Day 2 of the Overwatch League Preseason featured an epic five-map slugfest between the LA Gladiators and the London Spitfire.
The Gladiators drew first blood with a hot Junkertown performance. So, going into Map 2, Horizon Lunar Colony, the London Spitfire cool them down with a frosty pocket pick - Mei. Point A goes the way of LA, but the Mei pick ends up being the key for London to shut them down on Point B...FIVE PUSHES IN A ROW. PUSH 1 BigGoose drops the beat and Hydration jumps on Hagopeun, forcing a defensive Trance https://henchmen-studio.com/online-gambling-entertainment/.
Meanwhile, LA’s still grouped near the top choke - a perfect spot for a Mei Blizzard! So, while the LA divers are busy, Rascal FLANKS them, drops his ult, and prevents the rest of LA from following-up. With BigGoose chasing Hagopeun, London don’t have to worry about a Lucio booping their team away from the fight. Rascal even blocks the escape with an Ice Wall, so all LA can do is watch as Rascal makes popsicles out of all of them. PUSH 2 LA make a switch - Lucio for Ana.
The goal: combo NanoBoost with Tac Visor or Dragonblade. It’s a risky pick into 3 London divers because Ana can’t peel as well as Lucio. Gladiators, again, push the topside, but Rascal Walls them off as they try to move in. There’s not much LA can do until it melts, so they’re stuck waiting while London set up a flank. Once the wall melts, LA push in...just as London’s flankers hit their backline. The chaos leaves LA scattered. Trying to salvage the fight, Hydration draws his Dragonblade, but Rascal stops him with a PERFECTLY-TIMED ice wall right before he can jump the London squishies. LIKE, SERIOUSLY. REWIND THAT. LOOK HOW PERFECT THAT TIMING WAS. Forced to reposition without his dash, Hydration gets cleaned up by Fissure, and London mops up the rest of the LA team. Spitfire also traded two LA ults for just one of theirs - holding onto their Blizzard for the next push. PUSH 3 Another LA swap. This time - Genji for Hog. Again, a topside push.
On approach, Rascal drops an Ice Wall that splits the Gladiators, resulting in Bischu’s ult and early death - a crucial kill that will cost LA later in the fight. Rascal tries to follow-up with a Blizzard, but the Gladiators back up just in time. Afterwards, LA kill Hagopeun and Birdring back-to-back for the 5v4. With the advantage, they engage with the NanoVisor, but get jumped by Fury and Fissure. Fissure gets nailed by a sleep dart, but not before he can drop his bubble. This bought NUS enough space to fly in to double-res his teammates, immediately swinging the advantage back to London. The bubble also forced Surefour to reposition with his TacVisor, giving Fury a window to shove him away before he can finish the monkey. This scatter spells disaster for the Gladiators, and they’re, again, cleaned up by London. If Rascal hadn’t killed Bischu at the top of the fight, Bischu would’ve been able to zone London’s divers with his Defense Matrix and Boosters, or even use his ult to counter-engage. But, due to the early pick and the Gladiators’ call to run a comp without a Mercy, the fight’s over as soon as Spitfire double res’d and scattered the Gladiators. PUSH FOUR This fight actually starts off a bit scary for London. Rascal’s holding the top cut when he gets sniped by a Sleep Dart AND a Roadhog hook.
But even with the CC-chain, Rascal still survives with CryoFreeze. As the Gladiators move in, Birdring goes for yet another flank. Once Rascal wakes up, he throws up an Ice Wall to split the LA team in two, and gets away. LA are stuck. Without their backline, the frontline can’t fully commit. And without the frontline, Birdring has a much clearer shot at the squishy backline. Birdring opens fire as the Ice Wall collapses, and the following teamfight is a chaotic one. Birdring gets stopped by Hydration, but Fury finds the kill on LA’s only DPS - Surefour. The fight probably would’ve ended right there, but LA spot Hagopeun overextending, so they jump back in to pinch him and draw his ult. Following London’s Trance, LA engage with their own plus a Whole Hog. But...remember Mei? Still alive! With the LA players in the lower choke, it’s another perfect spot for Rascal to drop his Blizzard and shut the fight down. He gets nailed by a sleep dart, but it doesn’t matter. As he lays there snoozing, he gets to watch his teammates smash the frozen Gladiators to pieces for the fourth teamfight in a row.
Now time’s running low and the Gladiators’ ult economy’s in bad shape. Especially since Bischu just randomly chucked his ult at the end. With the round almost over, they make some last-second changes for their FINAL PUSH. With a Reaper and Lucio now in the mix, Gladiators hit the point HARD. After dodging Fury’s Self-Destruct up top, LA jump straight on-point for the fight and manage to kill four London players. In response, NUS Valks and resurrects both Hagopeun and Fissure, but Hagopeun dies as soon as he comes back up, with NUS dying shortly after. Fissure survives with his Primal Rage, and hops AWAY from the point knowing LA can’t chase him. THIS... is KEY. At this point, London only have three players alive, but they stall PERFECTLY to buy just enough time for the respawns. Still Primal, Fissure circles around and jumps back onto the point, with Fury and Birdring darting in-and-out of the fight just to keep the point contested. This stall buys Rascal JUST ENOUGH TIME to run out and throw out his Blizzard before Cryo-Freezing on point. Hydration kills Rascal as he unfreezes, but it’s too late. Even though the Gladiators dropped the beat right before the Blizzard, it wasn’t enough. BigGoose and Hydration are frozen and killed, swinging the advantage back to London.
Thanks to the Blizzard, Hagopeun, now back from spawn, was able to finish earning HIS ult. He Trances straight into the fight to keep his team alive, and Birdring finds the kill on Shaz - LA’s only-remaining support. WIth both LA supports down and London spawning just meters away, the Gladiators get shut down for the fifth time in a row and fail to capture all of Point B. Make no mistake - these defensive holds were the result of excellent teamwork by all players on the London Spitfire.
But, it still begs the question - Was Rascal’s Mei THE factor that ultimately earned London the map win? Just MEI-BE.

