How I Used Calculus to Beat My Kids at Mario Kart 

Next, beat your kids in WII Sports using category theory

While none of the math in the video is wrong, and it was very entertaining and informative, there is some information about the game which is wrong. The reason acceleration is the most important stat in the new Mario kart game is not because you actually accelerate faster but because it is linked to the mini turbo you get when holding a trigger and doing a turn. They will charge faster, last for longer and go faster if you have high acceleration. Outside of this fact though, and at levels of play where the mini turbo is not being optimized, like the casual environment where the game is probably best enjoyed your observation is correct! Top speed will beat out pure acceleration!

I always picked High Acceleration Low Speed because I originate from the Wii age, where the bots would hit you every 15 seconds with a shell or a banana or something, so going from zero to sixty was pretty important when you're reduced to zero so often

You forgot that the type of circuit is also a factor, more curves means accelaration is better, longer straight segments means speed is better.

You’ve convinced me to get good at math. Once I become a physicist I will dedicate a speech to this video.

Your mathmatical reasoning isn't wrong, but if you found yourself capable of holding top speed for long in Mario Kart, then you're either playing 50ccm or your kids just don't know how to use items. In my experience with 200ccm, but also mostly with 150ccm, you don't hold top speed for more than 5s before drifting, getting hit by an item or both. Also in 200ccm especially, high top speed may be detrimental because you can no longer handle the curves. To sum it up, your mathmatical intuition is correct, but your and your children's Mario Kart skills seem to be lacking.

In my experience playing the game Usually you never get top speed Either because you got hit, there is a curve, a wall, a obstacle, a random lightning Acceleration is much more important because recovering from getting destroyed is much more important than staying in first place ( a single blue shell and you are done after all) But as a engineering student, seeing the aplication of what i learned in something i put so much time into is really cool Very good video!

None of the math in this video is wrong, but there is a main issue here that comes from lack of experience and knowledge of the game itself. Speed (at least Ground and Anti-Gravity speed types) is definitely better than Acceleration (even if Acceleration is not as bad as you could think because in this game you get hit a lot so there isn't just one time where you have to start from a speed of 0), but there is another stat in the game that is better than Speed: Mini-Turbo. This stat is hidden (not shown in the kart select screen) because seems like Nintendo loves trolling (thanks Nintendo). This stat is visible in many Combo Builders you can find online... they will also show you the other hidden stats: all the four types for both Speed and Handling (Ground and Anti-Gravity Speed being particularly important) and Invincibility (this is arguably the worst stat in the game so don't worry about it). The way this game is designed makes high Acceleration combos also have high Mini-Turbo (most characters and vehicles parts increase Mini-Turbo and Acceleration together with very similar scaling), that's why your kids were picking combos with low speed but high acceleration: they actually were aiming to get high Mini-Turbo. Mini-Turbo and Ground Speed are both S Tier stats but Mini-Turbo is better for most tracks, so turns out that the best overall meta combo for frontrunning (the basic strategy of the game that consists on going forward and staying in a top ranking like any conventional race) aims at getting the highest sum of Mini-Turbo and Ground Speed, but since there are many combos that reach the same maximum value the best one among them is the one that has the highest Mini-Turbo. This combo is the one which uses: - Character: Peach, Daisy, Yoshi, Birdo or Peachette (they all have same stats) - Vehicle: Teddy Buggy [Read note below] - Tires: Rollers or Azure Rollers (they have same stats) - Glider: Cloud Glider, Paper Glider, Flower Glider or Parachute (they have same stats) [Note] There is also Cat Cruiser that has the same stats with more Invincibility but everyone prefers Teddy Buggy because it has a smaller Hitbox meaning that you're less likely to get hit. There are also other two vehicles (Yoshi Bike and Comet) with smaller Hitbox and more Invincibility than the Teddy Buggy, but they are still sub-optimal because they have a different drifting style: they are Inward Drift bikes. There are two drift types in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and you probably remember that from Mario Kart Wii: Outward (Outside) and Inward (Inside). Outward is the "normal" drift style used by most vehicles in this game, and it's very similar to a car drift in real life. Inward is the drift style of a special category of vehicles in this game: Sport Bikes. It isn't really a drift, the vehicle just takes the turn by leaning inside and you cannot take the turn wider once you start the drift. The way Inward Drift is designed in this game makes it generally worse than Outward Drift because it's less versatile and you cannot pull off some techs that make you faster (like Super-Bounces). Maybe you remember that in Mario Kart Wii it was the opposite: Inward Drift bikes like the Flame Runner used to be the best (in that game Inward Drift was way more versatile and had more turning capability, making it better than Outward Drift by miles). So, we're finally at the end and you're probably asking yourself this question: "Why did my high-speed combos feel better against my kids? How did I manage to beat them?" There are two answers: - First of all this game is extremely balanced (unlike Mario Kart Wii that was broken and unbalanced as hell), so your driving skills matter way more than optimising your stats. You probably just have been a better driver than your kids (even if you don't think so). I guess you're all playing casually, so that's not unexpected. - Your kids are not pros, and you're not a pro either, meaning that none of you are currently able to squeeze the most out of that Mini-Turbo stat. There are many advanced techs that work around charging Mini-Turbos, so the Mini-Turbo stat is really important. Considering the casual environment of the races against your kids, Speed is actually better than Mini-Turbo because you can always squeeze everything from that stat: all you need is pressing "A". Hope this explaination can be useful for you... and maybe your kids will learn something new as well. To conclude this comment, here are some useful links: - Mario Kart 8 Deluxe combo builder: mk8dxbuilder.com/ - Mario Kart 8 Deluxe stats and translation tables: www.mariowiki.com/Mario_Kart_8_Deluxe_in-game_statistics Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Characters Tier List (made by me): www.reddit.com/r/mariokart/s/Qf2Yiet4LZ

