13-Year Old Becomes First Human To Beat Tetris On NES

Posted on 03/01/2024 by Jonathan Berisford

13-year-old gaming streamer Blue Scuti has become the first human to beat the classic Tetris game on the Nintendo Entertainment System, almost 35 years after its release. Previously, the game had only been beaten by artificial intelligence. Blue achieved the feat during a semi-final round of the Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC) and set three world records in the process: the highest overall score (6,850,560), the highest level achieved (Level 157), and the most total number of lines (1,511). Wow!

The game is “beat” when it crashes, and the screen freezes. For the first two decades of the game’s existence, it was believed that progress past level 29 was impossible because the pieces are falling so fast that holding left or right will not move a piece all the way to one side or the other before it reaches the bottom. That led gamers to start getting creative with how they used their controllers.

According to Polygon, Blue’s strategy “was a culmination of the technique that younger players have been developing in recent years. These newer strategies, like ‘hypertapping’ and later ‘rolling,’ emerged in 2016 and 2020 respectively, allowing players to operate the NES controller even faster than the buttons by tapping the underside of the controller.” I’ve seen players doing that in videos and wondered what was happening! That explains it. Me? I’m lucky to hit the right button at all, let alone at lightning speed.

[via BoingBoing and Polygon]

1,499 Drones Recreate Gigantic Nutcracker Ballet, Set World Records

Posted on 28/12/2023 by Jonathan Berisford

Orchestrated by drone show performance company Sky Elements, a recent recreation of characters from The Nutcracker ballet successfully set two new Guinness World Records. The show used 1,499 choreographed drones flying above the Birdville Fine Arts and Athletic Complex in North Richland Hills, Texas, to achieve the feat, and it must have been a sight to behold in real life. At least there’s a video for those of us who live behind computer screens.

The first record was for the largest aerial display of a fictional character using drones, awarded for a giant Nutcracker stretching 700 feet into the night sky. The second was for the largest aerial image formed by drones, for an absolutely massive picture of a Christmas tree in front of a window with snow falling behind it. Maybe it’s true what they say after all: everything IS bigger in Texas.

Will the records get beaten in the coming year? Almost certainly. As a matter of fact, if I had an army of drones, I would beat them myself. But I don’t even have a single drone, so their records are probably safe from me, provided 2,000 drones don’t fall off the back of a truck in front of my house.

[via TechEBlog]

Mark Rober Builds World’s Longest Hot Wheels Track

Posted on 06/12/2022 by hite

Because records were made to be broken, Mark Rober recently constructed the world’s longest Hot Wheels track in his new CrunchLabs warehouse. The track measures over a half-mile long and utilizes a series of switchbacks and boosters to achieve the record-setting length in a warehouse that isn’t anywhere close to a half-mile long. Me? I would have gone with a long straight track down a steep hill.

How much does a half-mile of Hot Wheels track cost? No clue, but I’d definitely buy the off-brand stuff to save on construction costs. Kind of like when my wife and I had our house built, and I opted for no windows. Is it day or night right now? Beats me, but I’m tired regardless.

Mark filmed the Hot Wheels action with some cool drone flying, which really adds an element of excitement that the otherwise boring track was missing. I mean, not even a single jump or loop-the-loop?! For shame, Mark. For shame.

[via The Awesomer]

Cassie bipedal robot sets Guinness World Record for 100 meters sprint

Posted on 04/10/2022 by Gaurav Sood

Boston Dynamics Spot robot might have got us all sold with his agile moves and intelligent dexterity, but the quadruped has got new competition in town, as far as running speed goes.

Meet Cassie, the bipedal robot invented by the Oregon State University College of Engineering and produced by the OSU spinoff Agility Robotics. More than just a mechanical AI-powered machine on two hind legs, this robot now holds the crown for being the fastest 100 meters bipedal robot out there.

Designer: Agility Robotics and Oregon State University College of Engineering

Apparently, Agility Robotics is co-founded by associate professor of mechanical engineering and College of Engineering Dean’s Professor, Johnathan Hurst, Oregon State graduate Mikhail Jones and Hurst’s graduate school classmate Damion Shelton. The idea is to develop a fleet of robots capable of delivering shipments 24×7 without ever catching a breath. Cassie is their first adventure down this lane, and it has bagged the Guinness World Record for the fastest 100 meters by a bipedal robot in 24.73 seconds, to start off on a good note.

