Reach AMA

[Reincarnate]

Thoughts on Arch0wl/Nima and that whole era of competition?

[A2P]

With yourself being an intelligent person, what are your opinions on the subject of knowledge and intelligence? Is intelligence something that people are born with, or can it be learned as well?

[Reach]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

Thoughts on Arch0wl/Nima and that whole era of competition?

Arch0wl is a great guy and he's a good friend of mine now, but back in the day he was kind of a d-bag towards me in general and a narrow minded elitist when it came to simfile creation. I remember at one point he believed he had 'perfectly synced' a version of max300 and got into a big argument with me when I called out his stupidity and the offset variance between computers. Mind you, I was more antagonistic in general back then, but he seemed to have it out for me.

He was mediocre at best as a player. I played index once in awhile and I was way better than him at it anyway.

Outside of the game, fantastic guy.


As for nima, he posted a bunch of stupid scores that were impossible in his 'Omg...did insane...' thread and I never paid much attention to him after that, though we talked on MSN quite a bit. Decent guy. I think I was the only one at the time capable of understanding why those scores were BS aside from maybe a few others, but I'm not really sure what happened to nima after that since I stopped following the scene not long after TBH.

With yourself being an intelligent person, what are your opinions on the subject of knowledge and intelligence? Is intelligence something that people are born with, or can it be learned as well?

The manifestation of intellect is certainly an interaction between genes and environment. It's not really possible for it to be one or the other. It's much like the area of a field; it's a product of the width and length and you can't have the final product without both.


I believe g, or the general intelligence factor, to be the primary heritable variable when it comes to intelligence. G can most succinctly be described as a cognitive capacity for complexity and it appears to be tightly bound to working memory capacity. There is strong evidence that the g factor is highly heritable and correlated with performance in every mental task that can be performed.

Increases in g lead indirectly to increased intellectual performance across the board because of greater cognitive capacity, leading individuals with higher g to accumulate more knowledge over their lives and learn significantly faster with less tendency for error than their lesser g counterparts. This systemic effect is largely what leads to achievement discrepancies we see on a population level.


G inevitably interacts directly with environmental factors though. Especially in domains of specialized knowledge or performance, such as academia. Specialized performance on particular tasks can be increased through superior environmental conditions that allow the general factor to maximize its utility.

More specifically, G largely serves as a threshold for performance when it comes to specialized tasks. For example, one would not expect someone with an IQ of 80 to ever master quantum physics. They largely lack the cognitive ability to grasp the concepts at hand. However, once G reaches reaches a specific level at which the task can reasonable be completed and understood, performance will be largely determined by environmental factors (and personality factors, but that's a whole other basket of issues).

That's why you see IQ stratification amongst various jobs and academic fields, depending on the level of complexity. These levels are largely determined by the minimum intellectual capacity required to perform the task. However, beyond those minimum requirements, there is much variance and additional intelligence won't necessarily lead to superior performance.

[Zapmeister]

You're playing poker with a tiger. You're holding Ks Js and the flop is 7h 4h 2c. The tiger is being really hyperactive and pacing around the whole place as if it had too much sugar for breakfast or something. It excitedly places 2/3 of its chips into the pot. Do you fold? call? raise? or run screaming?

Is Nicole Kidman scared of butterflies?

Waffles or pancakes?

Why can you assume that you can separate the variables in homogeneous PDEs and still get all the solutions?

[Reach]

I said I would only answer serious questions, but:

1. Fold given the information, but I don't know how much I have committed, what the stack sizes are or the blinds.

2. Unlikely

3. Waffles

4. Sturm–Liouville theory

[kommisar]

how's dat dentistry going?

[Reach]

Good, albeit we're pretty busy right now. I'm at school for more than 12 hr a day 3 days a week. Starting to see patients, doing shit like crowns and bridges and prosthetics, a lot of resins. Get to start sitting in on some oral maxillofacial surgery, which is pretty damn cool though.