The strongest sorcerer of today (8 minutes of calculus) vs the strongest sorcerer of all time (Funky Kong flame runner)

Khan Academy escapee

It's wild to me that your kids went for high-acceleration build! When I was a lad playing Mario Kart Wii, I always tried to go for high speed because, in my mind, the whole point of racing was to go as fast as possible. The speed stat absolutely achieves this, but it's certainly not the only important stat

I’m not sure if this is too “common knowledge” to make a video about, but in monopoly, understanding statistics concepts is very helpful. For example, knowing the expected value of 2 side sided die is 6 (helpful for predicting where ur opponents might land), and understanding that not every square has an equal chance of being landed on.

my brother in christ its a fucking triangle

does watching this count as studying for my ap calc exam in 1 week?

I've used math for two games: Clash Royale and Clash of Clans. For Clash Royale I made an excel table and populated it with all 100+ card stats. The problem with Clash Royale, though, was that every card had some unique function which made it hard to generalize. However, I focused mostly on damage per second, hitpoints and cost. My approach was: find winning/losing 1v1's and find cost-efficient cards that can make up for a card's weaknesses. For Clash of Clans I went to excel again, fed it with all of the defenses' stats and worked out the most efficient progress order. The idea is to promote defenses with a better ratio of cost per damage per second gained per upgrade. Obviously, there are different approaches but I was focusing more on damage output *gained" per upgrade.

6:23 reminds me of the into to the Numb3rs show: "Math is more than formulas and equations. It's logic, it's rationality, it's using your mind to solve the biggest mysteries we know"

The real reason was because you were playing against kids

Hi, very cool video. Like previously said, the most important stat in mario kart 8 deluxe is the mini turbo which is hidden (thanks Nintendo). However you should also considerate your strategy. You could front run and be at first place all the time but you are more likely to be hit by an item. So you need better acceleration to be back at speed. You could also wait in the back of the field, waiting for good items (rocket, triple mushroom) and make a finishing sprint to win at the last moment. In this case, maximum speed is better. Thanks for the video !

The non-math related reason for top speed being better than acceleration: A lot of items (Mushroom, Golden Mushroom, Star, and Bullet Bill), as well as boost pads will get you close or onto your top speed with no need to worry about acceleration speeds

I wish math in school was about problem solving like this rather than numbers and algebra.

In Dragon Age Inquisition there are "constellation" puzzles, that pretty much all of them can be solved with the eulerian tour theorem

Gamers, the time has come to learn calculus.

