How lucky is too lucky?: The Minecraft Speedrunning Dream Controversy Explained
Buy my book Humble Pi now!
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo...
UPDATE: Harvard Book Store have totally sold out.
My talk on 4 February 2021 at Harvard Book Store:
www.harvard.com/event/virtual...
Here is the original accusation against Dream.
Video: • Did Dream Fake His Spe...
Paper: mcspeedrun.com/dream.pdf
And here is Dream's reply.
Video: • Video
Paper: drive.google.com/file/d/1yfLU...
"Matt flips a coin 100 times."
• Matt flips a coin 100 ...
"Holy Craps! How a Gambling Grandma Broke the Record"
content.time.com/time/nation/a...
Number of casinos in the world in 2011: 3,547
www.statista.com/statistics/2...
Roulette records.
www.roulette17.com/stories/re...
CORRECTIONS
- At 09:08 I say “1 in 110 trillion” when I meant to say “1 in 110 billion”. The number on the screen is correct, it was just a verbal slip-up.
- At 25:27 I showed the 118 craps record as “1 in 1.2 × 10^9” when it should be “1 in 2.2 × 10^9”. The voiceover says the correct number.
- I slip and “more likely” instead of “less likely” at 33:47 (I think I may have even been going for “more unlikely”). But everything in the screen is correct.
- Let me know if you spot any more mistakes!
Thanks to my Patreon supporters who mean I can spend [[REDACTED]] hours filming myself trying to achieve improbably things. If you support me, you can get access to all [[REDACTED]] hours of bonus footage from this episode.
/ standupmaths
As always: thanks to Jane Street who support my channel. They're amazing. And I believe they have no opinion on Dream.
www.janestreet.com/
Endless filming by Matt Parker
Editing by Alex Genn-Bash
Some graphics by Ben Sparks
Minecraft consultancy by Oliver Dunk
Music by Howard Carter
Design by Simon Wright and Adam Robinson
MATT PARKER: Stand-up Mathematician
Website: standupmaths.com/
US book: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo...
UK book: mathsgear.co.uk/collections/b...
I’m not commenting on how many takes that took. But feel free to guess! (And if you must know: the complete footage of every attempt will be uploaded to Patreon. patreon.com/standupmaths )
I would of had a green screen as a background and rendered a background with a dartboard in post. ;)
I’m impressed that you didn’t screw it up by smiling when it eventually happened... very cool head!
I've send you an attempted proof of the collatz conjecture mind checking it out? I need your help with part of the proof.
It was just one take right? You just got lucky!
i assume it is close to 0010(in binary) multiplied by cubic root of parkers square. Right?
I feel bad for dream, he can't even go for a 5 minute walk without getting struck by lightning ten times
He struck himself
If you think that's lucky, wait until you see the five runs that were even luckier than he was by entire minutes
Dont worry he will win the lottery 10 times in a row to pay for his hospital bills
@@mobiusone6994 which ones?
@@semicolon2599 The top six for the current version of minecraft
'I'm not saying he's cheating. I'm just saying if the _entire population of Earth played an entire game of minecraft every second for a hundred years,_ he's still many orders of magnitude luckier than any of them would probably have gotten.'
actually, you're *still kind of understating it* . If the entire population of Earth played *33* games of minecraft every second for a hundred years...
@@XCC23 why 33?
@@squibble311 dream had 33 runs in which he started killing blazes.
@Aquaintence Buddy Yeah. That's mostly just a rounding up to make a better upper limit + making the math nicer, but the speedrun vs series of six streams is an actual difference.
"Well, dream is a god then" - Dream stans
"So you're saying there's a chance!" is basically Dream's entire defense, btw. Which is hilarious.
he's got a better chance at winning the lottery everyday than being innocent
Well… there’s always a chance. Theres a chance that a 1 in 10^1000000000009 will happen to me right now. But it’s not likly to happen
there's a achance that every particle in my body will quantum tunnel to jupiter but hey
@@vwlz8637 BUT IT COULD HAPPEN
Dream is not a Minecraft developer so cant manipulate RNG. He could not change the RNG even if he wanted to. You just don't know the story and how Minecraft works.
"I wasn't cheating" "Well, I was cheating, but I didn't know I was cheating" "Well, I knew I was cheating, but I thought someone else set up the cheats for me"
And people still forgave him.
🤢
@@domenpodlesnik7599 Sure, it's fine to forgive him, and to enjoy his content. Just from now on, don't trust him to be honest about stuff like this. 🤷♂️
@@mhelvens Dream also has accused another speed runner of cheating. He was proven wrong but to this day has refused to retract his accusation or admit he was wrong.
