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Man Spends 2,200 Hours Defeating Bejeweled 2
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."
Ah well, 2,147,483,647 points ought to be enough for anyone.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
THE reason to upgrade to x64
(Also, I thought my 5 days continuous freelancer game at university was extreme)
Lately, I really wonder about the passage of time. Back in the day it seemed like devoting months to a game wasn't a big deal.
Now, I barely have enough time to accomplish all the things that are mandatory. 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.
So, who wants to bet that most of the time he spent playing Bejeweled he was also billing someone for contract work?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
In the article the author raises an interesting point:
"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 the Internet."
Here's the rub: you (me, everyone) made fun of him for what, a few minutes? But he played a game for 2,205 hours to be "the best". He wasn't saving lives, he wasn't improving mankind, he wasn't doing this to make money (like a Starcraft player might), he simply sat on a chair and played for 2,205 hours, and he did that in just 3 years, which averages out to be 2 hours a day every day. That's a lot of wasted time within a short time frame, and he doesn't even have a train village to show for it like a model train builder might. I'm sure there's WoW players who might average out to be the same, but no one's telling anyone about it, and there's a lot of social interaction in WoW as anyone who watches The Guild knows.
Although maybe I shouldn't talk: how many hours does the average American watch TV a day? Although they wouldn't lock someone up for watching TV for 2 hrs a day, 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.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
That's about two hours per day, for three years straight.
Obligatory.
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.
but what is his score on bejeweled blitz? This equates out to 16225.67 points per minute. You don't even get a badge for that.
Such as the guy who beat World of Warcraft!
He could have been watching porn!
Who is Tess Taylor and why is she naked with a bong? :p
...I wonder what happened to my wife?
One of the reason I don't want to start this game is I would be bored after ~30 minutes, and will started to code a bot to play for me.
captcha: harmless
I, for one, don't consider time playing video games as "wasted." If it made this guy happy, why does it matter so long as he isn't killing and eating your goats or something?
He's lucky he finally beat it. I've spent 3,264 hours on World of Warcraft, and I still haven't beaten it.
The guy spent roughly 5 minutes a day on overage. That sounds to me like he wasn't wasting anymore time than the rest of us do. If the guy can focus on a goal while doing what most people would do while taking breaks, then kudos to him!
----
Space monster need space Nom.. Nom..
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.
I spent 6600 hours playing runescape and I am not even ranked in the top 2000 players
Could they just put out a fix that uses an unsigned int and double his playtime? :)
today is spelling optional day.
WHY is his monitor at ceiling level about six feet from his head while he plays? I need a chiropractor and a new eyeglasses prescription just LOOKING at his setup...
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?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?
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 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.
Still, I'd like to know why any one would spend so much of their time playing a game? Like so many of our leisure activities, gaming produces nothing beyond some sort of satisfaction for the player, but 2,200 hours (91.66 days), seems a bit excessive. Personally I think this sort of thing borders (just being polite), on obsession or addiction. Get some help, man!
Like the inimitable Groucho Marx, I would never join a club that would have me as a member.
I want to point and laugh at him and yeah I still think he's done something worse than I have but still I have played virtually every Pokemon game and completed most of them even giving up socialising with friends for the latest Heartgold version and I've turned 33 this year. So really I shouldn't point and laugh at him.
Why did they use a signed value for the score?
They could have kept him going for another couple of years if they just used the appropriate damn type.
Oh that's nothing. I spent more time than that changing my newborn's diapers and/or clothes. Just today.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Sounds like a wedding - congratulations or condolences, one for the bride, the second for the groom.
So my brother Dave works at PopCap. I'll have to pick his brain on this some time. :-D
-- haaz.
as a lovely parting gift, he gets his virginity back.
Who is McAffee? I have heard of McAfee though. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
only on slashdot.
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)?
Ask me about repetitive DNA
N/T
Seems like Hubble will be the last space telescope to operate in the visible range. One would guess theres only so much information that can be gleaned from there and further efforts will focus on the IR and X-Ray range and beyond. Still,a loss of no worries on a loss of pretty pictures as the Spitzer (also in the IR range) shows us.
Thiscould be the successor to even the James Webb.
The only winning move is not to play.
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 instead!. What a bunch of idiots wasting his time. Probably nerds. And Slashdot editors hate nerds.
-Woof woof woof!
When I play computer games I often (but not always) choose games that allow me to use them as a kind of meditation ("match 3" types of games like Bejeweled fit into this category) and/or "relaxation by super-focus" (Tetris fits into this category). Puzzles like Nonograms, Sudoku, Loops, etc. function as both and in addition gives me somewhat novel (compared to the rest of my day) kinds of problem-solving situations (sometimes puzzles backfire if they become too easy or too hard and one ends up doing hard thinking --possibly concerning unrelated issues one wants to ignore or let simmer-- instead of relaxing).
Social inputs? Looking at and experiencing societies (both locally and elsewhere) I usually do not want "random"/worthless/unuseful social inputs of the kind that can be had from watching TV (48% lame debauchery 48% stale laughs) and most movies or anything from the abyss of the worldwide political and ideological blame game with its huge noise to signal ratio where just about everyone seem to think their own noise is a valid and interesting signal in their own favor. Why should I add to that? :)
Anyone wanting social inputs better walk out the front door instead.
Never played WoW so can't comment much on that part but I would assume it soundly beats TV (why else would people get seriously addicted? Never heard of anyone getting addicted in that kind of manner to watching TV).
By the way how can one not meditate/deeply relax when playing click-feasts and grind-feasts like for example Diablo II? The high score is only a digital version of a prayer bead used for meditation.
Perhaps the software was originally written in Java, which subscribes to the philosophy that "We don't need no stinkin' unsigned numbers!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.