Another thing to consider is the cc level. 200 cc high acceleration is better because the top speed is so high that characters never reach it

There's also the opportunity to graph the frontier of optimal possibilities. Perhaps even in multiple dimensions to include the incredibly important boost stat. Any point along the frontier is Pareto efficient. And the expected frequency of spin outs can determine where along the frontier is best for you.

Couldn't you just treat the accelerated part as a triangle?

Another thing is that acceleration helps with drifts & there are a lot of twists & turns which harm the top speed, not to forget items hitting you.

One problem I’ve been puzzling over for a couple days takes place in Guilty Gear: Strive. One character, Bedman, has two attacks where he shoots a projectile at the opponent’s center of mass. A common strategy that players use is jumping into the air and then firing one of these projectiles over and over again. Normally, when playing a large character or a slow character, this is a problem. However, picking the small, fast ninja means that you can just sprint forwards and it’ll go right over your head. After I thought about it for a bit, I realized it’s a related rates problem. You take the running speed of the character, or v’(t). Then, you find the change in Theta of the angle between the two characters. If the change in Theta in the time it takes for the projectile to reach its target is greater than the angle that it can cover, you are able to safely run underneath it. If not, then you can’t. That was when I was thinking, “this is sick! calculus works in video games too?”

Cool video! Brings me back to playing Mario kart with you. A part of me wants to play you again and see how well I do now.

There is definitely a big difference in the top combos of MK Wii and MK8. In MK Wii, all vehicles are more than capable enough of staying on the track, with very little difference in the effectiveness of mini turbos. In MK8, vehicle combos have a hidden mini turbo stat with a huge effect on mini turbo effectiveness, with faster vehicles usually having low mini turbo and also low handling, making them hard to control and bad at building up mini turbos. The coins also complicate things massively. With high acceleration, you can be the first to pick up coins on the track, increasing your top speed. If you collect 10 coins right away, you will have a higher top speed than a high speed combo, so a high acceleration can allow you to snag those first few coins, putting you ahead for a long time. Because most of the tracks will have you constantly building up mini turbos in MK8, having a high mini turbo stat leads to much faster times than just fast top speeds on most tracks. Factoring in items and the difficulty of driving high speed combos with low handling, you will also likely get off the track and collide with obstacles much more frequently with high top speed combos, and whenever you fall off the track or get hit by an item, you lose lots of time to anyone with high acceleration. Of course, there are lots of exceptions with tracks where there are lots of boost panels and few turns, where top speed is way better, since top speed also increases boost panel speed. In general, I think MK8 is a lot more balanced, with a web of complicated stats and factors such as the track shape and difficulty, coins, boost panels and more having varying effects on the usefulness of each stat. In MKWii, the Flamerunner is just the best no matter what.

I've played a racing game called GRIP (which is similar to mario kart in many ways) and I can attest that having high top speed is actually detrimental there most of the time. You can go very fast, so fast that you can easily lose control and bump into obstacles or fly off the map, so the better cars tend be more in the middle of the line with good traction. And depending on the map you play, having a car with high acceleration and low top speed is actually better because these maps don't allow you to frequently reach top speed.

That was a really nice and intuitive video, I've never played Mario Kart but I understood everything I needed in order to grasp the problem! I really like this style of video, I'm going to check out more of your work! The one time I remember being proud of the math I used to get an advantage in video games was in modded minecraft. There are processes that produce an given amount of a resource with a chance to consume the input. My question was "How much does one input produce on average before getting consumed?". It's one process for sure, plus one process if the input was not consumed, plus one process if the input was not consumed a second time, etc. I was in high school and didn't know about geometric series, but I ended up finding empirically that 1/(1-p) was the average amount of processes executed with a single input, with p the probability of not consuming the input. I could then setup factories without worrying about buffers overflowing, and I could easily compare the efficiency of various processes with an easy formula for the average! I was blown away a couple of years later once I learned about geometric series and realised why my formula worked. Not really game related but around the same time, I was wondering about the likelihood of coming across molecules in a single tablet of homeopathy. Much later I showed that it followed the limit of a binomial law and calculated it, but I didn't know about the Poisson law at the time either. When I learned about it in college, I was very proud to see in my classes the proof I had already found.

