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You probably know some variation of this one. I know it like this:

- Three friends are travelling in a car on a long road and there hasn't been anything on it for hundreds of kilometers. They're tired and want some rest. They finally spot a small hostel or something like it. They stop by, get off the car and talk to a man at the entrance.
- The man says he's not the owner, that he'll be coming in an hour or so. When the friends ask for rooms, the man says he only has one left. He doesn't know the exact rate, but if the friends want to share it, he'll charge them $30 and they can go and sleep. When they wake up, he'll let them know if there's a difference, but won't be much for sure. So the friends take the room and each pays $10, totalling $30.
- When the owner arrives, the three friends are still asleep. The owner's replacement tells him about the rented room and that he's charged $30 for it. The owner says "You've charged them too much. It's actually $25 for that room. When the kids wake up, give them $5 back". But the guy thinks "How will I give $5 to three people?  Better just keep $2 for myself and give $1 back to each of them". And thus he does.
- Now the problem is this: if each one had paid $10 and is now given $1 back, then each actually paid $9. But they are three, so this is 3 times $9, which makes $27... plus the $2 that the guy kept, that's $29. So where is the other dollar?

RECOMMENDATION: If you see that somebody's posted an answer. First think about the puzzle before reading the replies. When I've given this problem to several people together, they tend to quickly influence one another and that's less interesting, even if they're wrong!

AND NOTE: People tend to stop for a moment and then tell me something like "You're saying it wrong" and then, they proceed to explain everything again just like I said it from the beginning. I know it happened that way. My question is precisely, how come if it happened that way, then it turns out a dollar is missing when we make the count?

Have you guys ever dedicated some time to thinking about time travel?  I'm sure you have. Of course, some of us love science fiction, others are just nostalgic of their past, others may be fascinated with the idea of seeing something historic... or prehistoric, etc. There may be different reasons. But... if you were told there exists a method, that one has been discovered... before you were told anything else about it.... What would you imagine it to be like?   When you have thought about time travel, how did it work in your mind?  Think of this for a moment before reading on, or I'll be influencing you with what I'll say next... and I'll still want to know the old answer.

- The style in Back to the Future makes the movie fun, but it's easy to find lots of pieces that don't match. It's like the grandfather paradox. Easy to see it doesn't work. Although, maybe you still think something like this could be possible if we just make some touches to prevent those contradictions.

- The one way that sounds the simplest for me, in the sense that it's the one that leads to minimal contradiction is to imagine that you can only travel to the moments you've lived, in your own body of the time. In this sense, you could also travel to the future if it's one you already lived and you're currently in a "past" relative to it. This would be like a "savegame" system. But this doesn't allow to travel beyond your lifetime. And there's also the problem that you wouldn't be going to the real moment you lived, since your new knowledge would be different from the one at the time. It would be an "extremely similar configuration", but not the same.

- There's also the idea that you can be physically transported, like in the first case, but to a parallel configuration, so you can do whatever you want. It's a copy, it won't affect the original. The actual problem with this is how to define a position. How can you tell if you're "at the same place"?  For instance, if you say "the place where I'm standing right now, but ten years ago", you could mean the same spot on Earth back then, or the same distance and angle from the Sun or from any other object. If you go so much into the past that plate tectonics make a difference, even the continents would be somewhere else.

Anyway... there are tons of ideas that can come up. This topic might be very interesting or too boring, but I just wanted to drop something in case you'd like to post your ideas. Then again, how do you imagine time travel?  And which time travel film or book have you enjoyed the most, if any?

Hi, guys. Well, we're all having this thing. I think the world hasn't been as homogeneous for a long time!

In Argentina, things are not very different from what happens in other countries in the region or what happened weeks ago in Europe. At the beginning, it was "Alright, only a few cases and they all came from abroad. Don't worry, the virus isn't that deadly" and it has gradually evolved to people crowding in the supermarkets and the current regime finally accepting that it's better for children not to go to school after the ministry of health spoke several unfortunate statements. Workers are still allowed to go to work normally, except 60 year olds or older, but many companies have chosen to take their own measures and, whenever possible, have their employees work from home.

