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Mario Meets Pareto

Mario Meets Pareto

theanonymousone

Comments (63)

  • moomin
    Of course I, and most of the dads I know, optimise for something else: what’s the car that will keep me competitive, but probably losing, to the kids?
  • jerf
    This is a really important concept for developers.One aspect for developers that I see quite often is the assertion that "We can't have X without giving up more Y", most commonly "we can't have more security without giving up on user experience". With the Pareto idea in mind, we can see that that statement is true, if and only if you are in fact on the Pareto frontier of security and user experience already.However, many times these confident pronouncements are being made when the system under question is quite evidently not on the Pareto frontier in the first place and indeed you can get more of one without giving up the other.Making it more tricky is that in business, you can never discard "money" as a dimension, so unless you're taking "money" as one of the dimensions in the original comparison you want to do, it sneaks its way in. Or, a composite time/money, or "cost to business", or some other similar concept, time & money aren't orthogonal and don't need to be treated as two separate dimensions in general, though you can if you want. Which puts you into the 3D case, and as the page says, that grows the frontier quite a lot, which is good in some ways and bad in others. Nevertheless, in my opinion it is still often the case that even in that space we are often making "tradeoffs" without checking that we're on the Pareto frontier in the first place.
  • a3w
    I did not understand https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096439, but I understood this.
  • __s
    > You probably won't pick a driver sitting on the edge of the frontier because you want some balance between speed and accelerationfor super mario kart speedruns go with bowser/dk: https://www.speedrun.com/smk/runs/zp68nr8mThat seemed to hold up for Mario Kart 8 too going with Bowser at the edge of their pareto frontier, https://www.speedrun.com/mk8needing acceleration is a skill issue
  • phyzix5761
    A lot of these optimization problems can benefit from using a genetic algorithm: https://github.com/lodenrogue/genetic-algorithm-js
  • yathern
    Apologies for the self-promotion, but I learned about the Pareto Front from this site a while back - and applied it to Mini PCs with https://minipcs.zip which plots Mini PCs based on Compute vs Price (and other metrics) - highlighting the pareto front to find the optimal unit.
  • sendes
    Finally an important and realistic application of economic theory to real life!
  • Retr0id
  • charv
    I would really love to be able to explore this data, e.g. what is the "worst" driver? Is there an inverse Pareto front?
  • FailMore
    If you liked the playing card interaction at the start (I did), I run a random side project where you (or your coding agent) can build similar 3d cards:https://requirement5.combuild a card here: https://requirement5.com/create (and the CLI instructions are there too)https://github.com/vilt9/requirement5
  • hn22fazjsv
    Solid advice, saving it
  • kevinwang
    Can anyone explain why Rosalina is not Pareto optimal here? It kind of looks like she should be.
  • nwsm
    Nice article, I'm sad to learn that I shouldn't be using Koopa. How are Peach and Mario not dominated on acceleration by Tanooki Mario and Luigi respectively?Also, wonderful visualizations, but the change between blue and white backgrounds is really jarring to me.
  • andai
    Excellent. This is some kind of 3D PowerPoint. How did he do that?
  • phoghed
    To think I gimped myself so much by using baby Rosalina on a scooter with rollers
  • rakamotog
    This was fun, thank you
  • paulnpace
    Mario was an elite?
  • hnmu4c5zar
    This resonates hard
  • reconnecting
    Thanks! Very useful information. I will never play for Bowser again.
  • demibabs
    This article isn’t quite accurate; acceleration is surprisingly unimportant in Mario Kart and not really considered a major factor when choosing a optimal combo. The optimal combo is solely decided on the basis of speed and mini-turbo. Otherwise good analysis.
  • bix6
    Lakitu ftw
  • Aeroi
    wow that took alot of work. nice job
  • suzukivenom
    beautiful site
  • ShinyLeftPad
    The site is really broken on mobile.
  • Xirdus
    In Firefox reader mode, there's like 5 paragraphs of text. I am unable to digest the content on the website itself. Can someone confirm if the 5 paragraphs is the whole content or if I have large parts of it missing?