[HN Gopher] Mario Meets Pareto
___________________________________________________________________
Mario Meets Pareto
Author : theanonymousone
Score : 843 points
Date : 2026-08-06 11:24 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mayerowitz.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mayerowitz.io)
| a3w wrote:
| I did not understand
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096439, but I understood
| this.
| caxco93 wrote:
| I can only imagine the guy that made Mario Meets Pareto waiting
| for some Pareto related post to hit the front page before
| sharing his
| darkwater wrote:
| I remember seeing this on HN frontpage already in the past,
| and indeed here it is:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39936246
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| It turns out a lot of things are extremely accessible to a lot
| more people when you teach them as concrete, relatable
| scenarios in simple language with useful visualizations instead
| of abstract X, Y foos and bars described with an unfamiliar
| jargon term every 3rd word. We really need to do better when it
| comes to pedagogy.
| prvc wrote:
| I am the complete opposite of that. My attention wanes when
| someone fails to get to the point, instead dwelling in
| irrelevant details which are not intrinsically interesting.
| Have to muster the motivation to concentrate in such
| circumstances, and doing so is not enjoyable.
| woodrowbarlow wrote:
| is this also true when the irrelevant details _are_ (by
| coincidence) interesting (to you)? it sounds to me like GP is
| interested in mario kart and you simply aren 't, so this is a
| perfectly natural result.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| I'm not interested on Mario kart at all and still found the
| article to be interesting.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| What's the Pareto front of "get to the point" vs. "attempt to
| tell a compelling story"?
| fl4regun wrote:
| wiki is usually not great at teaching new concepts, better as a
| reference for someone who already learned something.
| dxdm wrote:
| But Wikipedia tells you in the first paragraph what it's all
| about.
|
| A "Pareto front represents the set of solutions where no
| solution outperforms any other solution in the set at every
| objective, and every solution not in the set is outperformed by
| at least one solution in the Pareto front in every objective"
| Maxatar wrote:
| Knowing a definition is not the same as understanding. I know
| this first hand from interviewing people who at the beginning
| of the interview can confidently tell me the definition of
| certain principles in statistics that I ask them about, and
| then later on in the very same interview when I present to
| them a real world scenario to analyze, they are completely
| oblivious that the very concept they explained to me so
| articulately when we started the interview is the very same
| concept needed to solve the real world scenario being
| presented to them.
|
| In general Wikipedia isn't a great way to learn new concepts;
| it's a good reference when you're already familiar with
| something and need to brush up on it.
| ShinyLeftPad wrote:
| The site is really broken on mobile.
| rokkamokka wrote:
| Works for me in Firefox on Android anyway
| fnordian_slip wrote:
| Works for me with Firefox on android and ublock origin.
| voidnullvalue wrote:
| I cannot be the only one who atrongly dislikes this bloated web
| design. I hit back after scrolling a bit
| andai wrote:
| Until recently I thought I hated sites that messed with the
| scroll out of principle, but then I found a handful of them
| that do a good job of it. This is one of them.
| kfarr wrote:
| The key here is to have a foreground layer that always
| responds to scroll and informs the background layer based
| on its position
| recursive wrote:
| This is a good job? It takes me a half dozen scroll actions
| to get each sentence of text. I'm not risking a carpal
| tunnel flare-up just to get through effectively one
| paragraph of content.
| duskdozer wrote:
| No, you're not. A lot of the web is becoming increasingly
| unusable for me because of things like this.
| ShinyLeftPad wrote:
| I did the same but not because i dislike it, because it is
| just broken, layout constantly shifting and so on.
| rtrigoso wrote:
| Also on Firefox android and working great. What's your
| browser/os?
| phoghed wrote:
| Works wonderfully on iPhone
| ShinyLeftPad wrote:
| I'm on latest one and nope it's glitchy af.
| superMayo wrote:
| Can you tell me what's going on? I tried my best to make it
| work on every device, but handling mobile is hard, and
| especially when you're messing with interactivity and 3D.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Previous discussion (2024):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39936246
| reconnecting wrote:
| Thanks! Very useful information. I will never play for Bowser
| again.
