by Javantea
March 18, 2025
Duolingo has a lot of problems. I know this because I've spent 1232 days learning Portuguese, Spanish, and a little bit of Finnish and Klingon. I have a 1232 day streak and am in obsidian league. I'm hoping that the developers at Duolingo who are watching for negative sentiment find this post. Here's my duome if you want to see where I'm at.
Duolingo is for beginners. If you end up at day 400 in Duolingo, you might think that it is useful for intermediate and advanced speakers. This isn't true. The only argument that I have really accepted for why intermediate learners should accept Duolingo as a daily tool is that it's important to avoid losing ground in a language. By spending a few minutes you're able to avoid dramatic loss of vocabulary that often coincides with not using a language for weeks.
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A conversation between Javantea and Gemini (artificial intelligence by Google). Javantea's prompts are labeled.
Javantea: Do you have any opinion on the meaning of the song Forever Young by Alphaville?
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First off the tl;dr for those in a hurry.
My SPS source code has been available since July 2022. It's not the only implementation.
So the short explanation is that the design of pickTetriminoSeed, the function that is the basis for the whole of TetrisGYM SPS (v4 and v5 seeds) has a weakness that Tetris original rom does not. The attached seeds are a list of seeds that fall into the same sequence before piece 100. This is caused by @invalidIndex. There are 276 seeds. Because of how the LFSR in generateNextPseudorandomNumber works, it's not just 276 seeds that do that, it's ~2x that. This is true of just about everything I've checked so instead of 4 million unique seeds, we have about 20k-80k sequences that a player can expect to get (research not complete). And because of how it locks, it continues indefinitely. This is probably beyond the capacity of a person to memorize, but we could see players memorize a small fraction of favorable and unfavorable sequences for a benefit in competition. Let's start the work of writing an improved SPS shall we?
