The 500 edits required for access to TWL is actually for all of the sites under the Wikimedia banner. If you're having trouble finding things to edit on Wikipedia, you can try their other sites such as Wikisource or Wikibooks.
On Wikisource in particular, it's fairly easy to make useful edits through validating proofread pages or proofreading simple pages (both of which can be easily found in the Monthly Challenge).
The conclusion is basically (Larry) Niven's Law of Time Travel. From "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel" (1971):
> If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.
The entire essay is worth a read, of course. Meanwhile the paper in the OP goes for a more mathematical approach.
Somewhat related is the work done in "Falling with Style: Factoring up to 255 “with” a Quantum Computer" published in the proceedings of SIGBOVIK 2025 [1]. The author, Craig Gidney [2], successfully factored all odd composite numbers up to 255 using Shor's algorithm, even though the quantum circuits involved were such that any meaningful output would be overwhelmed by noise (and indeed, performance was maintained when the circuits were replaced by a random number generator).
> To my knowledge, no one has cheated at factoring in this way before. Given the shenanigans pulled by past factoring experiments, that’s remarkable.
[2] Who has previous experience in cheating at quantum factoring: see "Factoring the largest number ever with a quantum computer", posted April Fools' Day 2020 at https://algassert.com/post/2000
A while back I came up with the idea to carve out 4096 code points in plane 14 (Supplementary Special-purpose Plane) for super-surrogates, and use three such surrogates (1 initial, 2 extension) for codepoints beginning from U+110000. If done properly you get unlimited range and self-synchronizing, at the expense of needing 12 bytes minimum per codepoint (more if you want it truly unlimited), but I figured the demand for UTF-16 would be low enough by the time it's needed that it's a workable tradeoff.
Having come across the connection from somewhere else entirely, I found it a very curious rabbit hole. I saw recently a website that attempts to summarise the whole thing (not quite complete) [1], with a section on St. Bride's.
Then there's the oral history someone posted on Something Awful some years ago [2] -- from someone who may have accidentally indirectly derailed the entire movement.
RFC 2550 to the rescue: handling the transition from A99999 to B100000, or even from Z999999999999999999999999999999 to ^A1000000000000000000000000000000 will be a piece of cake.
Neat. However, I noticed that the page description reads "No stress, memory-optimized 3D Tetris variant.", but I can't figure out what's supposed to be 3D about it.
Ha, I missed that. The AI prob wrote that. It thinks it’s 3D because it’s using the three JS library and I was asking for performance optimization ideas
MAX_SAFE_INTEGER = 2^53 - 1 = 9007199254740991. The next integer 2^53 is representable, while the following one 2^53 + 1 isn't.
2^53 + 1 milliseconds = 9007199254740993 milliseconds = 104249991 days 8 hours 59 minutes 0.993 seconds. Since the zero point is midnight 1970-01-01, we reach the first non-representable millisecond at 287396-10-12T8:59:00.993 (be careful to use the Gregorian leap rule if you want to calculate this manually).
As a long-time (since 2007) TGM player, my opinion on TGM4:
- At launch there were some severe issues that denotes a rushed release and lack of QA. The most glaring of which being the inability to rebind keyboard controls (a patch is underway for this Friday). It's quite paradoxical since it's a game that was originally announced in 2009 (and has been cancelled 2 times; it's a whole saga that would be widely out of scope of this HN comment). In the other hand, it is a game that's technically rooted in 2009 (a DirectX 9 game that originally targeted a Windows-based arcade system like Sega Ringwide; TGM3 itself being released on Taito Type-X which is already a Windows machine masquerading as an arcade machine with arcade controllers bolted on).
- On the other hand, the dev team has been super reactive and the lead producer/director/whatever is the appropriate title is in Japanese regularly communicate with the community. And we know first-hand that one of the main dev is also a legendary player (Jin8; the first player who obtained the Gm grade in TGM3, a feat that only 20 people or so in the world has replicated) that has the game in his heart.
- Gameplay-wise, it is a much more accessible game, due to having to implement one part of the Tetris Guideline gameplay element (the lock delay behavior switched from Step Reset to Move Reset; the details and consequence of which I don't have time right now to explain). Detractor would say that it's another pollution by The Tetris Company, but I think this is a conscious choice and makes the game overall better (all of the ill effect of move reset being counterbalanced by the rest of the rotation system, and of course the insane speed). The overall difficulty is lower and hence more accessible, but some of the endgame challenges are devious (but that's through the incursion of gimmicks instead of simply the game system being what it is). It has not the austere elegance of TGM1, the rigorous beauty of TGM2 or the manic challenge of TGM3, but it has still all the heart of TGM in my opinion.
- However I do find the meta-game lacking because of the removal of many of "grades" (in the older games, the game judge you and give you a grade to either your game or your account; think of it like martial arts belt). There are still acknowledgment of finishing a game (
"you are {this or that mode} Master!"), but this is very, very difficult (and very, very rewarding), but there's a lack of intermediate rewards for experienced but not expert players. Allegedly this is a TTC decision, and I find the game worse for it.
- Overall it's still a solid game (and being in 2025 and this being not an arcade game, we can have patches and the dev seems willing and motivated to add fixes and new features in the future), and in my heart one of the best Tetris out there. Tetris Effect has a way better eye-candy (it is a Mizuguchi game after all), but if you're willing to play with "TGM" rules instead of Tetris Guideline rules, it's mechanically incredibly rewarding.
In a similar vein, there is Wikisource.[0] Wikisource has the advantage of allowing for extensive formatting to closely match the source works due to its wiki-based format, but doesn't have quite as robust processes. Its flexibility is unparalleled though -- it covers virtually any form of scanned print work and even some old movies, and contributors can focus on whatever niches they're interested in if they want.
On Wikisource in particular, it's fairly easy to make useful edits through validating proofread pages or proofreading simple pages (both of which can be easily found in the Monthly Challenge).