A quick Google search suggests that the limiting factor in Ms. Pacmac top high scores is luck. Fruits that give a varying number of points show up in each stage. There are a finite number of them and it's pure luck whether you get one worth a high number of points. While getting to the Kill screen (essentially the end of the game) takes skill, it's well within human ability. Doing it enough times so the stars align and you get 1000000+ points is not as easy. RNG manipulation might be possible but it seems like someone would have mentioned it if it was viable to be performed by human.
This is for the arcade version which is the version the 933580 human world record was made on. I don't know if the Atari 2600 version has any important differences but if it does the initial comparison between scores was invalid to begin with.
The Pokemon TV Show is still around today. Since the airing of that particular episode, there have been stricter policies on flashing images that are similar to the ones that caused the problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Senshi_Porygon#Aftermath
The 36 people mentioned in the article are those who have qualified for the World Championship by ranking highly at the US National Championship. It doesn't even include people who qualified through other means or from other countries. The US TCG Nationals tournament (which allows all players who live in the US) had 1507 participants across 3 different age divisions. The Video Game portion is smaller right now. The US Nationals only had around 300 players in the top age bracket. I'm not sure about the lower are brackets but they probably had around 300 players for a total of 600 video games players at the tournament.
Slashdot Mirror
A quick Google search suggests that the limiting factor in Ms. Pacmac top high scores is luck. Fruits that give a varying number of points show up in each stage. There are a finite number of them and it's pure luck whether you get one worth a high number of points. While getting to the Kill screen (essentially the end of the game) takes skill, it's well within human ability. Doing it enough times so the stars align and you get 1000000+ points is not as easy. RNG manipulation might be possible but it seems like someone would have mentioned it if it was viable to be performed by human. This is for the arcade version which is the version the 933580 human world record was made on. I don't know if the Atari 2600 version has any important differences but if it does the initial comparison between scores was invalid to begin with.
The Pokemon TV Show is still around today. Since the airing of that particular episode, there have been stricter policies on flashing images that are similar to the ones that caused the problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Senshi_Porygon#Aftermath
The 36 people mentioned in the article are those who have qualified for the World Championship by ranking highly at the US National Championship. It doesn't even include people who qualified through other means or from other countries. The US TCG Nationals tournament (which allows all players who live in the US) had 1507 participants across 3 different age divisions. The Video Game portion is smaller right now. The US Nationals only had around 300 players in the top age bracket. I'm not sure about the lower are brackets but they probably had around 300 players for a total of 600 video games players at the tournament.