Man Spends 2,200 Hours Defeating Bejeweled 2 179
An anonymous reader writes "A California steel contractor spent 2,200 total hours over the last three years racking up a high score in Bejeweled 2. He exceeded the 2^31-1 maximum score programmed for the score display, proving that there is, in fact, an end to the game. I suppose congratulations or condolences are in order."
Signed int (Score:5, Funny)
Ah well, 2,147,483,647 points ought to be enough for anyone.
We need more people like this guy (Score:5, Funny)
Conversely, he may have a bright future as a stockboy at Walmart (or if you will, Target), which requires speed, precision, and the ability to organize matching products in rows of three, five, up to infinity. Clearly, he is a credit to the species.
Re:We need more people like this guy (Score:5, Funny)
Turns out the guy was a former Tetris champ making a little side money to pay for grad school.
Chicken or egg? (Score:4, Interesting)
Was he super good at spatial relationships and packing because he was a Tetris champ? Or was he a Tetris champ because he was a savant at spatial relationships and packing?
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Was he super good at spatial relationships and packing because he was a Tetris champ? Or was he a Tetris champ because he was a savant at spatial relationships and packing?
I think in Last Starfighter that distinction wasn't relevant. Be it nature or nurture, the high score certifies that that dude sure splows him up some aliens.
Re:We need more people like this guy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:We need more people like this guy (Score:4, Funny)
This is Slashdot. A certain degree of "semantic leniency" is called for.
P.S., You insensitive clod.
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Bad English cry baby Jesus makes.
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parsing error on "pairs of three"
That's no parsing error, that's a type checker exception!
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That's actually an often misattributed quote. From Bill Gates's wiki article:
Often attributed to Gates in 1981. Gates considered the IBM PC's 640kB program memory a significant breakthrough over 8-bit systems that were typically limited to 64kB, but he has denied making this remark. Also see the 1989 and 1993 remarks above.
I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time I keep bumping
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640K of memory is enough
-- Bill Gates, Career Opportunities in Computing — and More (1996), as cited in http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1637882&cid=32056488 [slashdot.org]
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x64 (Score:5, Funny)
THE reason to upgrade to x64
(Also, I thought my 5 days continuous freelancer game at university was extreme)
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(Also, I thought my 5 days continuous freelancer game at university was extreme)
It's really not that much when you think about it. 2200 hours divided over three years is only 2 hours a day.
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Yes, 2 hours per day does sound rather manageable. Until you step back, take in a bit of perspective, and realize that he spent about as much time as the modern worker spends with his/her children on a cheap iPhone game.
When the life energy of the members of our society is of such little value that such a huge chunk of it would be spent on such a mind bogglingly empty pursuit, one has to question the values that we as a society hold dear.
Oh wait, we're free, that's right. Who am I to ask questions like that
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So? The average american spends far more than 2 hours a day watching TV. We all waste our life in different ways.
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Re:x64 (Score:4, Insightful)
There are so many opportunities for people to do things that don't cost money (or at least in amounts that are far less than $20). I think that you've been over-consumerized.
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Dude, have you never heard of a park? Visit a library? Take a walk along a river? Volunteer someplace? Build something? Try doing a local biodiversity survey. Collect stamps, or leaves, or something!
Dude, have you ever heard of sex?
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We all waste our life in different ways.
Sorry to nitpick here, but I feel this is kind of important, even if it's just a matter of semantics.
No, we all live our lives in different ways. Unless one believes in some kind of supreme metaphysical being against all evidence, then the only purpose our lives have is one that we assign to ourselves.
I couldn't personally give a damn about Bejeleweled, or tv for that matter, and I wouldn't waste my time on them, but if somebody gains fulfilment and happiness from doing so then why should it be called a was
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Oh noes, we're free, so we don't spend every waking moment of our lives working either for the man or society or the state. Individual leisure pursuits -- how terrible.
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so you're doing what on slashdot? :P
What's that? Sorry didn't hear you the first time.
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(Also, I thought my 5 days continuous freelancer game at university was extreme)
It's really not that much when you think about it. 2200 hours divided over three years is only 2 hours a day.
Yet in those 2200 hours he could have learned two or three languages fluently, or he could have written a new application, compiler, OS, or he could have writen a book or two, or he could have learned to play a musical instrument...
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THE reason to upgrade to x64
If the developer had used an UNsigned int, the game could have been twice as long.