| Jepacor wrote:
| Once at a Mario Kart 8 tournament I was helping run there was a
| kid who had picked Bowser and max speed and he was struggling
| to make every turn.
|
| I switched him to the meta build and suddenly boom, he went
| from like 10th to 2nd against the AIs.
|
| It's kinda weird that you can shoot yourself in the foot so
| much when picking your kart in this game.
| latexr wrote:
| > It's kinda weird that you can shoot yourself in the foot so
| much when picking your kart in this game.
|
| Nintendo optimises for fun, not competitive play. Infamously,
| to curb the competitiveness of Super Smash Bros (SSB) Melee,
| they introduce a random tripping mechanic in the following
| SSB (Brawl). Everyone hated it so they removed it in the one
| after that.
| latexr wrote:
| It might still be the best option, depending on your play
| group. For example, if you're in a play group with a bunch of
| novices and you're destroying them, like finishing a full lap
| before the second place, choosing Bowser gives you a handicap.
| Lowers your chances of winning but increases fun for the group
| as a whole.
| elwell wrote:
| > I will never play for Bowser again.
|
| What do you mean "play for Bowser"?
| andai wrote:
| Excellent. This is some kind of 3D PowerPoint. How did he do
| that?
| Retr0id wrote:
| Looks like html+css+js+webgl
| beklein wrote:
| I guess the author used a different framework but I like this
| one: https://animejs.com/
| superMayo wrote:
| Author here. The source code is available at
| https://github.com/SuperMayo/mayerowitz.io.
|
| It's called scrollytelling. For this particular project, I
| borrowed a lot from https://mlu-explain.github.io/. For the 3D
| elements, I used Threejs and a custom vertex shader for the 3D
| plot.
| dxdm wrote:
| Is there a version I can just read as text without having to
| push every paragraph out of the way with my fingers across an
| unevenly colored background that shines through?
|
| I get that this form of presentation may be great for many
| people, but for my brain, it makes it extremely hard to
| engage with the content.
| superMayo wrote:
| I'm sorry, this is _by design_ colorful and interactive. If
| you still want to read about this topic in a less "juicy"
| way, you can can take a look at this other article:
| https://hinnefe2.github.io/python/tools/2015/09/21/mario-
| kar...
| dxdm wrote:
| Thanks a lot for the link!
|
| I appreciate your work to make this topic accessible in
| an interactive format. Somehow, in this case, it's too
| much for me.
|
| I think the ratio of information to interactivity is too
| low. It's like I have to push around a tiny keyhole to
| slowly access information. The graphs look fun, but their
| fancifulness is distracting me.
|
| I don't usually mind interactivity, but I think usually
| it is embedded in the text, instead of gating it, if that
| makes sense.
| suzukivenom wrote:
| beautiful site
| jerf wrote:
| This is a really important concept for developers.
|
| One aspect for developers that I see quite often is the assertion
| that "We can't have X without giving up more Y", most commonly
| "we can't have more security without giving up on user
| experience". With the Pareto idea in mind, we can see that that
| statement is true, _if and only if_ you are in fact on the Pareto
| frontier of security and user experience already.
|
| However, many times these confident pronouncements are being made
| when the system under question is quite evidently not on the
| Pareto frontier in the first place and indeed you can get more of
| one without giving up the other.
|
| Making it more tricky is that in business, you can _never_
| discard "money" as a dimension, so unless you're taking "money"
| as one of the dimensions in the original comparison you want to
| do, it sneaks its way in. Or, a composite time/money, or "cost to
| business", or some other similar concept, time & money aren't
| orthogonal and don't need to be treated as two separate
| dimensions in general, though you can if you want. Which puts you
| into the 3D case, and as the page says, that grows the frontier
| quite a lot, which is good in some ways and bad in others.
| Nevertheless, in my opinion it is still often the case that even
| in that space we are often making "tradeoffs" without checking
| that we're on the Pareto frontier in the first place.
