When machines can do things faster than people, how can we retain our human dignity?" "My critical skills are being displaced by a computer," Gates wrote, as recalled by Ryan. Gates' reply had the subject line "Chairman displaced" and explained to the staff he'd looped in that Ryan's macro had irrevocably beaten his Minesweeper record. Ryan sent a screenshot of the new record to Gates, writing "Sorry, your five-second record has been eclipsed permanently because I don't think you can beat one second." Bear in mind that Minesweeper's timer starts at one and not zero. I felt very efficient having done this while I wasn’t even in the office." "So I set it there and then went off for a day of meetings," said Ryan, "and four hours later it had won while I was gone. You'd just have to play like a gazillion times to do this." The idea was that in one particular random layout where all the mines were in the lower right corner, this macro would "clear the entire screen in one or zero seconds. Decades before they'd become the right hand of most MMO players, Ryan used the Windows software Macro Recorder to automatically click one corner of a fresh Minesweeper game, then start a new one. Ryan decided that, rather than keeping the high scores from Gates, he'd work out a way to set an unbeatable one. The coda to this story is rather amazing. Bill has a lot of important decisions to make, and this should not be taking up time!" She asked Ryan to do "a favor for the company… Please don't share with Bill advances in the Minesweeper record." Gates was playing too much and this was "not a good thing. French would become Melinda Gates in 1994. "Melinda was a level above me, but we in the same group," Ryan said. This was a guy who didn't have time to waste. Gates' love for Minesweeper has been known of since the early '90s, but what Orland's book uncovers is the quasi-obsessive depths it had reached, and at a time when Bill Gates was the most important figure at what was becoming one of the biggest companies in the world. was a former Boeing executive, and he was not a humorful guy, so… the idea that Bill is sitting there after work, going into the president’s office so he could play Minesweeper, it was just weird imagery." It’s on the machine in Mike Hallman’s office.' And like, 'What?'" "So it was one Sunday afternoon, and we get email from Bill saying, 'Hey, I think I just got a new high score. This being 1990 there was also an honesty system around the high score records, which were in a simple text file, whereby any new record score had to have been seen by someone else. Hardcore ironman means you have 1 life, when you die you return to a normal ironman.Gates would get so obsessed with the game that he removed it from his own machine.Ultimate ironman is the longest because you have no bank, you have 28 spots in your "bag" and have to use it wisely.In Ironman game modes you play solo, you have to collect everything yourself and you cannot trade other players.Normal is the fastest because you can trade and buy supplies to level up with.A handful of players have done this now, which is estimated to take about ~15,000 hours. You can take this further by getting 200million xp in all skills which is the max amount of xp in a skill. This is also just for what we call maxing which is 99 in every skill. For a gamemode "ironman" where you are on your own and cannot trade, the record is ~3400 hours. This is just for one game mode where you can trade other players. Slightly different type of game, but a strong mention for Runescape, specifically old school runescape as it takes longer to max.Ī mod tweeted the record for fastest "Maxing" (highest level in each skill) to be ~2136 hours.
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