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  • flyingpants1 - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link

    A departure from the normal tech news, indeed.
  • xaml - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link

    One that wasn't worth it. What would have been worth it, for example, would have been an article about a travel to a fabrication plant or conditions in the manufacturing industry.
  • RagnarKon - Sunday, March 2, 2014 - link

    Was completely worth it. An interesting social experiment that combines technology, video games, and people in an almost completely uncontrolled way.

    If someone asked me at the start of all of this, I would have thought it wasn't even possible to beat the game until public interest was lost. Just too many people out there with a desire to cause havoc. But beating it in 16 days? I'm surprised.
  • aegisofrime - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link

    Praise Helix!
  • ydeer - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link

    Next up, twitch reviews the 2013 Haswell rMBP.
    Let’s make it happen.
  • bj_murphy - Sunday, March 2, 2014 - link

    Haha, that made me chuckle sir/madam. I'm sure twitch would do a "fine job" reviewing the Haswell rMBP ;)
  • HyperText - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link

    Anarchy!
  • willis936 - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link

    Interestingly the most destruction took place during democracy mode.

    I still would have liked to see missingno captured.
  • tipoo - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link

    This really proves that so many people working together can do anything.
    Many times slower than one person would have been at it, but lets not ruin the moment.

    I loved the "red hearing voices/insanity" plot line some of them wrote up for it. This final comic hit me in the feels surprisingly hard.

    http://i.imgur.com/Tnlj9hf.png
  • tipoo - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link

    Meanwhile, in another region, another boy starts to hear a voice...
    http://i.imgur.com/V8ZSlkO.png?1
  • inighthawki - Sunday, March 2, 2014 - link

    I completely disagree. this experiment, at best, showed that pokemon can be beaten by seemingly random input with the occasional requirement of democracy to handle the cases where it can't.

    With the sheer number of people providing input, the bias/intentions of the users, and the lag during the stream, the input into the game is statistically random. It shows absolutely nothing for collaborative effort.
  • mkozakewich - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link

    Not even. The Random-Number-Generator version didn't even get to the first town after a few months. There was another version with some bias introduced in order to guide it toward its goals, but even then they needed someone to take over for a few spots.

    The kind of randomness from this system is like the randomness of growing slime moulds or something. They've got a direction they're going, and they can make it there in very little time. The biggest problem was the 20-second lag, which caused most commands to overshoot. If every command was instant, we'd actually have an interestingly-high accuracy. I was looking out for trolls when we were in democracy mode, but I saw exactly what I'd expect from a bunch of unintelligent but well-meaning players.

    The lag was always the biggest issue with control, because the actions people inputted would only be executed 20-30 seconds later, and so they'd overshoot; and when they tried to correct they'd correct too far back. They didn't learn very well, either, and it remains a problem even as we play through the second generation.

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