| voidhorse wrote:
| Yes, the difference between coding (writing software) and
| engineering (making informed trade offs about system design) is
| effectively bound up in analyses like those supported by
| concepts like pareto efficiency.
|
| One should keep in mind though that not all problems have a
| neat solution. Many spaces have multiple efficient points that
| still need to be chosen from, and many pareto optimization
| problems actually become NP hard computationally when the
| problem is large enough.
| dzonga wrote:
| there's something equivalent in the business world - mostly
| used by businesses not run by psychopaths - where you optimize
| inside 2 triangles with the points on the triangle being cost,
| profit, & user utility/happiness.
| phonon wrote:
| Are they conjoined triangles?
| dzonga wrote:
| hope u see this :)
|
| https://imgur.com/a/wy2fLEw
| munchbunny wrote:
| Agreed with what you said, when you're only considering
| security and usability you're often not at a Pareto optimal
| state, but once you add cost into the picture you see a lot
| more cases of being on the Pareto optimal boundary, or at least
| in case where the next improvement only comes with significant
| effort (by re-platforming, for example).
| jerf wrote:
| Yes, I don't mean to imply that this is some sort of clear
| majority situation or anything. I just mean that I've
| definitely both seen on HN and participated in real life in
| some conversations in which it was taken as given that we
| _must_ give up one thing to get another when nobody had in
| fact established that we were on the Pareto frontier. Or,
| considered from a local point of view, whether the tradeoff
| really was inevitable. I have had cases where we could have
| had both, with no difficulty.
| efavdb wrote:
| I guess that makes sense. as you get to higher dimensions,
| most points sit very close to the surface. So if we're
| trading off N things and N >> 1, expect to basically always
| be at the pareto boundary.
| miki123211 wrote:
| On the other hand, we should recognize that, to put it
| plainly, not all dimensions on the frontier have the same
| level of importance.
|
| Any technological and societal progress is going to have
| negative consequences. To give just one example, completely
| curing cancer will put many doctors (and other healthcare
| professionals who aren't paid as well as doctors are) out
| of a job. It will definitely cause at least a few children
| to go hungry. It will probably cause a few suicides when
| some oncologists start to "feel useless." This does not
| mean we shouldn't cure cancer if the opportunity arises.
|
| Our society, driven by clickbait, rage and social media hot
| takes, tends to overweight the dimensions at which new
| technology makes things worse. There are many news stories
| about social-media-fueled teen suicides or AI datacenter
| water use, very few about how talking to family abroad no
| longer requires astronomical long-distance bills.
| _davide_ wrote:
| this is a silly oversimplification
| whateveracct wrote:
| "making tradeoffs" is an excuse for management to cut corners
| to get their feature faster at the cost of future developer
| pain and suffering
|
| you know how japanese oni would roll human souls into soba
| noodles? [1]
|
| that's what modern corporate software company management does
| :)
|
| [1] i learned about this from the very funny gintama funeral
| episode
| circusss wrote:
| developer pain inversely proportional to the amount of tech
| debt that exists!
| Aeroi wrote:
| wow that took alot of work. nice job
| Xirdus wrote:
| In Firefox reader mode, there's like 5 paragraphs of text. I am
| unable to digest the content on the website itself. Can someone
| confirm if the 5 paragraphs is the whole content or if I have
| large parts of it missing?
| Levitz wrote:
| The article includes interactive graphs and scrolling
| animations that explain them, as well as data.
| duskdozer wrote:
| It looks like it. There are four images that pop up and start
| animating numbers, and those aren't visible in the built in
| reader. I use Tranquility Reader which ime tends to do a bit
| better, but it still wasn't readable. Looking at the source,
| that content seems to be created only on scroll with
| javascript, so it won't be able to be read accessibly. I had to
| close it so I can't say what else is missing.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Turn off reader there are graphics along with the paragraphs.
| Reminds me of the complaints that used to be super common from
| people religiously refusing to enable javascript and
| complaining when breaking the site breaks the site.
