Maximum Lives in SMB2

[Gario]

3-1 start: 37,449,981 lives, Play as Toad

-Grab first potion, go to section A

-(37,449,980x) Drop potion 3 steps left of the leaf next to the top of the ladder, grab 3 coins, suicide: 1 life, 112,349,940 coins

NOTE: almost impossible to do. Dropping potion any further to the right and you can't suicide. Success requires sliding off left side of ladder to freefall, getting bottom-left coin immediately (it can be finicky), and walljumping back up the ladder precisely.

-Go to section B

-Grab potion, drop one step to the left, grab 12 coins: 1 life, 112,349,952 coins

NOTE: even with Toad, it is impossible to grab more than 12 coins within the time limit.

-Exit the left door and go back in

-Grab potion, drop one step to the left, grab 12 coins: 1 life, 112,349,964 coins

Complete level: 561,749,821 lives (1 base, + 112,349,964 coins x 5up)

I don't know if you're referring to the arduous task of getting this many coins by now, or to that particular step. Either way, has anyone thought of the disappointment that would be experienced if you fucked this up at all, at this point? Not to mention the fact that you need to do this 37,449,980 times without a single mistake?

If this wouldn't cause enough stress to make your heart explode, I don't know what would...

[SoulinEther]

I admitted it was a conservative estimate.. lol.

[ambinate]

if we had been playing this since the dawn of our species we would be so fucking good at it right now

[The Dennis]

EPILOGUE:

Hilarious read, though... Do you have any idea how long it would take to achieve that theoretical number of lives?

Assume it would take average 60 seconds per suicide/level completion, and 4 seconds per slot machine roll.

At the given rates, it would take 2,777,841,450,626,986,826,572 seconds to reach the max. That's about 88,026,363,867,855 years and 5 months. Trillion years, with a T.

If you wanted to get the maximum number of lives, and then blow them all at 1 life per second, it would take over 102 trillion years.

[JCvgluvr]

This thread is quite epic. More people should know about this.

[Sir_Snooze]

Mind is blown.

[Xelebes]

epic thread is epic

Only way to make this thread more epic is to put the original post to rhyme, meter and alliteration.

[EC2151]

I'm not gunna lie son... I gave up on math after high school.

[Level 99]

This would be the biggest and most epic speedrun for lives that nobody ever cared enough to watch for 88 Trillion years.

On, and you absolutely reminded me why I hate math. Now get back to playing SMB2.

Oh, and side note: couldn't one macro the input for each section into an emulator and put it on an iflessthanx-repeat, ifmorethanx-nextstep basis? Would easily resolve the exactness of timing for specific parts, and THEN you could ramp up the emulator speed to going beyond human comprehension.

Sounds like, if there wasn't the internal cap based on game programming, this would be an interesting semibasic computer program exercise. Reminds me of the "Tower of Hanoi" recursion.

Edit: Semibasic meaning that if you had the skills to macro each of these runs that requires repetition at least once and then base a simple program on executing those macros. In reality, that'd probably be a bit harder to do.

[Gario]

Just out of curiosity, let's see how many tries it would take for someone/something to roll the number of perfect slot rolls (Cherry-Cherry-Cherry) required for the theoretical life cap.

Let's take a look at some of the calculations, first...

There are four shapes that you can get in the slots (Star, Veggie, Snifit and Cherry) and three slots, so the odds are 1/64 that they'll line up (4 possibilities x 4 possibilities x 4 possibilities, or 4^3 possibilities altogether). Now, for such an event to occur twice in a row, we would multiply 4^3 x 4^3 = 4^6, or 4096, then use that number as our ratio (1/4096 that this would occur).

Now, based on how many coins that one needs to obtain in order to get the total theoretical amount of lives in this game, we need a total of 119,332,579,057,468,303,119 coins to roll three cherries in a row (I added Dennis' numbers together).Thus, we need to multiply 4^(3 * 119,332,579,057,468,303,119) to achieve the odds of this monumental event occurring, which is 1/4^357,997,737,172,404,909,357, or... well, the computer's calculator is crapping out on me, so... yeah. Let's just say it's faaaaaar larger than anyone can calculate (computers that are designed to calculate these numbers quickly would take weeks, if not months or even years, to get the solution...). Those are the odds that a program could randomly generate that many lucky rolls in a row, resulting in the theoretical cap for lives in Mario 2.

[Xelebes]

Oops.......

[prophetik music]

this is a brilliant thread. srsly.

[LuketheXjesse]

Mind is blown.

[Crufix]

Amazing thread, I wonder what the programmers of this or DDP would have thought if you presented this to them 20 odd years ago?

-Jacked to facebook as well, with credit.

[Bundeslang]

Nice theory:mrgreen: