deplorable, it does not logically follow that a child molester is
necessarily an unreliable referee.

~~~
UsernameProxy
It's a pretty safe bet, though.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
People commit horrible crimes. That's one of those things that happen. It
doesn't actually mean that everything they did was a lie or a crime, even if
they are a horrible, detestable human in many senses of the word.

I'd nearly argue that it would be in his worst interest to participate in
defrauding something since it might have revealed his horrible offenses.

~~~
rubicon33
> doesn't actually mean that everything they did was a lie or a crime

Nobody said that

> they are a horrible, detestable human

Nobody said that either

All that's being said is that it's more likely he would do something
nefarious, given his background.

~~~
tsumnia
The issue is that "child rapist" implies "poor judgment of character". This
implication cannot be made because there are plenty of accounts where "non-
child rapist" have "poor judgement of character".

No one is arguing a child rapist is okay; the issue other posters are having
is that it is a incorrect argument.

Any further "but what if's..." are simply assumptions that do not have proof.

~~~
dgjj
I don't follow your logic, I could see either

1\. The issue is that "child rapist" implies "poor judgment of character".
This implication cannot be made because there are plenty of accounts where
"child rapist" have _" good judgement of character"_.

or

2\. The issue is that _" poor judgment of character"_ implies _" child
rapist"_. This implication cannot be made because there are plenty of accounts
where "non-child rapist" have "poor judgement of character".

being at least a logical (regardless of correctness) statement

~~~
tsumnia
My apologies, you are correct. I suppose what I was attempting to say was that
the connection between video game referee and child rapist was a weak
connection due to the relation of "judgement of character".

The statements "child rapist" implies "poor judgement of character" and "poor
judgement of character" implies "poor ability to be a referee" can be negated
if the person turned out to be a qualified referee. The gray area is what
people agree to be what constitutes good/poor "judgement of character". This
is where I believe what AdmiralAsshat is attempting to argue in his post
"While that's deplorable, it does not logically follow that a child molester
is necessarily an unreliable referee."

------
Jeema101
One thing that has maybe not been considered is that the Atari 2600 is
susceptible to what's known in the online Atari community as 'frying', whereby
cycling the power off and then back on very quickly while the console is
running can lead to weird changes in the program state.

Not saying this is what occurred, but it could be a possibility, depending on
the code...

~~~
xamuel
Reminds me of a controversial technique discovered in the TAS community. Start
saving your savefile, then cut the power mid-write. Usually creates a savefile
with a bad checksum, but with certain timing on certain games, can result in
playable corrupt savefiles which can be used for a faster win.

One of the reasons this idea is so controversial is the TAS community always
assumes games should be played frame by frame, but this technique would open
sub-frame "gameplay" (timing when you cut the power with much higher
precision)

~~~
nightcracker
I used to do something similar as a kid, cloning Pokemon in Pokemon Gold by
turning off the Game Boy mid-save.

------
bbarn
So, is the opinion that he just fabricated the photo, or that he had a knack
for figuring these glitches out? Because as far as I know, glitching things is
considered all well and good with speed runners, and lots of his other high
scores imply some kind of glitching or another.

~~~
tomku
Twin Galaxies is notorious for banning glitches completely and it's one of the
many reasons the speedrunning community abandoned TG. If he glitched, his runs
would be invalid by TG's own rules.

As far as glitching in speedruns nowadays, it depends. You play by the rules
of the category you choose to run, which may allow no glitches, some specific
glitches or all glitches. To give an example, let's take a look at a popular
speedgame, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time[1]. The "Any%" record, meaning
beating the game with all glitches allowed, is 17m09s. The "Glitchless"
completion record is 3hr48m38s. Categories like "No IM/WW" and "MST" are
glitch limit categories where specific glitches are banned and the times are
intermediate between any% and glitchless. Less-popular games will have fewer
categories, but if there's interesting glitches, there'll usually be at least
"no/few glitches" and "more/all glitches" categories.