| duskdozer wrote:
| Why do you think people refused to enable javascript?
| rtkwe wrote:
| I saw a lot of people saying various things along the lines
| of "not running strangers code on my machine" and some "you
| should serve me the site working even if JS is disabled".
| The exact reason doesn't really matter it's more that if
| you're intentionally gimping the website you don't really
| get to complain about the site not loading.
| Xirdus wrote:
| I don't refuse to enable JS. I do, however, refuse to use
| website with broken scrolling. It makes me physically sick.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Does this site do that to you?
| Xirdus wrote:
| Very much so. It's one of the worst cases (but not the
| worst, not even the worst this week) I've seen around
| here.
| rtkwe wrote:
| What's broken about the scroll? For me it acts like
| basically any other scrolling presentation design used on
| hundreds of different websites.
| Xirdus wrote:
| I guess the whole idea of "scrolling presentation design"
| is broken? I certainly wouldn't mind if it stopped being
| a thing. It feels like 90% of websites that I find
| annoying as of late are of this type.
|
| This page has some elements that scroll and some elements
| that don't scroll. And some elements that switch between
| scrolling and not scrolling. And some animations are
| controlled by scroll position, meaning they bounce back
| and forth while I try to find my bearings on the scroll
| wheel. Everything is fighting for my attention all at
| once, which prevents me from focusing on anything in
| particular. Most of all, it prevents me from focusing on
| the scrolling itself - and scrolling requires extreme
| focus here considering you never know what will happen
| and how much you need to scroll for it to happen. Is text
| going to slide in? Is a picture going to suddenly pop up?
| Is an existing picture going to transform to something
| else? Will it transform gradually as I scroll, or is it
| going to do it all suddenly in one step?
|
| In short - it breaks the UI metaphor of scrolling an
| infinite roll of paper, and that in turn breaks my brain.
| I just can't follow what's happening, there's too much
| non-scrolling action happening when I scroll. There's
| also too much empty space between paragraphs.
| rakamotog wrote:
| This was fun, thank you
| __s wrote:
| > You probably won't pick a driver sitting on the edge of the
| frontier because you want some balance between speed and
| acceleration
|
| for super mario kart speedruns go with bowser/dk:
| https://www.speedrun.com/smk/runs/zp68nr8m
|
| That seemed to hold up for Mario Kart 8 too going with Bowser at
| the edge of their pareto frontier, https://www.speedrun.com/mk8
|
| needing acceleration is a skill issue
| ChrisGreenHeur wrote:
| Adding skill is just another dimension to the calculation.
| frantathefranta wrote:
| On the other hand, if you are a casual and want to dominate 99%
| races you enter at people's homes, pick Toadette (with Mr.
| Scooty). I don't think I've lost since 2019.
| paytonjjones wrote:
| Speedruns are for playing the track solo, right?
|
| If you're playing normally (with other people and items), even
| the most skilled player can't avoid getting hit by some
| universal items and will benefit from acceleration.
|
| Hence, as the author notes, the balanced build with Peach being
| favored among competitive players.
| crtasm wrote:
| GP first link is to a speedrun in the all cups category,
| played with items and computer opponents. There's a video
| included.
|
| People do speedrun the individual tracks solo in other
| categories.
| __s wrote:
| It's a fair point that such an environment will be
| different than playing against other humans
| bspammer wrote:
| For a speedrun you don't care about 100 failed runs as long
| as you get the world record once. You're basically hoping
| to get lucky that the computer opponent won't hit you.
| Obviously you're going to pick the greediest (i.e highest
| speed) choice in that setting, that doesn't make it good in
| normal gameplay.
| drdexebtjl wrote:
| Acceleration is not very important at a high enough level
| because you can mini-turbo up to top speed when you get hit.
| _superposition_ wrote:
| Lol skill issue... Right! But that's how you choose your
| weights. If you're not a great driver you need to give more
| consideration to acceleration.
