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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 1962
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 20/02/2001
Subject: Re: Highest Theoretical Score
> I wonder what the highest theoretical scoreon
> Manic Miner is for a single round of the
20
> levels.
An algorithm to compute the
highest theoretical score for a Manic Miner game would be
extremely complicated. It would have to take into
account:
(1) You get 100 points for each item, but it's not as
simple as 100 times the number of items in each room
because of anomalies such as "The Sixteenth Cavern" and
"The Students Union" (where the portal is already
flashing and the items are neither necessary nor possible
to collect).
(2) You are awarded points upon
completion of each level based on the amount of air left.
This entails having to compute the shortest possible
route through each room, which reduces to the problem
of whether a room is possible to complete at all,
plus an optimality constraint. Even the problem of
whether a room is possible to complete is extremely
difficult - I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be
NP-complete or worse! (I believe that this problem is
decidable but computationally intractable).
(3) You
get bonus points for bringing about the downfall of
the Kong Beasts, so the room-completability algorithm
would have to be extended to decide whether this is
possible and extend the shortest route.
(4) The
items reappear when you lose a life, so you can keep
collecting all the items, getting killed, and collecting
them again for more points.
Philip Bee proposed
a scoreboard for the MM/JSW community for us to
record our best performances. For JSW, we can obviously
just record the time we completed the game, but for MM
the score system is flawed by Point (4) above. We
would either have to agree to play with finite lives,
or simply use a stopwatch instead (on a real
Spectrum only, since emulators run at different
speeds).
--
Andrew
Broad
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/ target=new>http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/>
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/ target=new>http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/>
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/willy/ target=new>http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/willy/>
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