Was it more of his idea, and he handed it off to you? How did that relationship work? MIKE BURROWS: What happened was that he never bothered writing it up. I learned about it from him as a graduate student.
And the years ticked by after that. And he never wrote it up. At the time when I was a student, I thought that it was just one of those things that grad students learn.
And then eventually, I realized, no, this was really special, and the world ought to know about it. When he did it, he did not think of it as a practical algorithm. He thought of it as an algorithm to use to calibrate other algorithms. It wasn't practical for him, because he didn't have a really fast implementation.
And computers at the time were significantly slower. And so it didn't really go fast enough. So I decided that what I should do is write it up myself. And in order to do that, I had to do something. And so I worked with him to make it go fast Casinoslots New Zealand.
And we came up with ways to implement it efficiently. COLT MCANLIS: So I've got to ask you, in the 20 years since this algorithm's invention, what has been the most amazing thing you've seen it applied for? I mean, it's been everywhere, from the Linux operating system to a protocol on the internet.
What's impressed you so much about its use so far? MIKE BURROWS: Well, I suppose the most unexpected thing has been its use in DNA sequencing. It puts together the fragments of DNA that have been sequenced independently very efficiently into a combined whole. But there have been many other advances around it, particularly in ways to do the sorting efficiently, also variance of the transform, one that sorts only limited-length contexts. It turns out that Michael Schindler of the Technical University of Vienna discovered that if you sort the context up to any finite length k, it's still invertible as a transform.
Unfortunately, the inversion takes twice as long, so it's not popular. But it still works. David Scott and Yossi [? Azah ?] managed to find a bijective variant of the transform, where the size of the transform string is exactly the same as the size of the input string. COLT MCANLIS: So you don't need the row index at the end?
MIKE BURROWS: Yes, that's correct. It's a bit more involved and a bit slower to do the compression, but it still works. And that was another surprise for me.
COLT MCANLIS: Give me a little bit of background here. Where did you actually publish the paper originally for this? MIKE BURROWS: There's a funny story about that.
We first of all sent the paper to the Annual Data Compression Conference. But they rejected it. And there were no comments about why they rejected it.
So I wrote to them and asked why they had rejected it. And they told me that it was their policy not to explain why they rejected papers. So we just published it as a technical report. The next year, people at the same conference actually asked me to submit the paper again so that they could publish it. And I said, no.

All right, all right, all right. Calm down. Why don't you hit the showers, and I'll walk the people through the rest of the algorithm, all right? Good job today. Good job. I don't think he's got a shot at that one.
Anyhow, thanks to Magnus, we've got a recreated permutation table alongside a nifty row index that we output during the encoding phase. Since this matrix over there is identical to the post-sorted one from the encoder, the fourth row actually contains the original input string, "BANANA." See?
Pretty easy stuff. Oh, and to be clear, kids, training to be a world champion at sorting requires a lot of practice and dedication. So eat your vegetables and listen to your parents.
MALE SPEAKER: Take one. COLT MCANLIS: How do you make your hair do that? MALE SPEAKER: Lots and lots of gel. COLT MCANLIS: Really? I'm gel-ous, and not just because it's a pun. Nice.
It'll take him a second. In 1994, Mike Burrows and David Wheeler were set up to be the title fight at the second annual UFC championship in Las Vegas, Nevada. But before the fight, while playing a few rounds of pai gow, the two ended up creating the Burrows-Wheeler Transform algorithm.
MIKE BURROWS: That isn't really true. COLT MCANLIS: No, no. No, it is not.
Um-- ha. You know, one of the problems about working at Google is you can't really throw a stone around here without hitting the inventor of some amazing algorithm. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to introduce you to the co-inventor of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform, Mr. Mike Burrows. Mike, it's fantastic to see you. Maybe if you have a second, can you sit down and talk to us a little bit about your algorithm?
MIKE BURROWS: Certainly. I'd like to put you straight about that title fight. COLT MCANLIS: OK. So I guess at the beginning, let's start there. MIKE BURROWS: Well, it really started with David Wheeler.
He was on the faculty of the University of Cambridge, but on sabbatical at Bell Labs, and working on compression. And he came up with the algorithm there. I only learned about it some years later when I became his graduate student.
COLT MCANLIS: In the world of data compression, Burrows-Wheeler Transform just stands alone against everything else. There's nothing really like it. How did you all come up with it? MIKE BURROWS: Well, I asked David what was going through his mind when he came up with it originally.
And he didn't know. He could not explain to me how he came up with that particular algorithm. I got the impression that he was playing around with sorting the contexts of characters that were to be encoded and using that as a good predictor. And then he must have realized that it was possible to invert that sort under certain conditions. COLT MCANLIS: Did you and Mike kind of co-create the article together?