@@crypt5129 I really don’t think that video is as definitive as it presented itself to be. Don’t get me wrong, love karl and his work, but this topic is still heavily up for debate. It shed a lot of light on stuff not talked about often, but a lot of the evidence was FROM the guy being accused, hearsay, and inferences. Which is valid pieces of evidence, but there’s still room for plausible doubt I think my biggest problem though is the defense of his reaction to the problem near the end. There is no excuse for how much of a manchild dream was, and the amount of neglect he had for the moderators well being and his fan base’s rabid attacks. He has way too much influence than he knows what to do with and he can’t responsibly handle it
The missing bracket just means that the rest of the paper, and indeed the rest of all existence after you started reading the formula, is now part of the formula.
)
@@EebstertheGreat THANK YOU
@@nevs0917 _FINALLY_ i can die in peace
@@EebstertheGreat (
@@Stonewall42 ) no
Dream when he’s walking down the street and suddenly wins the lottery while simultaneously getting struck by lightning and then is eaten by a shark:
Funnily enough this has similar odds to what dream accomplished in his "speedruns"
Odds of Winning the Lottery: 1 in 302.5 Million Odds of Getting killed by a Shark: 1 in 264.1 Million Odds of Being struck by Lightning: 1 in 500,000 Multiplied Together: 1 in 2.5 * 10^23, which is just 1 order of Magnitude less likely than Dream's luck.
@arrsea not by much, it’s actually pretty damn close.
@@jasonlewis4438 Winning the lottery is definitely not "just" 1 in 302.5 Million, so you could easily pick a lottery with a more favorable chance of winning, making the original statement true. By doing that you would have made the joke better, instead of trying to ruin it :-(
@@moa-wg3bo What if he scratches a lottery ticket out while he's swimming when there's a storm going on?
Fun fact; one of the guys who noticed this statical unlikeliness and called dream out got caught cheating by also futsing with the games probability. I guess cheaters recognize cheaters
It's all about experience, huh.
Since he's a cheater he has in-depth knowledge of the probability stuff so he knows when others do the same
Birds of a feather flock together
"He just like me fr"
Takes a cheater to know a cheater
This is my 4th time watching this, and I'm now noticing how hard Matt has to keep down his excitement every time he nailed one of his trick shots 😂
glad to know I'm not the only one constantly rewatching this
Well, that‘s the exact feeling why we even bother with trickshots. The endorphin rush when it finally works. It‘s sooo good. =)
@@caspervandenakker me 2
360 NOSCOPE
I thought they were two different videos rotascoped together. Because you never see his complete arm. Both are hiding below the frame and then bam, a trick shot.
Soooo... 10 billion times luckier than the luckiest gambler ever recorded, huh?
i must be dreaming forsenCD
@@1088lol I had a dream forsenCD , welcome to the champion club
YES
Nah, just extremely cracked at the craft. Definitely no cheating here ;)
Lol 🤣 It's terrible!
Theory: This video was just an excuse for Matt to film a Dude Perfect video.
I calculated the probability of this to around 99.99999899939993999909998889988899779001%
Dude perfect are not because of being lucky but skill and taking many many attempts
@O.W.I what u refer to?
@@JamilKhan-hk1wl skill? LOL. Time to waste, and lot's of it.
@@JamilKhan-hk1wl many many attempts because they need to get lucky
My probability class did an exercise... they had one student flip a coin 100 times, and another student was told to just write down H&T randomly, without any props. Professor claimed that he could tell which was the true random series from the coin, because the student doing it by hand would be too shy to put in appropriate-length strings of heads (or tails) in a row. It was a neat game!
ZzZzz
thats really interesting!
@@baritonesax245 It's been a while, but as I remember, you expect a string of log base 2(# flips) of heads or tails in a row somewhere in the sequence. The fake random sequences never had more than 2 or 3 HHH or TTT, even for 100 flips.
Numberphile did a video on this called randomness is random. Where the host does 20 flips in his head and writes the down and the other person tries to predict what he picked.
Me: 50x T, 50x H
that mathematician dream hired is the equivalent of a lawyer having to defend someone who committed murder in front of the judge.
not really
@@flouride technoblade is burning in hell btw
@@gyanprakash7445 nice bot
@@gyanprakash7445 fr
@@nubs2234 cope
I feel like the Venn diagram of "People who watch Matt" and "People who have played Minecraft" has a larger overlap than you might think...
I wanted to say …
yea... its probably a circle :)
*people who have played and/or still are playing Minecraft
Its a circle inside of a bigger circle
I was playing it while watching the video. How likely was that? Well, very.. I was playing while browsing my YT subscriptions.