| rtkwe wrote:
| It's optimizing for different environments and opponents, the
| speed runs only have to deal with the AI not human players and
| take such crazy paths the AI isn't around to really mess with
| them so they don't have to worry about reaccelerating. In
| versus it's much less likely you'll be able to avoid all the
| other players so you need to be able to get back up to speed
| after being hit. A common strategy in the online vs mode is
| actually back running to collect better items then cashing them
| in rapidly to win.
| dmonitor wrote:
| Acceleration is pointless because of the hidden Mini Turbo stat
| kommunicate wrote:
| no, even in time trials it depends on the track. If top speed
| were the most important metric you would see the same meta
| build for every world record time trial, but that's not the
| case.
|
| Also, miniturbo is the single most important stat in the game,
| not top speed
| nightpool wrote:
| This used to be true on older patches but it's not at all how
| top players play these days. See e.g.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejt52UgnhAo for an example of
| the meta that prevailed for top-level versus play around the
| end of MK8's lifespan (Yoshi Biddybuggy Roller or Yoshi
| Teddybuggy Roller depending on your preferred drift style) or
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvrCP50Gfj4 for a breakdown of
| some of the latest time trial world records. At the beginning
| of the game's lifecycle top speed was the most important stat,
| but as more tricks were developed and the game's balance was
| adjusted, having faster and more consistent miniturbo boosts
| became much more important.
|
| (Mario Kart World, which isn't covered in this article, has a
| more standard speed vs acceleration trade off but in that game
| high-max-speed (heavy) combos have even worse problems due to
| the way the rail grind mechanic was implemented and what seems
| to be an unforeseen interaction with the coin curve see e.g.
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sPyur6BkiOs)
| nwsm wrote:
| Nice article, I'm sad to learn that I shouldn't be using Koopa.
| How are Peach and Mario not dominated on acceleration by Tanooki
| Mario and Luigi respectively?
|
| Also, wonderful visualizations, but the change between blue and
| white backgrounds is really jarring to me.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Koopa came out in offroad vs weight..without being _that_
| familiar with the game, I don 't know whether that would ever
| be important enough to care about
| mef51 wrote:
| I always pick koopa, I always win
| demibabs wrote:
| This article isn't quite accurate; acceleration is surprisingly
| unimportant in Mario Kart and not really considered a major
| factor when choosing a optimal combo. The optimal combo is solely
| decided on the basis of speed and mini-turbo. Otherwise good
| analysis.
| bix6 wrote:
| Lakitu ftw
| FailMore wrote:
| If you liked the playing card interaction at the start (I did), I
| run a random side project where you (or your coding agent) can
| build similar 3d cards:
|
| https://requirement5.com
|
| build a card here: https://requirement5.com/create (and the CLI
| instructions are there too)
|
| https://github.com/vilt9/requirement5
| DarkCrusader2 wrote:
| I noticed DaisyUI also has a component for this just a couple
| of days back - https://daisyui.com/components/hover-3d/
| FailMore wrote:
| This is the OG: https://poke-holo.simey.me/ - inspired me as
| an old pokemon collector
| phoghed wrote:
| To think I gimped myself so much by using baby Rosalina on a
| scooter with rollers
| hnmu4c5zar wrote:
| This resonates hard
| kevinwang wrote:
| Can anyone explain why Rosalina is not Pareto optimal here? It
| kind of looks like she should be.
| bspammer wrote:
| Because Donkey Kong gives more speed for exactly the same
| acceleration. I.e. you sacrifice nothing and gain something by
| switching away.
|
| EDIT: If you mean that Rosalina looks slightly higher on the
| graph, I believe that's just a visual effect to allow multiple
| characters to occupy the same square - the stats are all
| integers.
| kevinwang wrote:
| > If you mean that Rosalina looks slightly higher on the
| graph, I believe that's just a visual effect to allow
| multiple characters to occupy the same square - the stats are
| all integers.
|
| Ah, yeah. That is what I meant. Thanks!
