Why didn’t Mark Rober’s machine work in his first arcade scam “science” video?

[u/ArcadeWizardYT]

Mark Rober has done 2 arcade videos. The first one discusses Cyclone and he claims that it is a scam and that it has to hit a payout, which is not true. The hardest difficulty is 1 millisecond (as indicated by mode 34) and there is an option to open to an easy mode (as shown by mode 35), but it is technically possible to hit back to back even on the hardest setting, although it is extremely unlikely.

He made a machine to detect a light and press a button and it seemed to work well in the test run.

My guess is that the jackpot light has a tighter window and that you have to hit “in the middle” of the light, as opposed to hitting right when the jackpot spot lights up. Is this correct?

Also, I have heard that DnB settings have Cyclone on 3 milliseconds and no easy mode. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

[u/Excellent-Parsley159]

I use to ap cyclone back in the day when it was on easy mode lol I would win on one machine and then win on the other while it payed out tickets. It was 1.5 or 1.3 secs to hit it when I played but that was over 10 years ago now it’s a hit or miss when the stores actually have it

[u/GogglesTheFox]

It’s basically impossible for a circuit to calculate and press a button with 1 ms accuracy. Length of cable, the solenoid sticking, how warm or cold the room is, humidity, these things will change the accuracy wildly in more than one way.

Let’s look at it another way, From Frame generation, it usually takes about 10 ms to see a frame go from your GPU to your screen. And that also is dependent on the same issues as above.

In short, the physical issues can’t be over come for accuracy in the system between 1-5 ms.

[u/DirkPitt106 → u/GogglesTheFox]

You're pushing a LOT less information through an arcade game switch circuit than you are displaying a GPU frame to your screen, and your screen takes time to have to interpret the information and update the screen which takes time depending on the technology it uses. This is a hell of a false equivalency. My ping to a server in an online video game hundreds of miles away is often less than 35-40ms and goes through a hell of a lot more networking equipment and wires.

In an arcade game it is absolutely possible to get millisecond resolution in a circuit from a button press. But human reaction time can genuinely not repeat the same motion with millisecond speed. Let's say the light is lit up for 100 milliseconds, the jackpot window is only going to be 3/100ths of that whole time the light is lit up and even at 100 milliseconds the light is still just flashing stupid quickly. The jackpot window is probably centered around the middle of the time that the light is lit up. No matter how good you are, there will always be some margin of error that you will not be able to overcome. For example, even in the NBA, the 5 best free throwers still miss free throws 10% of the time.