And this friends is why you trust mathematicians who will put their name on their papers, rather than random, unnamed, and unknown astrophysicists. Cause only one of them will willingly admit/defend when they bodge a paper.
^^^
this was a reason i gave to his rabid fans when i told them how research and finding reliable sources to work with is the best chance of dream being right however it turned out dream literally just hired someone to do incredibly bad math and came from a wix website made a couple weeks prior to this event that still had its watermark of wix on it
Wrong. Never trust authority. Trust the rules of mathematics and read what they write, not who they are. Putting blind trust in people just because some university said they can put letters after their name is just stupid. And a cause of a lot of the issues we see in the world. In the dream case , the mathematics is simple. You can work it out yourself with a calculator.
It's not enough for the scientist to put his name, considering all the potential conflict of interests in the real world, when it is not about Minecraft, but medical statistic justifying lockdowns or the lethality of a virus. In fact, I would say that only independend scientists are real scientists, everyone else is a scientific prostitute creating the numbers which are wanted by his clients. (the people who order the study to prove their ideology correctly)
Funnily enough, the scientist did redact the initial paper saying that there were alot of mistakes, mainly due to not understanding the game. Which makes sense. And btw he didn't want to put his name on the paper cause he didn't want to get public backlash from it, and lets face even if dream was innocent and the paper just proved it, he still would get alot of backlash. And in a time where having a job is so important and finding work is incredibly difficult think it's fair to want to stay anonymous to stop people calling for you to get fired, which does happen.
Fun fact: 1 in 2.0x10^22 is like 1 millimetre in 2000 light-years.
@@threemetreydog cringe
Thanks for the enlightenment
DAMN. That really put that in perspective. For reference, the diameter of our solar system from one side of the oort cloud to the other is about 1.5 light years. Basically, you could select a millimeter at any point on a line drawn between the surface of the earth and another point hundreds, if not thousands of star systems away, leave a marker on it, and the odds of randomly picking that point out of any other point would be dream's luck.
is that a green day reference
jesus 1 millimeter in 2000 lyrs. thats like the visible spectrum visualized as a strand of hair compared to the distance from new york to los angeles
I love the unspoken fact throughout the video that so many shots were filmed in order to get those perfect odds-defying results, like the book throw, the consecutive ball hoops, the dice pairs falling in the results in the right order. Subtle, yet entertainingly on point.
It's a beautiful illustration of the question. Because I note that no one sees this and thinks matt legitimately did all that in one go. But it's way more believable that matt did that than Dream's result.
how is that subtle? lol
Joke's on you Matt, I'm here for the maths AND the minecraft
Exactly
same
I am here for the Matts and the maths! And a bit minecraft...
haha! you got him! ^^
same. i watch both a lot of minecrafters and this channel
"154 dice rolls in a row without getting a 7" Whenever the stupid robber is on my bricks in Catan, it feels like we've broken this record...
LOL i can totally relate to this one
I feel your pain 😂
that's so true
@@GDColon hello
so glad I read your comment! You're not alone...
As a Minecraft lover, hearing you describe the process to beat the game made me realize just how strange this game is.
It's like listening to your parents try to explain your hobbies to their friends
To be fair, as far as video games go, "get gear, go to hell, get item, make item, go to weird hell, kill dragon" is pretty straight forward. But i do get what you mean.
I remember trying to explain the plot of xenoblade to a friend, very difficult
@@notakirakarakaza2118 errrrm akshually the end is probably heaven 🤓 Say that as a joke since it's up to interpretation but like if you think of it as an interpretation of a barren kinda heaven that can only support strange life truly alien to our dimension it feels way more sensible, especially bc man have you seen the MC Dungeons ender creatures??? Biblically accurate angel lookin asses one of them mfs has a FLAMING HEAD and another is COVERED IN EYES
@@notakirakarakaza2118 The _details_ are weird though. Anything can sound normal if you describe it in the broadest possible way.
...why are people in the comments still trying to argue that Dream could have just gotten lucky? He admitted to having run on a modified client months ago.
From what I can tell, it's separated into two camps. Those who didn't know dream admitted to it, and those who know he admitted to it, but think there's still a case to be made that this COULD have been luck.
@@NickersonGeneral No, that's impossible.
@@grondlegger939 reread the comment 🤦♂️🤦♂️
We should be doxxing dream and trashing their home for this.
Weather he admitted it or not, the argument from probability is fallacious. If the video was about how he admitted it, it would be be a different story.
This reminds me of a quote I saw online from a journalism class. “If one source says it’s sunny outside and another says it’s pouring. Your job is not to cite both sources, it’s to look out the f*cking window and find out which is right.”
