From besting Tetris AI to epic speedruns–inside gaming’s most thrilling feats
Willis Gibson, a 13-year-old from Oklahoma, achieved a remarkable feat by becoming the first human to conquer the original Nintendo version of Tetris.
He dedicated his special win to his father, who passed away in December 2023.
Gibson defeated the game by conquering level after level until he reached the "kill screen," the point where the Tetris artificial intelligence stops play due to exhaustion, as its designers never programmed it to advance further.
Prior to Gibson, the only entity to overcome the game's AI was another AI
Gibson's victory over Tetris serves as a powerful reminder that, contrary to stereotypes, many gamers are not lazy or mindless.
In fact, the world's top players often showcase incredible achievements, ranging from the heroic to the inexplicably bizarre.
One popular gaming subculture is "speedrunning," where players meticulously optimize routes and exploit glitches to complete games in minutes that would normally take hours. This includes tightly constrained, run-and-gun action games like Cuphead and sprawling role-playing epics like Baldur's Gate 3
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In top-level speedrunning competitions, players aim to match the time of a "tool-assisted speed run" (TAS), where emulators are used to choreograph a theoretically perfect playthrough, advancing the game frame by frame to determine the fastest possible time.
Success in speedrunning requires punishing precision, flawless execution, and years of training.
ANSWER OF FIRST QUESTION : 14257896312544
A Twitch streamer known as Niftski currently holds the record for coming closest to achieving android-like perfection. His 4-minute, 54.631-second world-record speedrun of Super Mario Bros., achieved in September 2023, is just 0.35 seconds away from a flawless TAS.
Watching Niftski's famous run is a dissonant experience. The retro, 8-bit Mario effortlessly jumps over goombas and koopa troopas with the iconic "boink" sound. Meanwhile, Niftski pants as anxiety builds, with his heart rate, tracked on screen during the livestream, peaking at 188 beats per minute.
As Mario bounces over the final big turtle at the finish line – "boink" – Niftski erupts into screams of shock, repeated cries of "Oh my God!" and eventually sobs from exhaustion and joy.
Minecraft, the revolutionary video game that ranks as the second-best-selling title in history with over 300 million copies sold (second only to Tetris with 520 million units), has earned a place in the list of remarkable gaming achievements.
Minecraft is a sandbox game that allows gamers to create and explore their virtual worlds, limited only by their imagination and a few simple tools and resources.
One notable achievement in Minecraft involves riding a pig, with the Guinness Book of World Records noting the farthest distance at 414 miles.
Other accomplishments include collecting sunflowers (with a record of 89 in one minute) and digging a tunnel (with the current record standing at 100,001 blocks long).
A particularly intriguing ongoing effort in Minecraft is a global collaboration to recreate the world on a 1:1 scale using Minecraft blocks, where each block represents one cubic meter.
Sandbox games like Minecraft, at their best, offer players a chance to experience the joyful and purposefully pointless play reminiscent of childhood, providing a restorative escape from the utility-driven planning that often dominates adulthood.
The article discusses several remarkable gaming achievements that challenge stereotypes about gamers, highlighting their dedication, precision, and accomplishments.
These achievements include Willis Gibson, a 13-year-old who beat the original Nintendo version of Tetris, and Niftski, a Twitch streamer who achieved a world-record speedrun of Super Mario Bros. with just 0.35 seconds shy of perfection.
The article also mentions Minecraft, a popular sandbox game where players can create and explore virtual worlds.
Notable achievements in Minecraft include riding a pig for the farthest distance and engaging in global collaborations to recreate the world on a 1:1 scale using Minecraft blocks.
Additionally, the article touches on the collaborative efforts within the Halo 3 gaming community during the "Great War."
Players organized shifts, shared strategies, and collectively contributed to the game's success, demonstrating the fundamental human desire to work together and be part of something bigger.
The author reflects on the dedication and accomplishments of gamers, emphasizing the joy of mastery and the intrinsic motivation that drives them.
The concept of "gameful design" is introduced as an alternative to gamification, prioritizing fulfilling experiences, intrinsic motivation, and the sheer joy of accomplishment
ANSWER OF SECOND QUESTION : 1456806954565
The powdery material that NASA officials unveiled on Wednesday looked like asphalt or charcoal, but was easily worth more than its weight in diamonds.
The fragments were from a world all their own—pieces of the asteroid Bennu, collected and returned to Earth for analysis by the OSIRIS-REx mission.
The samples hold chemical clues to the formation of our solar system and the origin of life-supporting water on our planet.
The clay and minerals from the 4.5 billion-year-old rock had been preserved in space’s deep freeze since the dawn of the solar system.
Last month, after a seven-year-long space mission, they parachuted to a desert in Utah, where they were whisked away by helicopter.
And now those pristine materials sit in an airtight vessel in a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where researchers like University of Arizona planetary scientist
Dante Lauretta are getting their first chance to study the sample up close
“The electron microscopes were fired up and ready” by September 27, Lauretta said in a news conference.
“And boy did we really nail it.” (Lauretta, the principal investigator, gave the mission its name, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer.)
The preliminary investigation of a tiny fraction of the sample revealed it is rich in water, carbon, and organic compounds
The Bennu sample is also flush with organic compounds, too, which glowed like tiny stars within the dark sample when exposed to a black light.
“We picked the right asteroid—and not only that, we brought back the right sample,” Glavin said. “This stuff is an astrobiologist’s dream.”
Asteroids like Bennu were most likely responsible for all of Earth’s wet features—the water in oceans, lakes, rivers, and rain probably arrived when space rocks landed on our young planet some 4 billion years ago.
Bennu has water-bearing clay with a fibrous structure, which according to Lauretta, was the key material that ferried H2O to Earth.
Under magnification, the clay has a sinuous shape.
“We call this serpentine because they look like serpents or snakes inside the sample, and they have water locked inside their crystal structure,” he said. “That is how we think water got to the Earth
ANSWER OF THIRD QUESTION : 178546632896785