| charv wrote:
| I would really love to be able to explore this data, e.g. what is
| the "worst" driver? Is there an inverse Pareto front?
| chriswarbo wrote:
| > Is there an inverse Pareto front?
|
| Yes, trivially. Just look at the opposite end of each metric.
| Pareto optimality doesn't know/care what each metrics means,
| since it keeps them all separate.
| paulnpace wrote:
| Mario was an elite?
| yathern wrote:
| Apologies for the self-promotion, but I learned about the Pareto
| Front from this site a while back - and applied it to Mini PCs
| with https://minipcs.zip which plots Mini PCs based on Compute vs
| Price (and other metrics) - highlighting the pareto front to find
| the optimal unit.
| xp84 wrote:
| Thanks for posting this! It's an awesome tool. Makes me want to
| buy more tiny PCs. My only feedback is many of the ebay
| listings it points to are sold out, but I assume there's a
| limit to the freshness you can get. Still though, I found
| pretty good rates of success just pasting the important parts
| of the name of the sold-out listing into search.
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| A lot of these optimization problems can benefit from using a
| genetic algorithm: https://github.com/lodenrogue/genetic-
| algorithm-js
| sendes wrote:
| Finally an important and realistic application of economic theory
| to real life!
| moomin wrote:
| Of course I, and most of the dads I know, optimise for something
| else: what's the car that will keep me competitive, but probably
| losing, to the kids?
| jedberg wrote:
| I don't. I need to keep winning until I can't to keep the boy
| in his place. He is getting closer every time. I know my day is
| soon to end, and a new house champion will reign.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Better get the trophy ready
| aselimov3 wrote:
| This was going to be my reply. Can't let them get ahead of
| you too quick.
| hamburglar wrote:
| I'm still trying to beat my dad at ping pong. He's 75.
| jedberg wrote:
| Keep at it tiger, you'll get him one day!
| SaltyBackendGuy wrote:
| Ha exactly. Can't let the kids win for free.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| My trick is to just never power slide when I need to be
| handicapped to not ruin the kids Christmas. Or tap the accel A
| button in a PWM pattern.
| sudobash1 wrote:
| I often use the wii wheel as my handicap for family, but my
| wife (new to games) is now good enough that I might need to
| switch that soon.
|
| When my oldest was first trying Mario Kart, his uncle came over
| and played against him blindfolded (and still won). It was very
| entertaining to watch.
| hn22fazjsv wrote:
| Solid advice, saving it
| Agentlien wrote:
| On a tangent, I was a bit confused by the everyday examples given
| in this article.
|
| "We're often faced with similar trade-offs. You want a meal
| that's both cheap and delicious? A job that's both well-paid,
| easy, and fulfilling?"
|
| I really don't feel like "easy" is a dimension I wish to optimize
| for in a job. It almost feels opposite to what I've actually
| optimized for - since for me a fulfilling job usually means full
| of deep technical challenges. I want a job without unnecessary
| friction, without interpersonal drama, even one that's low
| stress. But definitely not easy.
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| It sounds like you're saying "easy" and "fulfilling" cannot
| coexist, and obviously they are in tension, but a Pareto
| frontier still exists there.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Well then, you would prioritize "fulfilling" in your utility
| function. Others might make a different choice; e.g. a single
| parent who needs to save time and energy for family might
| prefer "easy" at the cost of boring drudgery
| Agentlien wrote:
| I think what I am saying is more that "easy" is too broad a
| vector to optimize along because it combines too much - both
| good and bad. I don't want a job without challenges of any
| kind.
|
| But I definitely want a job without stress, danger, or
| physical strain on my body. Perhaps I am just looking for a
| similar word which doesn't imply anything about the
| complexity of the task at hand.
| blanched wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but I wouldn't say easy is the
| opposite of challenging. As a quick example, I would surely
| find a day job of manual labor harder and significantly less
| enjoyable than a day job of software engineering challenges.
|
| (And please note that I do not mean to imply that there are no
| challenges in manual labor or that software engineering is more
| important.)