This is a pretty good quote
@@penguins4284 It's an old joke. Not a bad joke as it will always be useful to get a point across but still a joke not a quote (unless someone can put a name to who said it)
From the weather I had driving home my answer would be, Yes.
@@iDeLaYeD_o technically it's a quote from whoever created the joke
and now a new favourite quote! :D
Obviously, the talking head scenes were shot in reverse and dubbed.
No comment.
Dubbed? Pretty sure Matt just learnt to speak backwards
@@standupmaths commenting 'no comment' :O
No reply
I guess this is why you're Practical Engineering, not Practical Performance Art
just for perspective, for the 10 billion human second century thing, it would have to take roughly 650.22 centuries for just a SINGLE occurrence of what happened to dream.
How did you work that out? (just curious have yet to take a class in statistics)
@@tes-cl3ru it's actually just almost straight arithmetic at that point. The probability of getting Dream's result is about 1:2*10^22. The 10BHSC is about 3*10^19 By multiplying these two numbers (raw probability and number of attempts) you get a new expected value, which is something along the lines of 1:650 (1:666 with the numbers I just provided) So you're going to need 650 of those centuries to expect it to happen once. Or alternately for attempts to be even faster. Or the population to be higher.
Well and if we factor in that it takes more than 1 second to do all the accounted livestreams it would take a couple trillion years for a single occurence. Considering the age of universe we still have a couple of trillion years to go.
@@XCC23 🤓🤓🤓 Nah i’m joking but still kinda sounds nerdy
@@gladosbutstupid8807 so you mean someone doing maths is sounding nerdy? What are the odds of that?
I love the concept of the 10 billion human second century, it's a really great way to put kind of abstract seeming, difficult to comprehend odds into perspective
The fact that this man actually went to the lengths to understand minecraft is just wonderful
I dont think he went out and "understood" minecraft in the sense you're suggesting. It's a childs game with a simple premise, not too difficult of a concept to grasp. Not only that he seemed to have only examined the loot tables thoroughly, as that was what was in question. Understanding minecraft, as you seem to mean, isn't as easy as knowing it involves gathering resources and killing a dragon
I think it's ironic because the dude understands so much about math XD
@@sakikogookheng I getcha... but Minecraft wasn't intended to be a kids game. It's a game for everyone. Not even Notch expected so many kids to be constantly playing the game.
Eh... I don’t play it but “get pearls, kill dragon” isn’t exactly the hardest thing to grasp. A quick look at the loot tables and you are set. Come on.
@@sakikogookheng You clearly have never gotten into redstone, automatic farms, nor sorting machines. Minecraft, on the surface, is simple... Factorio, is simple on its’ surface- you crash landed on a foreign planet, build factories, build a rocket, then you win. But when you actually get into, it’s incredibly complex and requires math.
If only this video came out about 8 years ago when I was trying to present my thesis on "Teaching Math with Minecraft"
hi anton :)
hello wonderful person
Hiii
Lol Anton, you're here too. I actually like watching your astronomy videos alot.
Woah didn't expect to see you here, Mr. Universe Guide
One of the best videos on all of KZhead
Not someone I expected to see here at all. Love you Hungrybox!
yea
JIGGLY! 💮
Truly, one of THE videos of all time
Fun fact: assuming there are 7.5e^18 grains of sand in the world (google), it is more likely that two people would randomly pick the exact same grain of sand out of every one on earth than what Dream did.
I handed my dumbass cousin the same grain of sand what's that mean genius?
Idk if the above commenter is saying truth but its more like this Imagine two aliens on space looking at earth The first alien closes his eyes And the second alien lands in a random spot in earth in his spaceship and marks it The second alien comes back and blinds himself and the first alien picks the same grain of from the entire earth and mark it
@@jacobp8294op specified randomly
@@jacobp8294 he talked about this principle of what youve said in the video, with the dart out of the plane
But... what if it does happen?
To put that kind of "luck" in perspective, flip a penny 13 times, and if it lands on heads on all 13 times, go buy 3 lottery tickets with 1/1000000 chances of winning, if you win all 3 lottery tickets, that's the kind of luck dream would have had to have to pull that off legitimately.
This comment needs more love. Jesus Christ the maths there.
@@binomial3837 No. 1 in 7.5 trillion was actually the upper bound on the chance that ANYONE would ever get Dream's luck on any set of runs. For just a random session of 6 livestreams, to get Dream's luck, it's closer to 1 in 10^22.
@@acxesta2 yeah they made it much “better” luck wise for dream and it was still no where near probable LMAO glad he finally admitted
In a row i assume?