Games and math... that's how we should study this in school. If learning isn't fun or at least interesting, our education system has failed us. This bourgeiose mentality of learning through suffering/frustration must end. Having fun IS learning.

I remember something like this in Physics just using kinematics. You could use these three equations to get displacement, assuming the perfect scenario, like in the graphs. t=(v_f-v_i)/a, time until max velocity is reached d_1=v_it+.5at^2, displacement for time during linear acceleration d_2=v_ft, displacement for time at a constant velocity or the ugly combined formula d=v_ft+(v_i(v_f-v_i))/a+((v_f-v_i)^2)/(2a), extra parenthesis to avoid division confusion All you need is: starting velocity(v_i, 0 most of the time), max velocity(v_f), acceleration(a), time spent at max velocity(t, used in lower and combined formula). There is technically a fourth - implemented into the combined formula - adding d_1 and d_2 to get the total displacement, the value you will be comparing to find the optimal build. However, after realizing mini-turbos exist in this game, this math is admittedly kind of pointless. Edit: Forgot 2a 💀

There are other factors to consider, of course, but this is a decent general rule. Other factors to consider include: 1) The top speed of karts change with your coin count, and the top speed of a minimum speed kart with 10 coins is equal to the top speed of the max speed kart with 0 coins. This means a minimum speed kart player could make it their goal to try and prevent top speed players from getting too many coins, either by trying to remain in front of them and grabbing as many coins as possible, or by trying to hit them in situations they otherwise might not have to. 2) It doesn't account for skill in various areas such as driving optimal lines, knowing how to take shortcuts both with or without mushrooms, getting maximum utilization of mini turbos (And mini turbo is an additional secret stat. A high acceleration kart with high mini turbo can be a LOT better than a high speed kart with low mini turbo if used right), or using/dodging powerups effectively. Powerup usage can be a REALLY big factor in some cases, actually. For example, if you are in a glider section and a blue shell is coming for you, it is more time-efficient to get with WHILE in the air (above ground) because it makes you spin out instead of getting flipped like when you're on the ground, which has a longer recovery time. If you CAN'T get above ground, nose-dive into the void because Lakitu will give you immunity to the blue shell explosion, so instead of waiting for the explosion AND Lakitu, you only have to wait for Lakitu. I won a race against multiple high speed karts in a high acceleration one by taking near-perfect turns, getting mini turbo boost even on straight sections, maxing my coin counter as fast as possible, and hitting the player who broke away in front of me with a red shell in an optimal time. What was that time? I waited until AFTER their powerup had been revealed to be a coin (since my red shell would have gotten there late if I threw immediately) AND when they were in a glider section above a pit. That caused them to void out and need to get saved by Lakitu, which is MUCH slower than just getting hit and continuing, especially if Lakitu screws you over with respawn point. With those features of my play style, I finished with half a lap on everyone (and keep in mind, these weren't little Timmies or new players online, this was an in-person local tournament with people who were at a comparable skill level and age to me. I just made better use of some of those game-changing techniques in that race).

I've been saying stuff like this for a long time! You use calculus to compare two functions as they go out in time, and that can make you choose the better item in a video game. It can also help you figure out the fastest way to make a turn. You don't need numbers to do this, you just need to compare the area of the two triangles, like you did. I love this! Pokemon is full of math for winnint strategies.

"sir, i just wanted to play mario kart"

Catan is pure math, knowing about the odds of numbers being drawn from rolling 2 6sided dice. And thinking about dice for exemple, many table top rpg forces you to think about probability to maximize your damage

This is a great video! It really helped me understand what it means to apply the concepts of math! Its also fun to learn about mario kart lol! God bless you and your family!

This is a lesson in how good math can lead to wrong conclusions due to missing variables. There is a hidden stat that influences how fast a mini turbo charges up, and low speed/high acceleration carts usually have a better turbo stat than fast carts. Counterintuitively this means that slow carts in practice are actually faster when nothing is going wrong. It's the low acceleration carts that are better at catching up because their high speed gets multiplied by power ups (mushrooms, stars, etc) that are only available when you're losing.