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But then how would you show negative scores?
Oh wait...
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Signed and unsigned integral values are stored in exactly the same way on twos complement machines. Its rather beautiful.
Your problems with mixing them is somewhere between your keyboard and your chair.
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The leading bit on signed numbers is the actual sign.
sigh... you realize that in twos complement, there isnt really a 'sign bit', right?
-1 is not the bits of 1 with a "sign bit" also set. In twos complement, the negation of a number is strictly defined as (~x) + 1
The beauty of it is that adding or subtracting integers works regardless of weather or not they are considered signed or not. They can both be signed. They can both be unsigned. One can be signed while the other not signed. In each of these cases the exact same silicon performs the addition in t
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The most significant bit is 0, so the pattern represents a non-negative (positive) value....The most significant bit is 1, so the value represented is negative...
That doesnt make it a sign bit.. you know that, right?
I call that a sign bit.
Then you use the term incorrectly, and this misuse is the direct result of someone who doesnt understand twos complement.
If you understood two's complement, you would know that the mixing signed with unsigned isnt a problem. You would in fact know that twos complement won out over ones complement precisely because the mixing of signed and unsigned values isnt a problem. In effect, two's complement is beautiful.
Not knowing what type the compiler is
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Do you even write programs? The GNU C++ compiler will give you a warning if you compare a signed variable to an unsigned variable. This should tell you that it is a bad idea if you don't believe me.
It in fact does work correctly which is why its a WARNING instead of an ERROR.
The WARNING is because the compiler knows that it is performing an implicit, UNDEFINED, cast.
The way you are talking, you seem to think that you should also be getting overflow exceptions and other shit that programmers fluent in twos complement also dont want.
FACT: only people that write incorrect (BUGGY SHIT) code have a problem with mixing signed and unsigned.
Others have already explained this to you. I have explained
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How can they be stored exactly the same, yet give different ranges of values for the same number of bytes?
The 'range' of values you are referring to are a higher abstraction than the CPU uses. The two's complement CPU see's a string of bits when adding and subtracting, not a value with lower and upper bounds.
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Best part of the article:
"In order to beat it, Little Gray killed 390,895 creatures, dealt 7,255,538,878 points of damage, completed 5,906 quests, raided 405 dungeons and hugged 11 players. We think he had sex zero times."
Upgrading to x64 would probably be darwin award worthly...
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Recompiled... recompiled... RECOMPILED!! -- (gamer dude wakes up), Oh thank God, it was just a dream.
What are the odds (Score:5, Funny)
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Union labor FTW
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So, who wants to bet that most of the time he spent playing Bejeweled he was also billing someone for contract work?
So, he was a QA engineer?
Re:What are the odds (Score:5, Funny)
So, he was a QA engineer?
Likely for McAffee.
McAffee? (Score:2)
Who is McAffee? I have heard of McAfee [mcafee.com] though. :P
Hey it could be worse! (Score:2)
Why this is sad (Score:1, Troll)
"I just made fun of Little Gray's sex life for raiding 405 WoW dungeons, but am I any better? Are any of you? Maybe we are, maybe we're not....It might not be considered a "real" accomplishment to beat Bejeweled 2. It's not like Mike Leyde is a New York fireman or a scientist making lifesaving medical breakthroughs. At the end of the day though, he's achieved more through playing Bejeweled 2 than we have through pouring derision upon him and his ilk via
Re:Why this is sad (Score:5, Insightful)
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The way it is worse is that bejeweled has a very limited repertoire of activity. This guy programmed his brain full of that limited range for 2k hours. At least with tv and wow you get a variety of social inputs.
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tv so formula there is a whole wiki full of cookie cutter parts, and wow where one get ones ability to reproduce dissed by some tween using text speak in voice chat?
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According to my Xfire Profile [xfire.com], I've spent twice as much time as this guy but playing way more than any one game.
Even so, I probably have anywhere from an additional 1,000-2,000 hours in Diablo II in the days before Xfire existed. There's very few games I could imagine playing for that long...
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It probably would have been nice if I actually linked to my profile [xfire.com] in that post. -_-
Re:Why this is sad (Score:4, Insightful)
Q: "how many hours does the average American watch TV a day? "
A: "According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day"
They should be locked up for that.