| jimbokun wrote:
| They're just hypothetical examples, not meant to apply to
| everyone.
| wiether wrote:
| > I want a job without unnecessary friction, without
| interpersonal drama, even one that's low stress.
|
| That's part of how I see an "easy" job. Where I can focus on
| working on the actual tasks at hand.
|
| Doesn't matter if the actual job is filling glasses of water or
| building rockets; as long as I can focus on it for 100% of my
| working hours, I'd see it as an "easy" job.
| elwell wrote:
| Felt like covert advertisements.
| jpfromlondon wrote:
| what you choose for the dimensions is arbitrary, they only
| chosen thusly to prove the point.
|
| I don't think I've ever seen an example of pareto that wasn't
| pseudo scientific drivel.
| ytpete wrote:
| Maybe instead of "easy" what they really meant that axis to
| convey is something more like "low stress" or "not frustrating"
| devin wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39936246 for the discussion
| 2 years ago
| yaqubroli wrote:
| So Pareto's the third brother then?
| hspeiser wrote:
| Ive been played. Me and my brother used to play this all the
| time. He would always beat me and whenever I would win it would
| be a momentous occasion. Turns out his build was directly on the
| pareto frontier and mine was not even close. Damn you brother.
| Hes totally screwed next time we play
| initramfs wrote:
| I used to play Diddy Kong Racing for the Nintento 64 a lot and
| what I learned is that the smaller carts with fast acceleration
| were good for learning how to navigate around the course and for
| battle royal, but the heavier drivers like Banjo had the highest
| top speed, and I developed better steering capabilities to time
| each curve, eventually making it sometimes the only way to win
| the race.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| Fun but still didn't tell me who the "best" player is.
| bleuarff wrote:
| There's no ultimate best player/build. When you factor in that
| each cart has different stats depending on the terrain, there's
| a "best" build for each track.
| johnisom2001 wrote:
| Dependent on your play style and which of the 3 main attributes
| you care about.
|
| Did you even read the post?
| dorfsmay wrote:
| I did not know the term but I'm thinking that the old project
| management triangle (cheap, good, fast) is a specialisation of
| that concept.
| SaltyBackendGuy wrote:
| I love how the data from top players shows that they're using a
| build on the Pareto Front, i.e. that the wisdom of crowds settles
| on a meta that is optimum. I wonder if we analyzed other games,
| if the meta were all consistently on the Pareto Front (WoW,
| Diablo, w/e). Likely so.
| drdexebtjl wrote:
| Competitive players (from Mario Kart in particular) are doing
| this type of data mining and analysis ever since the game
| releases, and sharing them in tightly knit communities.
|
| The analysis comes before the meta settles, so of course it's
| consistent :)
| valiant55 wrote:
| Probably but they could be arrived at via different means. In
| WoW for instance top players run simulated combat using third
| party tools to compare different gearing setup, often to
| determine if a new piece of gear is better than their current
| piece. This often isn't immediately obvious if the stats are
| completely different and "simming" is the easiest way to
| evaluate a piece of gear.
| kasts wrote:
| What I've found is that my favorite person is not optimal... I
| have decided that I'm going to believe that the driver is worth
| more than the sum of their choices. And when I lose I'll just
| accept it as my own failing of skill. #rosalina
| cortesoft wrote:
| There are a few things that are assumed to be true when talking
| about the Pareto frontier here, but aren't always true.
|
| One, that more of something is always better, e.g. it is always
| better to have more speed.
|
| Maybe, but what if having too much speed causes you to run off
| the track and perform worse? It could be that there is actually a
| peak in the utility of speed that declines as it increases.
|
| There could also be important relations between attributes that
| make determining a Pareto frontier impossible or at least more
| difficult. For example, some pairs of attributes work best when
| they are a specific ratio, and increasing one or the other will
| actually decrease utility unless the other is increased at the
| same time.
| Barbing wrote:
| > [is it really] always better to have more speed[?]