I still remember the Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 days, arguing over attachment combinations on the guns and the hitrater results. good times

Thanks for giving a simple, real-world example of calculus! It's been a year since I took an integral, so this was a nice refresher. Hopefully I'll find more uses for calculus in my area of interest, oscilloscope music!

really enjoyed this video! I didn't think of it as calculus in the moment, but had a similar but opposite experience prioritizing acceleration/handling (bc my friends and I love 200cc)

just discovered your videos , you are one of the small bunch that can make math fun !!!

I used to play Double Dash (the GameCube version) and after a while I decided to go for the heavy cars. I realized that my most common delay was falling off the road, and the most common cause was being kicked out by others. And in fact that really improved my game 😌

My preferred combos are shy guy bone rattler, monster wheels and plane glider or sometimes i use dry bowser instead for faster speeds

Hi! I really liked the video, especially the conclusion you made at the end, on how you are able to use the ideas and concepts for your reasoning, on your daily life, without actually sitting down and calculate. I love philosophy, and the same thing happens to me, exactly like you with maths; I notice on my day to day basis how this subject helps me with my thinking so much. I don’t particularly like mathematics, but the conclusion you made at the end made me appreciate it a lot more. Maybe I would love to see some more content regarding this, in the future! :)

Most top players in MK usually suggest going for some acceleration that’s at least decent, because getting hit happens very frequently, especially in online matches where all your opponents know what they’re doing (as opposed to bots which usually hold on to their shells for no reason for a really long time, often losing them on defense or to a Boo/shock).

Desktop Dungeons for sure. Loads of quick mathematics, it's beautiful.

The thing that also matters greatly is the invisible mini turbo stat, which affects boost distance, a lot of competitive players try and boost this stat and acceleration while leaving top speed behind

As others have mentioned, the mini turbo stat tends to be the best, with a high speed stat even being suboptimal in some of the older Mario Kart games. This is mainly because of the frequency of mini turbos and how their activation has changed. In Mario Kart Double Dash and DS specifically, the optimal strategy is to continuously chain mini turbos together in what is known as snaking. In contrast to the newer games where heavier characters with better top speeds are optimal, older Mario karts’ meta were lighter characters with high accelerations and low top speeds, because the mini turbo bonus outweighed the default max speed you could reach. Newer Mario Karts handle drifts much differently, meaning you can’t perform them nearly as much anymore, hence why speed has become more defining

Hell Let Loose is a game where i've used maths a good bit when using artillery as it is purely number crunching, you can use an online calculator for it but its a lot more fun to do it yourself

In helldivers2, you use worms style arcs to place gernades and stratagems. You can also use angle of impact to determine penetration or ricochet. For example bug with armored legs and face. Create an angle to ricochet the round off the inner leg and into the soft bits.

You do a great job of explaining calculus concepts, and I do agree with your explanation of why we technically didn't do Calculus in the video, but i feel like the math actually done in the video can be equated to Algebraic levels of physics. As a current physics student, this was taught at the beginning of the curriculum without any Calculus involved, only slope and area. Otherwise, I love your work and am glad that it inspires people to pursue maty and science in their life. P.S. the Mini turbo stat is the most important stat for experienced players but was hidden in Mario Kart 8. It was around back in the Mario Kart wii days.

no wonder why you are a professor! your explanation is so good!

6:18 nah, this is exactly what I’m doing in intro to calc.

I have used trigonometry to explain how to approach a specific jump for a shortcut in crash team racing. The jump is only barely possible so making sure the distance is the smallest possible is important.

So that's why there are so many pitfalls, sharp curves, and items that can stop you in your tracks in order to balance out this considerable advantage that high speed low acceleration karts have, making the only real advantage player's can have become their own overall driving skills in general.

The way I look at it is, you can look at one of these cart scenarios in terms of position, or velocity, or acceleration. Calculus is what lets you switch between the three.

Those are things that I have been thinking about for a while, but I have found that the actual number increase in either max speed of acceleration are large factors. For most Mario Kart games I have found that higher acceleration is better while learning the tracks, because it helps to recover from mistakes and getting hit by items, and higher max speed is better when I am good enough that I am not going to make mistakes and that I will be able to avoid all items that can be avoided. But there have been exceptions. For some games the max speed difference is so large and the acceleration difference so small that even while learning the tracks going for max speed gave me better results. There have been games where the CPU are so aggressive with items and the tracks tricky enough that, at least while playing GP, there will always be a track where going for acceleration is worth it, so I just put up with having less of an advantage on other tracks. This is mostly just going by feel though. I have always wanted to take the time to actually measure it, but I have never been able to sit down and take numbers. I definitely agree that there are concepts in calculous that most people would benefit from knowing about, even if they don’t have the formal knowledge to do all the calculations. Rates of change and how rates of change can have rates of change in particular is a concept that I keep seeing people making bad decisions because they don’t even have a general intuitive understanding of.

Math was great for Neopets. The horse race bet payouts sometimes made it possible to guarantee the worst you could do was break even.

I was really into playing as Isabelle with the Tri-Speeder and Azure Roller or Cyber Slick tires in MK8, especially on 200cc; in higher engine classes, your handling becomes incredibly important to remaining on-course, and playing a Light character reduces the amount of time spent correcting your course if you're knocked off the track or into the rough.

thanks for posting this I got to take calculus next fall and I am a bit nervous

The thing is that high acceleration recovers better from the huge load of items that can hit you than speed, this and the mini turbo factor explained in another commentary makes acceleration a little bit better

This is a great example of calculus in every day life. If you throw out the assumption that most of the track is driven at top speed (like the hardcore gamers in the comments suggest), I think it could open up a whole bunch of possibilities for other interesting math topics.

I usually use the combination of Yoshi, Sports coupé, azure rollers and MKTV paraglider. It might not be the best mathematically, but I stick to it to get a feel for driving

Thank you,I This video helped me with a homework that I didn't understand.

Playing manual on Wii is optimal because of the mini turbos, which get a secret boost from the acceleration stat, so interestingly a high acceleration is better in most cases. For Mario kart 8 deluxe this is even more so the case as snaking is a strategy that basically makes sure you’re always in a mini turbo (even on straightaways) so high acceleration is best in most cases. If the acceleration stat did not directly affect the time to charge a mini turbo as well as the duration of the mini turbo, you would be absolutely correct. Another thing to consider is how often you are hit by items. If you’re stopped a lot from that, having a better acceleration would give you the best chance. Good video!

Civilization is basically a math based game. In the later games, calculating the probabilities of causing damage is essentialvto know which units to deploy, how many are needed, and what order to attack the opponent with.

competitive mmorpgs in general have a lot of excel sheets behind them, looking for what's called 'min-maxing', optimizing everything

As someone with a deeper knowledge of why acceleration is actually better, this hurts not just by brain but also my heart

Not necessarily as directly correlative as Mario kart, but the Wii sports resort archery accuracy can be intuitively understood as the path integral for distance between moment the arrow is released from the bow and when it hits the target. Minimizing this integral means less energy is expended during the flight of the arrow, which (I think) means ALWAYS prioritizing using the highest releasing velocity as possible, as wind resistance and wind speed influences the path of the arrow

Coins do more for your top speed than your top speed stat btw. So it's fully viable to use low speed combos just to get more mini turbo. With soft drifting you can also use drifting to acelerate as if you always had a mushroom. That makes it so good players in this game only use mushrooms for shortcuts and blueshell dodging.

Nice video, i love the explain. You're a great teacher.

Interesting video, nice way to show what the intuition tells us (when we think about it). Not perfectly applied to Mariokart because of how complex the game is, but still very interesting.

Amazing, I did and redo calculus many times because I love it, and this video gave me lot of insights

I use maths for building magic the gathering decks all the time. Very useful for knowing how likely I am to draw lands vs spells

The hidden stat called mini-turbo is arguably the most important stat in the game

Gold metal mario on the city tripper with azure rollers and the standard kite. Good acceleration but still some weight, plays nicely in 200 CC

This is very much the case for irl racing as well. One must choose if they're going to accelerate out of a corner first, or are they going to bank on high speed and pull ahead on sections of straight roads. The choice very much delends on yhe type of track and how many corners exist.