I have been working from home for four years, so nothing has changed in my case. Employees are not afraid of the very likely future event in which they will be told to stay home, because with this regime, they surely will be given fully-paid leave and employers are not allowed to easily fire anybody. They don't see that if this extends long, companies will start to go bankrupt and they will end up jobless anyway. Besides the economic concern, people wonder if the speed at which cases will multiply will be slow enough for the health system to manage them. My guess is it won't, but on the good side, if things happen fast, at least they will be briefer. As long as one doesn't get seriously ill during that peak, they will be able to get the necessary medical attention. At least, this is what we hope.

So, yes, Argentina is also reacting too slow, but as I've said, this has a bad and a good side. Let us protect our old folks and take care of not getting sick of something else during this outbreak. It could be more dangerous to, say, get a gastroenteritis precisely now, that the health system is in jeopardy, than catching a CoViD19, which miiiight kill you, but most likely, will not.

A number of politicians in different positions in many countries have already confirmed the are infected. I've read about several different of those cases in the news and already forgot from which countries and in which positions, but yeah, ha, ha. Argentina's de-facto dictator and her puppet seem to be doing quite well so far, but considering that South America has been the last part of the world to get its sip of the virus, it's not surprising cases have not yet shot up so high. And considering how terribly disorganised our countries are, it makes sense to think we'll eventually develop a situation worse than that of most European countries. So... if we civilians are going to eat Covy, it'd be fair our disgusting politicians have to deal with him as well!

Hey, I feel comfortable composing, although I'm not as good at analysing races, but I can try my best. I'm working on the new R4K now, but you can count me in for the end of ZCT225 and later on, we'll see how well (or horribly wrong) I do it XD and if it's not that bad, I may be doing it more often!

Thank you, Dreadnaut!  Yes, I'm not going to get all the bells and whistles going from the beginning, but I would like to pave the road well, that is, to leave the space for the features, so that it doesn't become a burden to implement them later. For instance, I would already include a pull down option menu for "racing style" just like the one for RH/NoRH. The data would just get to the file and later, it'll be easier to see what to do with it.

I'm having one directory contain all tracks which will be numbered as they are posted. Scoreboards for each track will be in the same directory with the same file name, but a different extension. This will mean lots of files, although easy to look up. I don't know if this is the most convenient for later archiving and sharing, but doesn't look that bad.

Ah, that's a good one!  Yes, it's part of the Stunts pack in the end!

Well, six years passed. I had mentioned a year ago or so that I was interested in taking the work of setting up a new permanent competition. Now I am building into this idea with R4K. Earlier, I just wanted to do this because I saw you guys were busy with other things and I thought "I can do this and I want it to be a reality, so why not?". But now there's also another reason: I want to rewrite R4K and it comes in handy if the base code allows for several races and scoreboards being handled together. In other words, I want to rebuild the tournament on top of the permament competition system.

I would like to:
- Start with the tracks that come with Stunts, not including the closed ones
- Allow for posting tracks freely. In practice, there could be as many tracks as posted, but the ones that have more replays will appear first, so it wouldn't be messy. The closed tracks as well as any other track could of course be posted.
- Start with empty scoreboards. However, any old replay can be re-posted. There's a point here with the matter of authorship I would like to discuss to prevent easy cheating.
- Facilitate information exchange so that, if the Permanent Competition in ZakStunts is later on updated in the way planned in 2014, the tracks and replays can easily be incorporated and possibly exchange results between the sites.
- Allow posting with any car and any style (R4K-OWOOT, GAR, free-style, RH, NoRH, etc.) but making sure it's later possible to filter results so that one can check things like "fastest lap on Default with the Lancia in OWOOT". This way, there's a point in racing anything and not just Indy free-style. That is, you can set all kinds of records.
- For each style characteristic (say, OWOOT or NoRH), there would be three possible status configurations: Verified, Claimed, and No.

Again, I would like to do this to help and I'll be happy to hand the information and system if this is later to be implemented in ZakStunts. Also, if there's a plan my idea interferes with, no problem. Just tell me how I can help and I change the bearing or focus on something else. I would like to read opinions and suggestions.