Great form, nice. Remember, clench those abs. Yeah, good, stay with it. Fantastic. MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: All right! Ha ha.
COLT MCANLIS: This kid's good. All right. Now that we've got a sorted table, the next step is to prepend the input string again. So Magnus, another N-N-B-A-A-A, please.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Over there? COLT MCANLIS: Right there. MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Great, man. COLT MCANLIS: This guy kind gets it, right? Good.
Nice. Nice. MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Ah! COLT MCANLIS: Now-- all right. Now that it's there, we've got to do another sort. MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: A sort?
COLT MCANLIS: Another sort. MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: OK. COLT MCANLIS: All right. Now, I'm going to time this one. MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: OK. COLT MCANLIS: This is going to be a good warm up round? MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Yeah.
COLT MCANLIS: All right. Ready? When you're ready, three, two, one, go. MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: OK. Let's go. COLT MCANLIS: Now, remember, you've got to tighten your abs during the sort. You're going to be judged on speed and accuracy here.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Boom! COLT MCANLIS: Fantastic. Look at that. 11 seconds. MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Yeah!
COLT MCANLIS: That's a personal best for this guy. MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Wow! COLT MCANLIS: You're already sorting faster than Michael Phelps. MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: That's great to know. COLT MCANLIS: I agree. So this is how the BWT decode works.
We append our input string across the rows of our input table, then sort, and then continue on until we've recovered our original matrix. So Magnus, ready for the big one? MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Yeah. Yeah, yeah! COLT MCANLIS: All right. So here's what we're going to do.
OK? We're going to do this four more times-- MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Four? COLT MCANLIS: --so we've got six letters in each row. MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Wow! COLT MCANLIS: You think you can do it? MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Yeah!
COLT MCANLIS: Are you ready to do it? MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: I'm ready, ready, ready! COLT MCANLIS: This is for the World Championship! MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Yeah, man!
Let's do it! COLT MCANLIS: Ready? MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Yeah! COLT MCANLIS: Set, go! All right.
Good. Great. Good job. Good job. N-N-B-A-A-A. We're going to get you so many endorsements.
You're almost there, Magnus. Finish strong! Finish strong! Ah!
Oh-oh-oh. Man. Great job, kid.

This recently came up on a forum I sometimes visit. What is it about lay and lie that is so difficult?
There are two basic issues:

1. This is not a problem of two verbs, but of three:
   1. ‘to lie’ = to intentionally say something that is not true
   2. “to lie” (a different verb) = to be in a position in which your body is flat on a surface such as the ground or a bed (but also used as in “there are clothes all over the floor”), This is often used in the phrasal verb form, to lie down
   3. “to lay” = to put something or someone down carefully, especially so that they are or it is lying flat
2. As you can see from the first two infinitives, the verbs share some of the same spelling (these are called homonyms = a word that is spelled the same or sounds the same as another word but has a different meaning), especially because b. & c. are irregularIf I show the infinitives, pasts and past participles, that should show you where the confusion is:
   1. lie lied lied (this is regular)
      I don’t know why, but he always lies to me.
      She lied about her father again and again.
      Have you lied to me again?
   2. lie lay lain (irregular)
      Look, you had better lie down, you look awful.
      As soon as they lay in bed, they fell asleep.
      The tree had lain where it had fallen for many years.
   3. lay laid laid (irregular)
      Lay the patient carefully on the bed over there.
      They laid they new carpet in the lounge, and it looked great.
      The body was laid carefully on the bed.

And how do English people tell the difference? Well, as in any language, it’s in the context, no one ever listens to any single word, but instead to a phrase in the context of a situation etc.
What’s the difference between look (at), watch and see?
All these verbs are related to sight and vision

1. See is the most common of the three verbs and is usually followed by an OBJECT:
   They’ve seen MANY PEOPLE wearing hats.
   John saw ANDREA at the party.
   But it doesn’t always have an OBJECT:
   I can’t see well, so I need to wear glasses.
   See (meaning vision – there are other meanings of see) doesn’t usually take the progressive form, but look (at) can:
   We’ve been looking at churches all day!
   We’ve been seeing churches all day!
2. Watch is used when animals or people look at something (or something happening) over a period of time:
   I’ve been watching the cricket, what have you been doing?
   Last night we watched a film.
3. Look (at) means ‘using eyes for a particular reason.’
   “I want you to look straight into my eyes.”
   He wasn’t looking where he was going.
   Look also refers to appearance when what you are looking at is the SUBJECT:
   SHE looks great in that red dress.
   THE HOUSE has been looking awful for the last few months.