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Q: "how many hours does the average American watch TV a day? "
A: "According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day"
They should be locked up for that.
if we locked them up, then what would we do to the criminals?
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Make them watch tv, that will teach them.
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Q: "how many hours does the average American watch TV a day? "
A: "According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day"
They should be locked up for that.
The difference is I can vaccume and do dishes while watching tv, try vaccuming and playing Halflife at the same time. Your cats will hate you 4evah.
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My cats hate me when I'm vacuuming akshually.
Re:Why this is sad (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, so what...
Really. Yes, plenty of people watch 2 hours of TV a day. Frankly, that's not all that excessive. Figure one 1-hour newscast and one 1-hour length drama/show. Does that put it more in perspective?
I'm not a gamer, so personally, I wouldn't spend 2 hours, let alone 2 minutes, playing a computer game, but the guy hasn't caused anyone any harm, so who cares, really?
It's not sad, it's just the way he chooses to spend his free time. Just as I might choose to spend my free time trying to learn another language - something that many other people would find boring and/or a waste of time.
Re:Why this is sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Figure 40-minute newscast, 40-minute drama/show, 40 minutes advertising
FTFY
(Your point still stands. I agree with you.)
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one can tell newscasts and dramas apart these days?
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Yeah, most dramas don't have the same kind of foul language [youtube.com] that newscasts have.
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Yeah, and the script writing is typically a bit better, especially in the "believability" department.
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From what I've seen of what the networks call "news" and "drama" lately, much of it isn't any less mind numbing than American Idol.
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I think this guy has a hobby he enjoys. It's one where no one else is being harmed, unless his playing has damaged his relationships with friends and family. No worse than someone who watches any kind of TV program or reads books two hours a day. IMO, no one has a beef long as this guy obeys the law, pays his taxes, etc. There are people all over the world who indulge in some kind of pastime for themselves, and even if no one else ever benefits from it, in the end all that matters is it made their lives mor
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People seem to think doing anything for longer than $VAGUE_TIME per day is 'crazy' or stupid. You'll never get an 'appropriate' time out of them, though.
2 hours is nothing. As stated before, the average TV time for Americans is 4 hours a day. Or to put it this way:
Let's say the guy works 9am to 5pm.
He gets up at 7pm, to catch the morning news and get ready for work. He plays the game @ 8AM for 15 minutes, leaves at 8:15 for work. Total time in game: 15 minutes.
He gets home from work @ 5:30. He plays the gam
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but if they did something crazy like, throw rocks at a tree for 2 hours, everyday, for 3 yrs, someone might notice. I think this guy needs professional help.
Throwing rocks at a tree is crazy? Talking to a tree and hearing a response is crazy. Throwing rocks at it might just be a new sport.
Why is it you seem to think something you don't understand is crazy? I don't understand anyone that watches their local news on TV every night. The sensationalist simplistic nonsense that comes out of it makes me want to t
I talk to trees. (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you for sticking up for people like me who talk to trees. I should caveat that I USED talk to trees until some of the trees started calling me crazy and laughing at me behind my back. Now I am just kind of sad.
+1, Insightful (Score:3, Funny)
only on slashdot.
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I throw pieces of rubber at metal poles for two hours at a time sometimes. Two hours is about right for 27 holes of disc golf.
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I've occasionally been known to throw parabolic pieces of metal at a stick in the ground, so I know where you're coming from.
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See, what makes him really cool is that he was playing WoW *at the same time* - 2-boxing, as it were.
And watching TV.
So this guy was getting 6 hours (average) of amusement crammed into 2 hours/day. I'm pretty sure he spent his other free time saving baby seals.
NOW what do you have to say?
There's always someone with less of a life (Score:2)
Such as the guy who beat World of Warcraft! [joystiq.com]
Why criticize? (Score:5, Insightful)
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OMG. For a moment there I thought I read "goatse."
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OMG. For a moment there I thought I read "goatse."
Concerned Onlooker is concerned. Also perhaps having a moment of Freudian Slippingness?
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Signed int? (Score:2)
Here's what I don't understand... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would you use a signed integer for a value like this? I mean, you're never going to have a negative score, and it's not like there's a performance benefit to using a signed integer instead of an unsigned integer. It would take up the same 32 bits of memory. Sure, a score of two billion should be enough and four billion is overkill, but that's really not the point - if you know you're never going to need negative values, why would you reserve a bit for them?
