Fighting Game Difficulty

Lowering difficulty in games has become a recent trend amongst gaming companies. The goal of this tactic is to provide a more welcoming platform for players that are new to the franchise. However, this trend has been met with criticism amongst more experienced veterans of their respective games. This essay will touch upon different games within the fighting game genre that have lowered their overall difficulty, and the positive/negative effects of it

Olfactory Neuroblastoma: Diagnostic Difficulty

Olfactory neuroblastoma is an uncommon malignant tumor of sinonasal tract arising from the olfactory neuro epithelium. The olfactory neuroblastomas presenting with divergent histomorphologies like, epithelial appearance of cells, lacking a neuro fibrillary background and absence of rosettes are difficult to diagnose. Such cases require immunohistochemistry to establish the diagnosis. We describe the clinical features, pathological and immunohistochemical findings of grade IV Olfactory neuroblastoma in a 57 year old ma

Difficulty of distinguishing product states locally

Non-locality without entanglement is a rather counter-intuitive phenomenon in which information may be encoded entirely in product (unentangled) states of composite quantum systems in such a way that local measurement of the subsystems is not enough for optimal decoding. For simple examples of pure product states, the gap in performance is known to be rather small when arbitrary local strategies are allowed. Here we restrict to local strategies readily achievable with current technology; those requiring neither a quantum memory nor joint operations. We show that, even for measurements on pure product states there can be a large gap between such strategies and theoretically optimal performance. Thus even in the absence of entanglement physically realizable local strategies can be far from optimal for extracting quantum information.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

The difficulty of folding self-folding origami

Why is it difficult to refold a previously folded sheet of paper? We show that even crease patterns with only one designed folding motion inevitably contain an exponential number of `distractor' folding branches accessible from a bifurcation at the flat state. Consequently, refolding a sheet requires finding the ground state in a glassy energy landscape with an exponential number of other attractors of higher energy, much like in models of protein folding (Levinthal's paradox) and other NP-hard satisfiability (SAT) problems. As in these problems, we find that refolding a sheet requires actuation at multiple carefully chosen creases. We show that seeding successful folding in this way can be understood in terms of sub-patterns that fold when cut out (`folding islands'). Besides providing guidelines for the placement of active hinges in origami applications, our results point to fundamental limits on the programmability of energy landscapes in sheets.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

What Does Difficulty Mean in the Writing Tutorial?

One year I tutored a student almost weekly. K wrote with little understanding of her topics and less of English grammar. In our first session the following year, she told me that she was enrolled in two third-year Sociology courses and was under academic warning: she needed a C+ average to remain at York. She wanted help with an essay in her course kit that she had volunteered to summarize in a seminar, but then found she did not understand. It was written in fairly demanding sociological prose, and I found a more readable essay in the kit and recommended she change to it. Then I went back to the first essay to see what in particular she didn’t understand. I asked her if she had looked up the word magnitude. “I don’t have a dictionary,” she said. “You have to buy a dictionary now, this minute,” I said. (When students bring in an essay topic they haven’t understood, because they haven’t looked up key words, I assume panic. It doesn’t occur to me they may not own a dictionary.) K did not return. During that last session what I wanted to say was “You have no chance of passing these courses;” instead I told her to get a dictionary. Did the difficulty lie in K or in me? Sometimes the student is recalcitrant, resistant, inadequate to the task. Sometimes the fault lies with us, tutors who make the process more difficult than it need be.University Writing Cente