@@leadmaxwellarco2574 yes that’s what it was saying.
That slight smile he gives when he realizes he got the take.
No no as a S-U M stan, I can 100% with certainty confirm that was his first try attempt, he is simply that lucky. Ur a negative h8r looking for clout. It's possible among millions of ppl to throw a dart at a board that one will get it on their first try. Have u not seen endgame? Its possible. (Wow that felt terrible, this is just a joke)
@@cameronvalencia6023 had me in the first half.. haha.
@@cameronvalencia6023 I can literally see a 12 year old typing that lmao
well its a magnet so
Maybe there is a second person off camera grabbing the ball he throw when it goes offcam and drop a second ball off cam in the basket :D.
I can't believe whilst procrastinating on tomorrow's advanced math exam I accidentally come across a video that helped me actually learn binomial distribution and probability calculations 😅 a topic which I skipped cause I didn't attend the classes where it was taught LOL Thanks. Will definitely come back for more videos maybe i'll learn some stuff whilst procrastinating 😅😂
There we go, the cheating actually made something good happen.
how did you do on the exam?
What was the probability of that happening? 😂
This video is now mentioned on Dream's wikipedia page!
Imagine getting odds better then if ever human for a century speedran the game and only getting 4th fastest run in the world
Tbf, he had some bad luck with the end portal. Before that, he was on WR pace.
@@danielf.7151 that's a shame, he should've set the portal's spawn to be closer
@@danielf.7151 He couldn't have gotten world record even if the eye didn't break, would've been like a 15 or 16 min time
Thats probably what he wanted, the cheating would be obvious if he would have set the WR
Lol true
This video is basically a "Dude Perfect" video with less yelling.
an more math
*Binomial Distribution*
I came into the comments to see all the dream stans arguing before I watched the video and I was very confused when I saw this comment
Just imagine Dude perfect got his perfect shot... AND THEN start doing the maths how likley the stunt whatsoever was to happen. lmao.
And without the obnoxious music...
The 10 billion human second century is brilliant. Really illustrated the point so clearly and made it possible to conceptualist such extreme odds
this video is older now but having the book land when you flip it behind you at 17:15 is SUCH a great touch when you just finished debunking the incredibly low possibilities of this being an honest speedrun lmaooo
And he continues with another minute of commentary without even a microexpression of excitement that he got the book to land.
The fact that he definitely played on an altered version and then paid a mathematician to create a biased paper, is such a disgusting move.
Probably not a mathematician just a person who understands a lot of math
This man?
Dream really doesnt deserve all those subs he has
That astrophysicist/astrostatistician is probably responsible for a rocket or two blowing up.
I just find it very human xD I find it more disgusting that people need this video to even get close to making sense of the truth while it IS very clear. As we see the math show. I would LOVE for this video to be completely unnecessary proof-wise (nothing against Matt of course), but unfortunately it is not. Cheers.
Given my watch history of countless Minecraft videos, and every video on both yours and Numberphile's channels, I'm sure the KZhead algorithm positively pissed itself with excitement when recommending this video to me.
same
same !
Well put! I love picturing the YT algorithm as an excited little kid handing out videos at random.
"WE THINK YOU'LL LIKE THIS ONE"
Same
Just a note on the odds on those craps runs because your math ends up off because of it. The 154 roll streak was without crapping out (losing) *not* without rolling a 7. There could (almost certainly were) 7's in that run. It could have even been literally all 7's. The number for the losing roll varies depending on the phase of the game you're in. One "game" of craps consists of one or two phases. You start with a "coming out" roll. If you roll a 7 or 11 you win immediately. If you roll a 2, 3, or 12, you lose immediately. If you roll 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, or 10 that becomes your "point" and you enter the second phase. In the second phase, you win if you roll your point number before rolling a 7 and lose if you roll a 7.
Thanks for clearing that up. I remember trying to learn how to play craps once and couldnt get my head around it, but it definitely was more complex than how it was described in the video
Wait, so they were counted as 154 rolls, which would be less than 154 rounds, right? And it sounds like every roll has a smaller chance of making you lose immediately than just "not rolling 7", so the real chances would be slightly higher than what Matt calculated.
Just the fact that Dream has paid someone to protect him instead of accepting the low chance raises questions
Matt: "If you're here for the Minecraft, I'll explain the math clearly. If you're here for the math, I'll explain the Minecraft clearly." Me: I'm only here for the beard
The one thing not explained clearly
And u can see it clearly :)
It's a beautiful beard and I only just got recommend this vid.
Then he’ll explain- oh wait
Me: I'm here for Minecraft and for the math, what then?
