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In a similar vein, Tool Assisted Speedruns for video games can always outperform human players, but TAS streams and youtube videos don't get nearly as many viewers as real humans running. And human speedrunners caught cheating and using tools etc. have drastic hits to their popularity after they're exposed.


I'm actually on the whole more interested in a TAS. I would often watch a big fraction of the TAS block at a GDQ, and only RTA for niche cases where I especially care about that game.

However, TAS is very unlikely Computer Chess because the TAS is actually a composite of a vast number of individual human player inputs - assembled by in effecting rewinding and continuing the game over and over. The TAS is not a machine beating the game, but the effect if humans played the game as well as they know how. That's why they have "sync" problems during a GDQ, the playback device has no idea how to play, it's just robotically carrying out actions.


A human making a TAS isn't playing the same game. They're playing a version with slow motion, rewind, memory inspection, etc.

And a computer performing a TAS isn't playing the game at all.

So many cheating scandals boil down to splicing, which is again not playing the same game.

Tools that don't hack the game are very often allowed and openly used.




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