I haven't been able to analyse the files yet. Just downloaded them, but I'm at work. Anyway, my opinion is that, unless the replays are identical (up to the given point) in "binary", that shouldn't be a problem. I assume from the discussion that they are, indeed, identical in the binary. In that case, well, maybe he didn't know that would be considered cheating or wasn't sure about that. I agree with taking it light this time.

I once asked in the past a question about something similar, but not quite the same. I said that I often reuse my own replays to make a better one before posting, but once I post one, I start over if I later on want to post another and avoid reusing. I was told that this is not necessary, as reusing our own replays is not considered cheating, but I still feel reluctant to do that. What I get from this is that I had the intuition on this probably not being right, while others did not feel it that way, and that's OK. Well, I'm probably shedding more darkness than light to the topic, ha, ha. Anyway, just wanted to comment. I'm happy that this is being discussed in a good mood

Just to add something... did you guys know that Helen Wheels character is actually named based on Paul McCartney's car?  Through all this time, odds are half of you already knew it. I've known it just for a few years. Anyway... just posting it XD  There's even a song by Paul called that: "Helen Wheels".

Wow... I feel super lucky. I've known Stunts community for a long time, but like you guys, I could've not noticed it for years. It was chance. I actually had found an online tournament in the early 2000s (I don't remember which), but didn't join. Later, I found WSC in "La Cueva de los Clásicos", a site I was familiar with because I was interested in DOS games back then. Later, I noticed ZakStunts, which I joined several years later.

And yes, it's really great to see there's a community like this around a game like Stunts. It's a piece of the 90s always alive for me to come an visit   Great times!

If you're concerned that your computer might have a virus, you could just format the hard drive. No virus resists that, ha, ha XD
I do have a number of faithful computers to play my old DOS games, but they are all desktop PCs. I've had them for so long that I wonder how hard it may be to get one of them when I move abroad, as I don't plan on carrying my old desktop computers with me. Is legacy hardware still easy to find?

It's really late tonight. Tomorrow, when I finish work, if nobody has yet posted the pictures, I'll make them

Humm.... Yeah, I see how the system could be unfair in teams. This could be resolved if X-points only affected individual player positions in the season scoreboard, but not team positions. That is, two team mates would not be able to accumulate points for the team by passing each other over and over again. But still, one could help their team members achieve individual higher scores.

Another fix could be that you only get X-points the first time you pass a pipsqueak in that race and you don't get X-points for passing a pipsqueak that's registered this year (to avoid creation of ghosts).

Anyway, this is just one example of what could be done about it. I don't mean to propose something to be implemented just as I imagined. It's an idea that anybody could build upon or modify or get inspired on to create something else. Maybe something very different, but with the same intentions.

About the cars, I agree totally!

About the LTB, this is something that rarely has had any effect on me, since I'm not a top pipsqueak and have never been, but the ideas I'm reading sound good. I would like to also add something that I had thought of in the past for R4K, but never implemented because it doesn't make much sense unless the number of participants is reasonable. This does not have to "replace" LTB; it could go with it. But now that I'm reading, it may be good to replace LTB with podium bonus, plus my idea or something similar. My concept goes something like this:

- We'll call this "X-points" during the explanation
- When the race starts, every player not having posted any replay so far is accumulating zero X-points per time-unit
- When a pipsqueak first posts a replay, if he is not last, he starts accumulating one X-point per time-unit. Any pipsqueak below him from that moment is reset to accumulating zero X-points per unit-time
- If a pipsqueak posts a new replay after having been on the table, his X-point accumulation status will only change if he manages to upgrade his position at least one step, that is, if the new position has more pipsqueaks below than the old position. Otherwise, he'll remain at either zero or one X-point per time-unit

This process sounds cumbersome when anaylised this way, which is the way the system would see it, but if seen qualitatively, it's very simple: you get more X-points if you make sure nobody is surpassing your position and keep updating your position whenever you can. You fall behind in X-points if you just sleep. At the end of the race, these points will reflect your competitiveness. The proportion of value between X-points and podium points can be any that's deemed appropriate and these X-points could have whatever cool name that fits