While the robot still has a long way to go before it is in contention for beating Usain Bolt’s 9.58 seconds sprint record that’s stayed unbeaten since 2009, things are looking good for now. Compared to the human sprinters, Cassie runs on ostrich-like legs as the bent knees provide cushioning spring action for sprinting forward. Interestingly, the robot doesn’t have any vision system or external sensors and relies on precise programming for simulated runs. It also has the laurels for completing a 5 km run in around 53 minutes on a single battery charge.

For nerdy stats, Cassie trained the equivalent of a full year (compressed into a week’s time) in a simulated environment to go through varied experiences using a computing technique called parallelization. The result, is a running behavior similar to human biomechanics. Once the running bit was sorted, the challenge was to get the robot to start from a free-standing position and return to a free-standing position without toppling. The team sorted this out with deep collaboration between the “mechanical hardware design and advanced artificial intelligence for the control of that hardware.”

It took Hurst and his fellow developers almost 16 months to develop Cassie with a $1 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. The renowned agency has been actively contributing to such leading innovations of the future – especially legged robots.

The post Cassie bipedal robot sets Guinness World Record for 100 meters sprint first appeared on Yanko Design.

Team Builds 1.4 Million Lumen “World’s Brightest” Flashlight

Posted on 07/12/2020 by hite

How bright is your flashlight? I only have the one on my phone because I’m completely unprepared for any sort of emergency situation. Well, presumably with the belief that it should be daylight all the time, the team over at Hacksmith Industries took it upon themselves to build a giant, 1,414,224 lumen flashlight. I can already imagine myself staring at it until I go blind.

The flashlight is illuminated via an array of fifty circuit boards, each with six individual LEDs, for a total of 300 lights, all magnified by a giant Fresnel lens. And, after barely surviving 2020, I think it makes the perfect flashlight for searching for all the damns I have left to give.

Holy smokes, that thing is bright. Clearly, the only thing left to do is tape a bat-signal to the lens and see if I can’t trick Batman and Robin into showing up at my next birthday party. I hope they like Funfetti cake.

Watch a Porsche Taycan break the Guinness World Record for an EV drift

Posted on 24/11/2020 by Engadget

If you’ve ever kicked out the tail of your car, you’re aware of the razor-thin line between a clean drift and a wild spin. Now, imagine holding that knife edge for 55 minutes over a marathon distance of 26.2 miles. That’s exactly what Porsche driving...

Bugatti’s record-breaking speed run required special wheels and nerves of steel

Posted on 09/10/2019 by Engadget RSS Feed

Speed kills. That had to be on the minds of Bugatti and Michelin engineers (and driver Andy Wallace), when together they pushed a modified Chiron to 304.77 miles an hour. As you would expect, driving a production car that fast involves more than jus...

Wisconsin firms hope to make more of the radioactive isotope MRIs need

Posted on 02/10/2019 by Engadget RSS Feed

In the medical world, MRIs have become fairly commonplace. But imaging diagnostics like MRIs and heart stress tests depend on molybdenum-99, or Mo-99, a radioactive isotope that decays into the diagnostic imaging agent technetium 99m, or Tc-99m. The...

French hoverboard pilot will retry jet-powered flight to England

Posted on 31/07/2019 by Engadget RSS Feed

Inventor of the jet-powered Flyboard Air, Franky Zapata, had his dream of becoming the first person to cross the English Channel by hoverboard dashed last week, after he misjudged the landing for a refuelling stop. But he remains undeterred in his qu...

Watch the World’s Longest Domino Line Fall

Posted on 11/04/2017 by Shane McGlaun

Growing up, I spent some time with at my grandfather’s house during the summer. There were no toys, only the stuff he liked to do. That meant cards, dominos, and copious amounts of beer. That meant while he was sitting under the tree out back getting snockered, I was setting up lines of dominoes to topple. My uncle was a bit of an a-hole, and would often come by and shake the table just as I was finishing up my last bit of domino line.

Domino fanatic Lily Hevesh recently teamed up with some pals to set an unofficial world record for toppling the longest domino line ever. There have been displays with many more dominoes, but none recorded where they were all in one continuous line. The line had 15,524 dominoes and took the guys two days to set up, and about five minutes to knock over:

I can only imagine if my uncle were around the task would have been more tedious. Fortunately, for Lily and company, they didn’t have to deal with that.

[via Laughing Squid]

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