Respect for the MC Speedrunning Team for making a 29 page formal investigation
Yes, and Matt for understanding why instead of just complaining.
Yeah it may not be the perfect paper, but man they put the effort in, and that's incredibly admirable.
Tbh that first paper was better than what most of us could have provided
That's kinda what you have to do when a KZheadr has actual stans
@@mayo4507 lol the paper didn’t matter to Dream’s fans, he just said “their math is wrong and they’re evil clout chasers” and the 10 year olds believed him. Facts don’t matter to DSMP fans
Imagine being the luckiest human that ever existed... And coming fourth... That has gotta sting a bit. 😬😅
dream fans should consider taking a statistics course after they graduate from middle school.
The "10 Billion Human Second Century" is one of the funniest things I've ever heard in mathematics. Also genius in how easy it is to convey to the public at large.
totally agree :D it's a pretty good way to gain intuition!
What's that mean :o
Hell, I'm a mathematician and it's really conveying to me.
Hearing Matt say the words "Ender Pearl" and "Blaze Rods" is a strange phenomenon.
Gamer grandpa
@@areh3918 Stand-up gaming
I don't know who this is and even I can tell that it sounds weird when he talks about games.
what are the chances XD
If you check the description, he has a Minecraft consultant lol.
The fact that a physicist did the math for Dream should tell you everything you need to know. The number of arguments I (mostly jokingly) had with physicists about how to do maths because they couldn't be bothered to do it correctly is _high_ 😂
He literally admitted to cheating.
@@jager8148 Basically.
For something like forensic statistics/probability, you would indeed want a statistician/mathematician. There are possible subtleties that their training is entirely focused on. A more serious issue is that they didn't want their name on it. If I were hired to write a report as devil's advocate, I'd either decline if there is nothing I could say in their defense or accept and write things that are true but selectively in the client's favor and make the conclusions qualified
@@LeoTheDarkAngel I think this is not a "basically," but an "actually.' Another comment marked for a year previous to yours said Dream admitted cheating months before that. (As in shortly after this video was released.) In regards to physicists, when an entire category of scientists like to begin sentences with "Assume..." they're going to ruffle math people's feathers, lol.
I think this video is up for ‘most complete content on KZhead’ awards. It’s beautiful. It’s funny. It’s clever. It’s magnificent. Congratulations Matt.
Amazing that you got all of those on the first try
Rare Earth? What kind of insane crossover episode are we in?
I’m sorting by newest comment... Just finished your video on pyramid schemes. Can someone calculate the chances of that ahaha
Now i never imagined i would see Rare Earth commenting on a film about the probabilities of a minecraft youtuber be cheating on his speedruns
it was probably not first try...
He will be in the next GDQ!
"As an expert in getting things wrong" The Parker Square will follow this man to his grave.
a grave that is almost a perfect rectangle... almost (*not sure what a perfect rectangle actually would be...)
@@olik136 a square
pretty sure he'll have it on gravestone. either engraved or graffiti-ed.
@@olik136 I'll say it's a plane figure with four perfectly straight sides and four perfectly right angles.
And also made him (more) famous
I enjoy coming back to this one every so often because of how evergreen this video is. Despite being focused on what is now a years-old, and largely resolved, controversy, the core of what he's teaching us about throughout the entire thing is just as relevant today as it was then. The inherently suspicious nature of maths chaff, a simple tool of comparison for how likely a thing is in our universe, even simple things like how to understand scientific notation. It's a true masterpiece of a video, and the level of effort that must have gone into it really shines through. And not just because of the impossible shots he made in the background - though, every time I come back, I do wonder how the probabilities of the various shots he took match up to Dream's theoretical odds.
You know I was trying to understand why I keep coming back to this video. Now I know.
Same. :)
This video is especially fun to watch after seeing the one with Hannah Fry on Bayesian statistics where Matt repeatedly fails to throw a ball onto a table. But now, he *very mysteriously* cannot miss a target! Also, the explanation of the math is superb.
Dream: Damn those odds are really unlikely *googles "astronomical odds expert"*
What?
@@zh9664 He's supposing Dream found his unnamed mathematician by searching for an expert in "astronomical odds," expecting to get someone who specialized in odds that are astronomical in the sense of being very high, but instead getting a guy who's into odds related to astronomy...because.
@@VideoMask93 but the guy only had like two mistakes from what I heard
@@tuxedosteve9556 2 mistakes is too much
@@tuxedosteve9556 Mistakes aren't acceptable, and aren't the same as margin of error. Margin of error covers how much your number could differ from reality due to everything from cosmic interference to human error. A mistake is an incorrect calculation, and has no place in a paper.