|
| I'm reminded of two things that in a way support your premise
| with the second example being more relevant. Both are outside
| what's being discussed exactly, more about knock-on effects
| maybe, anyway:
|
| The first is that Angry Birds found the speed of launching
| birds into structures was important for engagement: it cannot
| be too fast.
|
| The second is from a commenter somewhere who said they had or
| worked on software that took ten minutes to boot in the
| morning, which is when employees made coffee and talked and
| brainstormed. Everyone was disappointed when after refactoring,
| the software booted immediately.
| latexr wrote:
| The second story made be think of XKCD 1172.
|
| https://xkcd.com/1172/
| Barbing wrote:
| Love spacebar heating
| dfdydx wrote:
| Wouldn't that just change the shape of the pareto frontier? It
| stops at some point (when marginal utility becomes negative) -
| but this is not special, they typically stop at 0 as well.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I love when people do an amazing job carefully explaining
| something complicated in a way that makes it seem very intuitive.
| Excellent job. Way to show off those technical communication
| chops!
| giekaton wrote:
| 80/20 Rule in Mario Games - https://8020.in/mario-games
| danilocesar wrote:
| Shame it isn't Luis Pareto.
| redbell wrote:
| > You can identify all efficient drivers that, unlike Koopa, are
| never dominated on both speed and acceleration. Together, they
| form what is called the _Pareto front_ (or frontier).
|
| Coincidently, this _Pareto Front_ concept is currently on the
| front page on HN at #10
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096439) and apparently,
| it was posted before this post.
| Aachen wrote:
| (2024) according to https://www.mayerowitz.io/blog and
| https://github.com/SuperMayo/mayerowitz.io/tree/main/src/rou...
| uzerfcwn wrote:
| I did similar analysis a couple years ago for optimizing item
| builds in WoW classic. The tricky part in WoW is that there are
| 15ish item slots with hundreds of item choices for each slot, so
| the total number of builds is well over 100^15.
|
| I ended up using a divide-and-conquer style approach, where I 1)
| pruned items that weren't on the Pareto frontier individually for
| each slot, 2) took the two slots X and Y that had the least items
| after pruning and grouped them by calculating
| Z:={x+y|x[?]X,y[?]Y}, 3) pruned items that weren't on the Pareto
| frontier in Z, and 4) repeated steps 2-3 until there was only one
| group remaining, comprised of the full Pareto-optimal item
| builds.
|
| This ran in a couple of seconds, as opposed to the other
| solutions I tried that took somewhere between minutes and years.
| The downside was that including set bonuses into the model took
| extra work.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Fascinating! Do you still have any of the code or
| datasets/datasources laying around?
| uzerfcwn wrote:
| The data came from wow.tools (which has since been replaced
| by https://wago.tools) and Wowhead. I still have some code
| but it has so many ad-hoc scripts and sections that I
| commented in/out while experimenting that I'd feel
| embarrassed sharing it.
| tgtweak wrote:
| 2020: https://www.civisanalytics.com/resources/the-best-mario-
| kart...
|
| OG credit to: Henry Hinnefeld 2015:
| https://hinnefe2.github.io/python/tools/2015/09/21/mario-kar...
| Velocifyer wrote:
| This doesn't account for vehicle size (important for red shell
| wall breaking[0]) and drifting style[1].
|
| [0] A redshell wall break is when you point your vehicle near a
| wall to break a redshell without using a defense item. [1]
| Drifting style is either inward or outward. Inward drift has more
| intuitive controlls and is way better for intermidiate players,
| but pro players dislike it because is removes various difficult
| tricks.
|
| I recommend yoshi on the yoshi bike with azure rollers and the
| paper glider.
| cantalopes wrote:
| I always thought in these games; picking acceleration is a way
| for you to recover from your mistakes. If you made no mistakes
| the speed would win. So, it is always better to pick the harder
| option and have a room to improve
| hei-lima wrote:
| Holy! This is one of the best articles i ever read here. Really,
| really cool.
| alana314 wrote:
| Peach was goated in Super Mario Bros 2 as well. I always pick
| her.
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