Mario Meets Pareto

Agreed with what you said, when you're only considering security and usability you're often not at a Pareto optimal state, but once you add cost into the picture you see a lot more cases of being on the Pareto optimal boundary, or at least in case where the next improvement only comes with significant effort (by re-platforming, for example).

"making tradeoffs" is an excuse for management to cut corners to get their feature faster at the cost of future developer pain and suffering

you know how japanese oni would roll human souls into soba noodles? [1]

that's what modern corporate software company management does :)

[1] i learned about this from the very funny gintama funeral episode

Yes, the difference between coding (writing software) and engineering (making informed trade offs about system design) is effectively bound up in analyses like those supported by concepts like pareto efficiency.

One should keep in mind though that not all problems have a neat solution. Many spaces have multiple efficient points that still need to be chosen from, and many pareto optimization problems actually become NP hard computationally when the problem is large enough.

this is a silly oversimplification

there's something equivalent in the business world - mostly used by businesses not run by psychopaths - where you optimize inside 2 triangles with the points on the triangle being cost, profit, & user utility/happiness.

Fascinating! Do you still have any of the code or datasets/datasources laying around?

I am the complete opposite of that. My attention wanes when someone fails to get to the point, instead dwelling in irrelevant details which are not intrinsically interesting. Have to muster the motivation to concentrate in such circumstances, and doing so is not enjoyable.

But Wikipedia tells you in the first paragraph what it's all about.

A "Pareto front represents the set of solutions where no solution outperforms any other solution in the set at every objective, and every solution not in the set is outperformed by at least one solution in the Pareto front in every objective"

I can only imagine the guy that made Mario Meets Pareto waiting for some Pareto related post to hit the front page before sharing his

wiki is usually not great at teaching new concepts, better as a reference for someone who already learned something.

It turns out a lot of things are extremely accessible to a lot more people when you teach them as concrete, relatable scenarios in simple language with useful visualizations instead of abstract X, Y foos and bars described with an unfamiliar jargon term every 3rd word. We really need to do better when it comes to pedagogy.

This used to be true on older patches but it's not at all how top players play these days. See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejt52UgnhAo for an example of the meta that prevailed for top-level versus play around the end of MK8's lifespan (Yoshi Biddybuggy Roller or Yoshi Teddybuggy Roller depending on your preferred drift style) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvrCP50Gfj4 for a breakdown of some of the latest time trial world records. At the beginning of the game's lifecycle top speed was the most important stat, but as more tricks were developed and the game's balance was adjusted, having faster and more consistent miniturbo boosts became much more important.

(Mario Kart World, which isn't covered in this article, has a more standard speed vs acceleration trade off but in that game high-max-speed (heavy) combos have even worse problems due to the way the rail grind mechanic was implemented and what seems to be an unforeseen interaction with the coin curve see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sPyur6BkiOs)

It's optimizing for different environments and opponents, the speed runs only have to deal with the AI not human players and take such crazy paths the AI isn't around to really mess with them so they don't have to worry about reaccelerating. In versus it's much less likely you'll be able to avoid all the other players so you need to be able to get back up to speed after being hit. A common strategy in the online vs mode is actually back running to collect better items then cashing them in rapidly to win.

On the other hand, if you are a casual and want to dominate 99% races you enter at people's homes, pick Toadette (with Mr. Scooty). I don't think I've lost since 2019.

Lol skill issue... Right! But that's how you choose your weights. If you're not a great driver you need to give more consideration to acceleration.

no, even in time trials it depends on the track. If top speed were the most important metric you would see the same meta build for every world record time trial, but that's not the case.

Also, miniturbo is the single most important stat in the game, not top speed

Speedruns are for playing the track solo, right?

If you're playing normally (with other people and items), even the most skilled player can't avoid getting hit by some universal items and will benefit from acceleration.

Hence, as the author notes, the balanced build with Peach being favored among competitive players.

Acceleration is pointless because of the hidden Mini Turbo stat

Adding skill is just another dimension to the calculation.

I don't. I need to keep winning until I can't to keep the boy in his place. He is getting closer every time. I know my day is soon to end, and a new house champion will reign.

My trick is to just never power slide when I need to be handicapped to not ruin the kids Christmas. Or tap the accel A button in a PWM pattern.

I often use the wii wheel as my handicap for family, but my wife (new to games) is now good enough that I might need to switch that soon.

When my oldest was first trying Mario Kart, his uncle came over and played against him blindfolded (and still won). It was very entertaining to watch.

One way of defining Wisdom is the ability to look at a set of metrics and discern when an adjustment or adaptation to them is needed in order to better approach the true objective we are optimizing toward—since the true objective is almost never perfectly described by any of the metrics that we can find to approximate it.

Eventually, almost every attribute we can practically and objectively measure is at best a proxy measure for the thing we actually want to know, which is, in this case, "Most likely to win races." The thing we actually want to measure is often hard, impossible, or impractical to objectively measure, which is why we resort to proxies in the first place. By "proxy measure" we mean, not a perfect 1:1 to the thing we want to measure, but containing some amount of signal about it.

So yes, sometimes there's a peak in the utility of speed. But perhaps that trade-off can be modeled by another attribute called "Proneness to fly off the track" which increases as speed does, and is weighted such that the peak and then taper-off of benefit in speed is captured between the combination of the two of them.

But then, any vehicle that has the same speed but lower "Proneness to fly off the track" would be objectively preferable to any equally-fast vehicle with greater "Proneness to fly off the track." And so it continues.

> [is it really] always better to have more speed[?]

