This entire video comes off as intentionally obtuse. Of course the set of Pokemon you're able to encounter isn't uniformly distributed - Tom made it clear that this was a deliberate simplification so as to not distract away from the point of the video. Not once in the numberphile video was it stated that "this is how wild encounter distribution works in the generation 1 games" - the fact that this was acknowledged by yourself makes it apparent that the underlying purpose of this video was to stroke your own ego.
To your first part, I'm genuinely actually confused what the point of their video was, because they correctly proved the answer to the coupon collector problem without ever once mentioning that's what it's called. Using Pokemon as an analogy and simplifying out the non-uniform chances makes perfect sense for an educational video but why does the conclusion never loop back and mention what the problem they solved is usually known as? I really like Numberphile's content and that aspect made it feel like an excuse to slap a popular IP's name on the video in a way that wouldn't have otherwise been necessary if they just looped back to state the colloquial name of the problem they proved. To the 2nd part, I actually was most prompted to follow through with doing this response because my wife noticed the Numberphile video and thought it would be a great idea to react to it. The original title "Numberphile is WRONG" is too far toward clickbait than I really want so I've updated it to be more rhetorical. Ultimately my goal with this channel is to try to communicate speedrun and TAS concepts and document/archive TAS records, and ultimately their answer is correct under their assumptions but there's additional interesting answers with more complete information about the games to be had from the history of Catch'em All Manipless speedrunners DSUMing encounters and Catch'em All Manipped runners performing manips. I don't expect these videos to get wide viewership regardless of how I title them, I've been getting consistently 50-100 views per video for years and don't have any grand idea about changing that, but I'd rather be a little clickbaity and obtuse if it means 10 or 20 more people learning about intricacies of Gen 1.
@TiKevin83 >why does the conclusion never loop back and mention what the problem they solved is usually known as? I'm not sure. I think defining the coupon collector's problem an additional time would come off as redundant, I agree it should have been mentioned though. The point of the video? I mean, it was like any other numberphile video. Ask a question, give some context or practical examples, then go on to answer the question through math. Also Tom had the Pokemon plushies, he's probably a fan, and like if I were him brainstorming the video, I would have chosen Pokemon too lol Do see this video just comes off as like, off topic though? If Tom said something like "in gen 1, all Pokemon in Mt. Moon are equally likely to be encountered" then yeah I'd completely get this video. But he didn't. About two years ago when I was learning the yellow classic route, I wanted to better understand how DSUM worked (I understood that it was a value in memory, but I was curious how it changed frame-by-frame, how it interacted with soft resets, how exactly the value was used when encounters were determined, etc.). Some parts of this video would have been immensely helpful at the time. But I would've hated having to skip through the parts where you were reacting to a video that had almost no relevance to what I was trying to learn. Does that make sense?
@@minnowsr yes that makes sense - I could see value in doing a "Pokemon RNG in 2024 update" videos that just no nonsense explain the state of understanding of encounter/catch/battle RNG either lumping related gens in 1 video or splitting them out
I would love to see more reactions like that!
This entire video comes off as intentionally obtuse. Of course the set of Pokemon you're able to encounter isn't uniformly distributed - Tom made it clear that this was a deliberate simplification so as to not distract away from the point of the video. Not once in the numberphile video was it stated that "this is how wild encounter distribution works in the generation 1 games" - the fact that this was acknowledged by yourself makes it apparent that the underlying purpose of this video was to stroke your own ego.
To your first part, I'm genuinely actually confused what the point of their video was, because they correctly proved the answer to the coupon collector problem without ever once mentioning that's what it's called. Using Pokemon as an analogy and simplifying out the non-uniform chances makes perfect sense for an educational video but why does the conclusion never loop back and mention what the problem they solved is usually known as? I really like Numberphile's content and that aspect made it feel like an excuse to slap a popular IP's name on the video in a way that wouldn't have otherwise been necessary if they just looped back to state the colloquial name of the problem they proved.
To the 2nd part, I actually was most prompted to follow through with doing this response because my wife noticed the Numberphile video and thought it would be a great idea to react to it. The original title "Numberphile is WRONG" is too far toward clickbait than I really want so I've updated it to be more rhetorical. Ultimately my goal with this channel is to try to communicate speedrun and TAS concepts and document/archive TAS records, and ultimately their answer is correct under their assumptions but there's additional interesting answers with more complete information about the games to be had from the history of Catch'em All Manipless speedrunners DSUMing encounters and Catch'em All Manipped runners performing manips. I don't expect these videos to get wide viewership regardless of how I title them, I've been getting consistently 50-100 views per video for years and don't have any grand idea about changing that, but I'd rather be a little clickbaity and obtuse if it means 10 or 20 more people learning about intricacies of Gen 1.
@TiKevin83 >why does the conclusion never loop back and mention what the problem they solved is usually known as?
I'm not sure. I think defining the coupon collector's problem an additional time would come off as redundant, I agree it should have been mentioned though.
The point of the video? I mean, it was like any other numberphile video. Ask a question, give some context or practical examples, then go on to answer the question through math. Also Tom had the Pokemon plushies, he's probably a fan, and like if I were him brainstorming the video, I would have chosen Pokemon too lol
Do see this video just comes off as like, off topic though? If Tom said something like "in gen 1, all Pokemon in Mt. Moon are equally likely to be encountered" then yeah I'd completely get this video. But he didn't.
About two years ago when I was learning the yellow classic route, I wanted to better understand how DSUM worked (I understood that it was a value in memory, but I was curious how it changed frame-by-frame, how it interacted with soft resets, how exactly the value was used when encounters were determined, etc.). Some parts of this video would have been immensely helpful at the time. But I would've hated having to skip through the parts where you were reacting to a video that had almost no relevance to what I was trying to learn. Does that make sense?
@@minnowsr yes that makes sense - I could see value in doing a "Pokemon RNG in 2024 update" videos that just no nonsense explain the state of understanding of encounter/catch/battle RNG either lumping related gens in 1 video or splitting them out