Regarding other games, I’d say that any RPG that shows the player’s health bar is helped by conceptual math. In competitive Pokemon, you can get a visual of how much damage you’ve done, which reveals certain information about nature and defensive EV spreads of the opponent’s pokemon. This comes with experience of course, by memorizing how much damage x attack should do to y pokemon if they’re investing completely in bulk, none at all, or somewhere in the middle.

anyone who has learned calculus and didnt already know this was failed by our school systems. Awesome educational and entertaining content

I don't know if it's because I was taught well or if it simply was natural to me, but it felt very intuitive that the calculus was used without anti derivatives or functions(though I did expect them to appear eventually to get a more precise calculation to get a better idea of when it's worth it and when not; but seeing as it's pretty casual it makes sense to not go that far) the rough location of the "equal distance" point/the y representing speed also felt obvious, but maybe it's because I was taught the subject not that long ago... that aside, I certainly enjoyed the video. thank you very much!

4:27 I think the reason for many students getting this wrong is that they heard "When will the blue kart be faster than red kart?" instead of "When will the blue kart PASS the red kart?" because in the first question, the answer they gave would be correct but that was not the question asked.

You have made a video about something I learned in Mario Kart about 30 years ago.

The easy way to find the area under the curve you drew is to drop a line down from the vertex where you reach top speed and calculate the area of the triangle and rectangle you made.

Perfect video to fall asleep too. Thank you

Now this is the type of content that youtube is meant for!

Wait till he hears how mini turbos work

It should be noted that if your kids are crashing or falling off often, the high acceleration may be beneficial due to how often their speed hits 0.

I have a friend that literally plays the highest acceleration combo with the intent of essentially becoming a time bomb versus your own skill with a normal kart

Early Street Fighter 4 was dominated by frame data knowledge. Basic Integer Addition was the name of the game. And once players understood the input method of "plinking", the game's hardest combos were not just accessible to everyone, but were easier to perform. And then there was the geometrt of hitboxes and hurt boxes. As a math teacher, myself. I would like to see this video.

You need to know how much time will you spend at top speed vs how much time you will spend accelerating. Also in mario kart you need to take into account all the stops and slows that you are getting applied constantly, the rubberband effect and the object pool wich will make you target of blue shells for being first

I use math in Pokemon all the time. I calculate damage for pokemon survival vs attacks a lot. One thing I generally found is regardless of base stats investing in both defense stat in question and HP results in lower %damage take. Sometimes it’s a lot in one stat over the other but often enough slight tweaks can change a lot in surviving a lot vs never or little of the time.

I remember Colin McRae rally - some tracks /time attacks could be went with high speed and hard suspension. But some had to have best acceleration and softer springs. Not only because of tight and slow turns, but rocky surface. And there was a damage component too. Calculus is part of physics and engineering.

The thing is acceleration isn't the priority. Mini turbo is.

There’s a few ways to play to win. One is your strategy. Now if you treat the game like how a race team would. (2 racers per team. One with a tanky slow build and the other as an accelerator build your strategy for success increases. In the game last place get more AOE affected items and boost. Where as top positions get tactical aim items. So if you have a teammate who sabotages all players and another who accelerates fast (recovery time) then you have the winning strategy over speed by relying on recoverability. The true winning strategy to competitive video games is a strong focused on counter play. If your kids want to beat you they should focus on denying you speed.

Fortune Street on Wii gives you a hige advantage if you understand math well. Some basic probability and algebra can definitely help mitigate the luck portion of the gameplay.

this was a really enjoyable and interesting watch even if it’s a surface level look at the game the actual best stat is hidden, and it’s called mini-turbo. It’s how quickly you can charge sparks while drifting as well as how long the boosts last despite this and what other comments mentioned this basic concept is good to know for outside mario kart, and using mario kart to deliver it kept it intuitive and fun

My go to is a heavy character like DK or waluigi, on the flame rider with Azure roller wheels and the default glider. It has higher speed, higher acceleration, and inside drifting allowing me to cut corners better as well.

Love this video! The next step is to then use Data Science/Analytics to tell you how often you're having to restart based on the map and skill level of opponents (thus needing to accelerate more). Combine the two for the perfect combo!