[FFRGreen]

hows life

[Reach]

Stressful, but overall I'd say I'm winning, so I'll give it an A+

[j-rodd123]

Originally Posted by Reach

Good, albeit we're pretty busy right now. I'm at school for more than 12 hr a day 3 days a week. Starting to see patients, doing shit like crowns and bridges and prosthetics, a lot of resins. Get to start sitting in on some oral maxillofacial surgery, which is pretty damn cool though.

my uncle is an oral maxillofacial surgeon and wants me to take over his practise, can you do it instead as I have little interest in dentistry

[Reach]

Sure. Give me about 1000 years though, given how long it takes to get an Oral Max degree from Dalhousie.

[Bahamut-X]

You're a dentist? Nice. Any advice for someone with TMJ? Can it be cured? Have you done research on it? My jaw clicks like billiard balls colliding when I move it side to side sometimes and aches at random.

Would you ever consider playing SM again? I know for the most part the community is completely (at least from the one you and I knew), but you were crazy good and I think it would be cool to see some scores from you at least one last time.

And on that note, are your wrists as ****ed as mine from all those years of keysmashing?

PS PSYCOPATH. AHHH I FORGOT ABOUT THAT. Tell me please what was the solution to sherlock's maze or whatever? I never figured it out!!! >=(

[Reach]

Originally Posted by Bahamut-X

You're a dentist? Nice. Any advice for someone with TMJ? Can it be cured? Have you done research on it? My jaw clicks like billiard balls colliding when I move it side to side sometimes and aches at random.

Would you ever consider playing SM again? I know for the most part the community is completely (at least from the one you and I knew), but you were crazy good and I think it would be cool to see some scores from you at least one last time.

And on that note, are your wrists as ****ed as mine from all those years of keysmashing?

PS PSYCOPATH. AHHH I FORGOT ABOUT THAT. Tell me please what was the solution to sherlock's maze or whatever? I never figured it out!!! >=(

It's TMJ disorder, good sir TMJ -> Temporomandibular joint.

Advice? Try to find a dentist that has a lot of experience dealing with TMJ disorder, because it's hard to treat and a lot of dentists have absolutely no knowledge on the subject whatsoever (we don't really cover it much in school). We have a TMJ specialist here at the school though and I've talked with him pretty extensively on the subject, and it's pretty complicated.

I don't really have time to take up SM again. I played recently for the first time in 5 years for the nostalgia, but I suck pretty bad now so it wouldn't be worth posting scores

And no, my wrists are perfectly fine

Psychopath was one of my favorite games ever. Sherlock's maze...all of the exits shown on the map were fake. The actual exit was hidden under a pink block. However, there were a number of clues on the map itself in the form of shapes that were hints to the actual location of the exit. If you found the actual exit, you beat the stage with an extra step.

[Bahamut-X]

Hidden under a block -_- of course. I recall actually going into the source code of the page because I thought the solution was something extremely devious or required outside resources. I always overthink things though.

Also, you were the one that made water bottle correct? That was my favorite level. Oh my god it felt SO good to finally figure that one out. Lots of red herrings.

About TMJD, damn that sucks. I'll keep looking around.

[Reincarnate]

damn, want to play Psychopath again now

[Bahamut-X]

Alright, I vote we get a psychopath revival going.

EDIT: May not work so well since I don't know if you can log into the original anymore. When you go to register the page is dead. I'm playing as a guest though right now. Everyone play psychopath!

[Reach]

Is it bad that I remembered the solutions to everything pre-55 and blew through them in like 10 minutes? It was like I could do it blind folded. It was all still up there haha.


I can't remember how to solve 55 for the life of me though. LOL

Also, I didn't have any problems logging in on an account I made awhile ago 8)


As for water bottle, nope, that wasn't me. I made most of the levels 65 and up. I think my favorite of mine was The Great Attractor. Pink! Plus devious solution.


Edit: God damn, just listening to the psychopath music in the background makes me feel a little sad inside. I still to this day feel like this was the best puzzle game I've ever played. K2xl should remake the original or something with all new levels to get the community up again, since it's so so dead.

[Reincarnate]

Playing Psychopath again... omg so fun

[Bahamut-X]

Ah, I think I was just using an old version of the game so the link it directed me to when I tried to register was dead. Can't remember my old account info which is really upsetting. Dammit I don't know if I can figure out forgive me again... that was a beast.

[Reincarnate]

Starting over from the beginning -- so far up to Level 23