I can't tell if the book-toss was: 1) Good enough to count, no more takes, just move on. 2) Better than intended, since it didn't slot into the others but it's upright and fully visible. 3) Exactly as intended.
I was wondering the same, im gonna go with 2 haha!
1. Definitely. It almost sloted perfectly: should that not be the objective, it should have had become the objective.
Its always 3
@@spusho Exactly
17:16 if you missed it (like I did...)
I love how indepth your efforts are in explaining this while managing to keep the over all ideas in layman's terms. Brilliant. I want to make two comments because of it. (Appologize if my first thought isn't well explained but I will attempt to do my best.) 1) It reminds me about highschool math and how if is often harder to add ideas/areas together is often harder than trying to take the larger shape/upper bound and substract from that to prove your result. Your method reminds me of that because I remember always forgeting to think about that option in working an idea out. 2) It makes me wonder what is the LUCKIEST EVER event an individual has achieved (both proven and/or unproven) to have existed. Anyways, thank you for the video.
The guy who survived both atom bomb drops in Japan would be up there.
Had this one on watch later for a while after it kept popping up in the suggestions, completely forgot about it until Steve mold posted today congratulating on the million subs.. well I'm subbed now as well 👍
This controversy has spawned some of the most interesting crossovers I’ve ever watched
Next person is Neil degrass Tyson blabbering over it
u seem familiar
If it please the court, I would like to admit into evidence, exhibit A: Timothy Dexter read about him. he was the living proof.
Why did I read that how yoda talks 🤦
What others are there?
"What I'm saying is, if every single human in existence was doing a speedrun of Minecraft every single second around the clock-- every human doing it!-- for a century, the odds are still you would never see a result anywhere near what Dream got." That settles it then.
It would take a thousand centuries for us to be pretty reasonably confident that it would happen.
@@Lowdian welcome to purgatory.
@@Lowdian only if they completed each speedrun attempt in 1 second
It's even crazier, because every human would have to produce 6 Livestreams every second too
@@DemonixTB The fastest current time to leave the nether after completing all trades is 8:45 by Pluginl. It could be improved but that's a bit longer than 1 second.
I really love the level of detail the speedrunning judges went into for the paper. You call it rambly, I call it Great Effort! genuinely really good work. you did it better but to be fair you are a famous mathematician lol
I failed maths GCSE in secondary school and had to redo it in college where I barely passed. I understand on an intellectual level that maths is genuinely beautiful in its order and magical in its ability to be strange and chaotic. It is the backbone of science that I love and the lore behind scifi sometimes relies upon maths to backfill the details from the stuff made up on the fly to suit stories. I am talking here about how nerds know how warp drive works, how fast the different ships go in different eras and how many shuttles and torpedoes Voyager had and used. The maths isn't what you do but it's there as a background. Then there's the maths of how games like Minecraft are coded. How you can enter the same seed and the world will generate in the same way (at least to a certain extent. I'm not sure if there comes a point where the generation has built on generation enough that two worlds with the same seed are different). I have been watching videos from James Hoffman this past Christmas about coffee and that involves maths, videos about chemistry from Nile red and that involves maths. On a more practical level I've been playing Fallout 4 with mods and had to come up against the mathematical limitations of the code and my machine. All this to say I am bad at maths and while I respect its role in the things I love I hate it because I suck st it. The first time I can remember having a panic attack it was because I was in an advanced GCSE class about some kind of maths and my impression was that we were being told to divide in a way that made numbers bigger and my brain could not cope. In hindsight it was probably phrasing i.e. that if you cut a log in half say you end up with two bits of wood so it's phrasing as dividing but was actually multiplication. At the time my brain just melted down. I came to this video for the Minecraft but not knowing or caring who Dream is and not liking maths. I loved the video and you explained it well. Though my idiot brain still says that it doesn't seem that unlikely to get drops that to my idiot brain don't feel that egregious. I am bad at maths so I know I am wrong but it's interesting that even after my video my brain is going "I don't know though..." Lol i like what you said about it being the difference between deliberately throwing a dart from a plane to hit a bullseye and throwing a dart from the plane, it landing point down and you then drawing a bullseye around it because as someone bad about maths I only know about probability when it's improbable. Stories are not written about the predictable. Videos are not made talking about the usual so to my brain a once in a lifetime occurrence feels like it happens regularly. I've watched ocean liner and engineering disaster videos where the videos are made because the metaphorical dart from the plane landed face down where a bullseye could be drawn. They were random spikes in the broth of chaos that happens all the time but were singled out as different from the broth and my perception of plausibility comes from seeing so many of these rare spikes. Tldr great video subscribed
So using Math, he basically "confirmed" everyones suspicion...the odds of Dream getting pearls and rods that fast are not 0, but boy it's the closest thing to 0
Basically, not zero, but it might as well be
As close to the asymptote as possible
If every person on the planet lived for a thousand centuries, (that's like pre-development of homo sapiens, to 500,000 ad?) And all those billions of vampires did, in a constant purgatory, was speed running Minecraft over and over. we would expect that one of them would have the experience that dream did... Probably. Lol.
