I finally got round to picking up a PS5 this week and have been really enjoying Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart - it’s just beautiful to look at and genuinely fun to play. Looking forward to more of that over the weekend! I’ve also been trying out Astro’s Playroom, the free tech demo that comes with the console. I was half expecting it to be a gimmicky piece of advertising - but it’s really well made! The platforming is excellent and all the little references to games are cute.

Does it require the touchpads for mouse control?

Anyone know how well these work on Steam Deck?

Tyrannosaurus Parvus

Yes you’re right about having more time and better reflexes back then, but at the same time I feel like I pick up on cues and understand more what the developers intended for the player the older I’ve got. I remember playing the same levels over and over as a kid and eventually losing motivation to continue (this is somewhat balanced out by the fact that yes, I’d have more time, and also I didn’t have as many games - so I had more incentive to keep playing one to completion). Whereas nowadays I’ve got more patience and I can work out ‘oh I’m probably meant to go that way’ based on my experience of playing lots of different games over the years. I’ve built up more of an intuition for these things.

That said, I’m not sure I could beat many NES games!

If I’d played it when I was younger, I don’t think I’d have made it very far to be honest! I’ve probably got a bit more patience and experience nowadays, hence finishing it on Switch. But I’m in no rush to 100% the game unlike some other Mario games (which tend to actually be fun to complete).

That’s fair, although I’ve always considered Galaxy to have a pretty good moveset. What was it missing compared to 64?

Odyssey gives you an insane level of movement, which I love. It’s fun to just run around levels.

Lol! Do you just feel that 64 is a better game, or has better level design?

Oh that’s interesting! Explains why I always had difficulty chasing down shadow Mario on Switch

I’ll have to check if it’s possible to use analog triggers with the SN30 Pro+ on Dolphin…

Oh god the pachinko machine… I salute you for 100%ing the game! Yeah Yoshi feels pretty pointless considering Mario has a more diverse moveset without him.

Graphically I still think it’s pretty impressive - the heat shimmer and water in particular. Crazy considering when it was released.

Yes I definitely agree with that. I loved the variety of environments, and the animations felt ahead of their time for a game from 2002. Well worth completing. How long ago did you play it, out of interest?

Heh, funnily enough I did pretty well back in school. But it’s been quite a while since I’ve learnt this stuff and it’s not something I ever specialised in. And when I did learn it, it was essentially just a series of facts that you had to memorise. ‘The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell’ etc. etc. So the second I passed that exam, I don’t think I ever went back to reinforce those memories.

Hearing about genetic dominance again did give me an ‘ah, of course!’ moment. If you are able to recall everything you learnt in school (including subjects that you may not have had much interest in), then congrats on the impressive memory :)

Ahh thanks, this is all coming back to me now! Despite being a pretty nerdy student, my biology teachers at school didn’t instil much enthusiasm in me for the subject. But the more I learn about it now, the more fascinating I find it.

Do you have any more detail/links about incompatible genes causing mutations?

Oh that’s actually really neat, I had no idea! But it makes a lot of sense

Ah thanks for the useful links! Those articles are all quite fascinating. In the plaintext attacks article, I love the tactic mentioned here:

At Bletchley Park in World War II, strenuous efforts were made to use (and even force the Germans to produce) messages with known plaintext. For example, when cribs were lacking, Bletchley Park would sometimes ask the Royal Air Force to “seed” a particular area in the North Sea with mines (a process that came to be known as gardening, by obvious reference). The Enigma messages that were soon sent out would most likely contain the name of the area or the harbour threatened by the mines

I explained it poorly - what I mean to say is, two people trying to send the message ‘Hello’ for example both using the same public key would get the same output. So if you had a simple message like that, someone could work out by checking every word in the dictionary what your message was by checking if the output matched.

But I guess it’s a bit of a moot point - it’s unlikely that an encrypted message would ever be so simple. It could just as easily be much longer, and therefore basically impossible to guess the plaintext.

Ah I think of sort of get it!

The public key is used within a function by the person sending the message, and even someone that knew the function and the public key wouldn’t be able to decrypt the message, because doing so would require knowledge of the original prime numbers which they couldn’t work out unless a computer spend years factoring the public key.

My only other bit of confusion:

• If someone used a public key to encrypt the message “Hello”, maybe it would spit out something like Gh5bsKjbi4
• If someone else sent the exact same message I assume the outcome would also be identical, and therefore it would be possible by using common phrases to work out what was sent? I could type messages like Hi, Goodbye, Hola until I got to ‘Hello’ and realised it was the same output.
• However I assume that a message like ‘Hello, how are you?’ would result in a completely different output (despite Hello appearing in both) and thus trying to work out any messages in a brute force way like this would be pointless.

So using the formula in that guide, you get a numerical value for O. But surely someone else could follow the same process and also get the same answer? Unless the primes change each time? But then how would the sender and receiver know the way in which the values change?

But say (simplying greatly) the public key tells my computer to multiply my text by a prime number

If the prime number is already known from the public key, then why is any computation required? To decrypt it can’t I (or anyone else) just divide by the prime? Even with a significantly more complex calculation, can’t you just work the steps back in reverse using the instructions from the public key?

I guess something like this (data stored on glass plates ‘Project Silica’) would store the data safely for a much longer period. What I’m not entirely clear on is whether it would still be possible to read that data in the far future - it seems to rely on some kind of machine learning to decode it.