I'm reminded of two things that in a way support your premise with the second example being more relevant. Both are outside what’s being discussed exactly, more about knock-on effects maybe, anyway:

The first is that Angry Birds found the speed of launching birds into structures was important for engagement: it cannot be too fast.

The second is from a commenter somewhere who said they had or worked on software that took ten minutes to boot in the morning, which is when employees made coffee and talked and brainstormed. Everyone was disappointed when after refactoring, the software booted immediately.

Wouldn't that just change the shape of the pareto frontier? It stops at some point (when marginal utility becomes negative) - but this is not special, they typically stop at 0 as well.

> Is there an inverse Pareto front?

Yes, trivially. Just look at the opposite end of each metric. Pareto optimality doesn't know/care what each metrics means, since it keeps them all separate.

  > I want a job without unnecessary friction, without interpersonal drama, even one that's low stress.

That's part of how I see an "easy" job. Where I can focus on working on the actual tasks at hand.

Doesn't matter if the actual job is filling glasses of water or building rockets; as long as I can focus on it for 100% of my working hours, I'd see it as an "easy" job.

I get what you’re saying, but I wouldn’t say easy is the opposite of challenging. As a quick example, I would surely find a day job of manual labor harder and significantly less enjoyable than a day job of software engineering challenges.

(And please note that I do not mean to imply that there are no challenges in manual labor or that software engineering is more important.)

They’re just hypothetical examples, not meant to apply to everyone.

Maybe instead of "easy" what they really meant that axis to convey is something more like "low stress" or "not frustrating"

It sounds like you're saying "easy" and "fulfilling" cannot coexist, and obviously they are in tension, but a Pareto frontier still exists there.

Well then, you would prioritize "fulfilling" in your utility function. Others might make a different choice; e.g. a single parent who needs to save time and energy for family might prefer "easy" at the cost of boring drudgery

Felt like covert advertisements.

what you choose for the dimensions is arbitrary, they only chosen thusly to prove the point.

I don't think I've ever seen an example of pareto that wasn't pseudo scientific drivel.

I noticed DaisyUI also has a component for this just a couple of days back - https://daisyui.com/components/hover-3d/

Probably but they could be arrived at via different means. In WoW for instance top players run simulated combat using third party tools to compare different gearing setup, often to determine if a new piece of gear is better than their current piece. This often isn't immediately obvious if the stats are completely different and "simming" is the easiest way to evaluate a piece of gear.

Competitive players (from Mario Kart in particular) are doing this type of data mining and analysis ever since the game releases, and sharing them in tightly knit communities.

The analysis comes before the meta settles, so of course it’s consistent :)

Thanks for posting this! It's an awesome tool. Makes me want to buy more tiny PCs. My only feedback is many of the ebay listings it points to are sold out, but I assume there's a limit to the freshness you can get. Still though, I found pretty good rates of success just pasting the important parts of the name of the sold-out listing into search.

Because Donkey Kong gives more speed for exactly the same acceleration. I.e. you sacrifice nothing and gain something by switching away.

EDIT: If you mean that Rosalina looks slightly higher on the graph, I believe that's just a visual effect to allow multiple characters to occupy the same square - the stats are all integers.

That's not the full picture though, because other players can hit you with items, and it's sometimes unavoidable.

If you get hit by a blue shell with a build fully optimized for speed at the cost of acceleration, it's likely to cost you the race.

Author here. The source code is available at https://github.com/SuperMayo/mayerowitz.io.

It’s called scrollytelling. For this particular project, I borrowed a lot from https://mlu-explain.github.io/. For the 3D elements, I used Threejs and a custom vertex shader for the 3D plot.

I guess the author used a different framework but I like this one: https://animejs.com/

Looks like html+css+js+webgl

Koopa came out in offroad vs weight..without being that familiar with the game, I don't know whether that would ever be important enough to care about

I always pick koopa, I always win

Once at a Mario Kart 8 tournament I was helping run there was a kid who had picked Bowser and max speed and he was struggling to make every turn.

I switched him to the meta build and suddenly boom, he went from like 10th to 2nd against the AIs.

It's kinda weird that you can shoot yourself in the foot so much when picking your kart in this game.

> I will never play for Bowser again.

What do you mean "play for Bowser"?

It might still be the best option, depending on your play group. For example, if you’re in a play group with a bunch of novices and you’re destroying them, like finishing a full lap before the second place, choosing Bowser gives you a handicap. Lowers your chances of winning but increases fun for the group as a whole.

There's no ultimate best player/build. When you factor in that each cart has different stats depending on the terrain, there's a "best" build for each track.

Dependent on your play style and which of the 3 main attributes you care about.

Did you even read the post?

I cannot be the only one who atrongly dislikes this bloated web design. I hit back after scrolling a bit

Also on Firefox android and working great. What's your browser/os?

Can you tell me what’s going on? I tried my best to make it work on every device, but handling mobile is hard, and especially when you’re messing with interactivity and 3D.

Works for me with Firefox on android and ublock origin.

Works wonderfully on iPhone

Works for me in Firefox on Android anyway

[flagged]

The article includes interactive graphs and scrolling animations that explain them, as well as data.

Turn off reader there are graphics along with the paragraphs. Reminds me of the complaints that used to be super common from people religiously refusing to enable javascript and complaining when breaking the site breaks the site.

It looks like it. There are four images that pop up and start animating numbers, and those aren't visible in the built in reader. I use Tranquility Reader which ime tends to do a bit better, but it still wasn't readable. Looking at the source, that content seems to be created only on scroll with javascript, so it won't be able to be read accessibly. I had to close it so I can't say what else is missing.