I see this sort of thing all the time. For example, various IMAP clients (including Mozilla Thunderbird and Apple Mail) use a signed integer for the message UID, which breaks horribly in the unlikely event that you happen to have a message in your mailbox with a UID above 2^31. (Unlikely, unless your IMAP server stores the UID within the message itself as an X-UID header, and your SMTP server doesn't strip X-UID headers from incoming messages, allowing spammers to cause all sorts of interesting problems.)
Is it really that much easier to use signed integers? Or are people just idiots?
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``Why would you use a signed integer for a value like this?''
Probably because you would be programming in a language that makes it easier to use signed integers than, say, a type that could actually represent arbitrarily large values, as long as there were enough bits of memory available. Had the program been written in, say, Common Lisp, Ruby, or Python, using such an unconstrained numeric would actually have been the easiest thing to do.
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See also: Google coding style guide
Because of libraries and external dependencies (Score:5, Informative)
An honest, practical answer:
Because most people who develop software link to other libraries, and many of those libraries don't have overloaded functions that take unsigned ints as parameters.
For example, C#'s String.Substring function [microsoft.com] takes Int32s as parameters. So if you're using an UInt32 called x to hold some kind of index that you want to use in that function, you have to 1) check to see if x is less than zero (or better yet, less than UInt32.MinValue), and if so, throw an exception, then 2) cast x to an Int32, which takes a miniscule amount of time and resources.
It's much easier just to define x as an Int32, even if you never intend for it to be negative.
In the case of Bejewelled, I can only guess as to what dependencies might exist. Maybe the graphics routine to display the score on the screen is some kind of DisplayNumber(Int32 number,...) function that is generic enough so that they can write the function to display any number, positive or negative, and not have to build and maintain (and risk breaking when the code is updated) yet another function to do the same thing with uints because some weird bizarre edge cases exist where people use numbers > 2^31 but for whatever reason can't just use an Int64 instead.
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It's one of the weaknesses of the language that you often hear people griping about, but I guess I can sort of see the logic.
The difference between signed and unsigned originated when memories were a lot smaller and CPUs slower. (Hey, I wrote assembly for the 8080, which lacked even a 16-bit multiply.) A single extra bit made a noticeable difference.
Today... hey, you think you're gonna need to count more than 2 billion? Fine, use an extra 4 bytes.
For that rare set of circumstances where you need more than 2 billion, but definitely less than 4 billion, and your loops are so tight that the extra delay in the pipelining makes a n
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Why is that rare?
When we do mediation in Java we don't have proper floating point available, so calculations are done in 1000 of a cent, when you already spent 5 digits to get to a dollar, the 2 billion mark isn't that far away.
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Right, but the 4 billion mark isn't that much further away, just a factor of two. The conditions under which you'd need precisely 32 bits, without any risk of going over into 33, are relatively narrow.
My guess... (Score:2)
Sad but I appreciate it (Score:2)
The Topper (Score:2, Funny)
Oh that's nothing. I spent more time than that changing my newborn's diapers and/or clothes. Just today.
The Killjoy Way (Score:2)
Why not just use a memory modification tool and set the score to something high (e.g. a few less than milestone scores like 2^31-1)?
Strange game, Professor Falken (Score:2)
The only winning move is not to play.
Condolences to you, editor. (Score:2)
Writting and publishing articles for free on a website? puff... I suppose congratulations or condolences are in order.... that I extend to all these people that climb mountains. And.. oh... to all these people that explored the world. Poor Columbus, soo sad man. Also, all the scientist, advancing our knogment of how the world work for not other reason than "just because".
Inventors, explorer, editors, people that beat things.. .IDIOTS!.. could be having sex, or doing something that give direct money instea
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Three years = 1,095 days.
2,200 hours = 132,000 minutes
132,000 minutes / 1,095 days = 120 minutes / day
Honestly, where the hell did you come up with 5?
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D'oh!
It is 5 minutes every hour on avg. not in a day.
The keys are right next to each other..
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D'oh!
It is 5 minutes every hour on avg. not in a day.
The keys are right next to each other..
I am SO behind the times... I need to get one of these new keyboards with the "hour" and "day" keys!
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"My gaming life has died on the vine, and I regret to inform you how long it's been since the bathroom has been cleaned."
I'm afraid to ask how these two are related.
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That's because you spend too much time on slashdot :)
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