[1]: [https://www.speedrun.com/oot](https://www.speedrun.com/oot)

~~~
xamuel
>banning glitches

How can you even define glitches?

In the original Super Mario Brothers, you could dash and then crouch and then
slide through narrow tunnels while crouching. It wasn't documented in any
official manual or anything, but everyone did it. Is that a glitch?

~~~
balls187
Speedrunslive defines a glitch as an "unintentional mistake in games code."

In your example, the dash-crouch in SMB is a glitch.

~~~
glhaynes
Unless we're talking about something different than I'm imagining (like
sliding through a wall or something), that seems obviously _not_ a glitch.
Mario has momentum that continues to apply when he changes to a crouching
state and it would look really weird if it didn't. (I recognize that this is
just proving the point that "glitch or not" is hard to define... and probably
harder to define than one would expect.)

~~~
munchbunny
Ultimately the definition of what is or isn't a glitch isn't the most
important question because it's often such a fuzzy question.

Like how some competitive gaming communities often have informal rules to keep
competitive play interesting by banning specific overpowered mechanics, the
more important reason for allowing/banning specific glitches or types of
glitches is to keep the competition interesting for speedrunners and viewers.

Obviously some games are more interesting than others to speedrun, but like in
the example of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, by ruling out specific glitches you can
make sure that speedrunners continue to explore the surface area of the game
rather than only trying to optimize a specific glitch with outsized impact on
run-time.

------
ChuckMcM
Interesting article. For as long as I've been playing games there have been
people claiming they did things which seemed unlikely if not impossible.
However, given today's cycle accurate simulators and computation power it
seems like you could certainly answer the question of whether or not the
software would ever get to a certain point.

------
stefs
i've never played the game, but if it's on mame, wouldn't a simple
evolutionary search yield good results?

~~~
awesomepantsm
With only 5.1 seconds of input, you could brute force it if you really wanted.

~~~
EtDybNuvCu
Could you?

The game runs at NTSC rates, which we'll round up to 60Hz. We'll also say that
6s of inputs need to be considered, and scores which are above 6s will be
discarded. We'll finally say that the possible input states consist of the
joystick in either left ("shifting") or neutral ("popping") position, and the
gas button either up or down. This generates four possible input states.

The number of possible input states in total will be 60 * 6 = 360, and so the
total input space is 4 * * 360 = 2 * * 720, which is a little big for brute-
force exploration. Many of these states suck; after all, the total number of
shifts is not ~300, but ~5. So a guided search is likelier to pay off.

Edit: Thanks HN for eating asterisks and having no math mode.

~~~
taneq
There's brute force and then there's brute force. You know that the joystick
inputs have to be applied in a certain order, and you basically want the
throttle on unless you're above a certain RPM, so the search space is more
like 60^4 with a couple of parameters, which is plenty tractable.

------
534b44a
The referee that decided most of the scores in prison for 30 years, he was a
very close friend to the cheater [1]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e-H4sEHB54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e-H4sEHB54)

------
zimpenfish
Alternate link for people who can't be bothered defeating WAPO paywalls:
[https://kotaku.com/infamous-atari-player-gets-world-
record-r...](https://kotaku.com/infamous-atari-player-gets-world-record-
removed-after-3-1822511777)

~~~
millzlane
I find that if you right-click on the link, then open it in a private tab or
incognito. It will allow you you to read the article.

~~~
doodpants
I find that viewing the article with JavaScript turned off works too.

------
xelxebar
This reminds me of the slimy feel I get about Billy Mitchell every time I see
a video of him.

~~~
vanadium
Reportedly, that's just a persona and he amped it up for the King of Kong
film. But I definitely get where you're coming from.

~~~
acomjean
The King of Kong film makes him look bad. He clearly fills a kind villain
role.

In the movie extras he's seen delivering a Q-Bert machine to a excited senior
citizen so she can practice for a tournament. Seemed oddly out of character
from the way he was portrayed in the movie.

I don't know him personally, but he keeps showing up at video game events and
clearly is enthusiastic about them.

------
NietTim
Good!