I think this is a lot like intelligent life. It is incredibly rare (by what we know) so it would be extremely unlikely for us to be here. But since we ARE here that kind of messes everything up. If the odds are 1/100000000 then that would mean that us being here could look like “cheating” but since we are here no math could dispute the fact.
ε>0 is the closest thing to 0
The Dude Perfect team is sweating Nervously right now.
Yes, because they changed the probability tables of reality
All trick shots are first try i swear
LOL
So much yes! Awesome comment :D
Unless they say they got it on the first try, they could have had an infinite number of takes before hand.
Making this video might be the single smartest thing Matt's ever done on his KZhead channel. It's only a year and a half old but it's his second-most popular video, second only to his Dr. Nim video which is 5 years older. And I'm sure it attracted a ton of newcomers from the Minecraft community.
It’s also perfectly placed in the timeline of events that happened, adding in a purely mathematical perspective to the equation. It served its purpose of helping explain the numbers further, and thats where it shall stay in history
12:20 some added context for those watching this video now, MinecrAvenger was exposed as cheating in the same way! in fact, MinecrAvenger was cheating much more egregiously than Dream and for a much longer time
It was Dream's big picture all along, he wanted to teach the young people statistics
"I'm not very good at statistics myself" -Paraphrase from Dream
@@irok1 Well, maybe thats why he wanted folks to be more aware than him? :P
@Leonardo #toddyn but the hero we needed?
Eeuuuuggghhhhh
@@The_SOB_II Its a joke its a joke xDD
"After considering this, I ended up finding out that I HAD actually been using a disallowed modification during ~6 of my live streams on Twitch.." -Dream
I like how he can’t just straight up admit he fucked up and has to victimise himself a little too lmao
@Are You Going To Do The 'Ora Ora' Thing? Yeah it takes a 50 paragraph document for him to say "Oops, I used a mod after all".
@@dermathze700 I just hope not too many kids fall for the “oops.” There’s no way it wasn’t intentional
@@coalblack666 It already happened. Look at any comment section on videos that Dream fans watch and you'll see them ALL excusing his actions because he's funny. Or trying to say that things were biased to make him look bad and that it was an honest mistake, even though it's logically impossible for him to pay for a mod that boosts his luck and then forget about it when being accused of having impossible high luck.
@@KonoGufo tbh im pretty sure he wrote the mod himself gotta give him credit for that
The look of pride and satisfaction when he looked to see if he hit the bullseye and saw he finally did is priceless. Plus keeping up the level of expressive narration after that many takes is impressive in and of itself. Just genuinely impressed with this channel especially because I know you do another channel that's way more serious but I can't place atm.
That was unbelievably impressive and love how you looked and could tell you were thinking "yes finally ffs!" but kept gking with the script cuz you had to after 1,000 takes. Lol. Well done and what an intro to your channel! Can't reply under your comment cuz this video is too awesome.
This is why you get a disinterested expert. They can explain it in a way that is simplified and not tripping over himself trying to justify himself.
And it helps that they aren't literally paid to pick a side like a certain astrophysicist.
Except there wouldn't be material for a video, and half a million views, if he went with "Dream just got lucky" theory. No internet figure feeding of this drama is truly disenterested.
@@Rpahut1 he just said in the video that of course he is interested in the controversy, but he is disinterested in who is right
@@Rpahut1 Are we at the "constructing conspiracy theories for why people who know what they're talking about would lie to make dream look bad" stage of bargaining at this point?
@bobin the boggart The issue is that the Speedrun mods offered to hire a statistician to review their paper, but Dream said no specifically *because* the statistician would be biased in favor of their client. After the mods offered to choose a statistician that Dream agreed on, Dream declined. And then hired his own anonymous statistician. From a website that was created just months prior. With no page listing their employees, or even verifying their existence. So it’s not simply that Dream hired his own statistician. The point is that he hired them *after* stating they would be biased.
I actually think it's really neat that a community-run speedrunning website published a competent (at worst 'Undergrad lab paper') mathematical paper on this.
The care that they took with this shows how seriously they take the job, even though it's unpaid (right? I know nothing about the speedrunning community). Well done to them, and may their future endeavors flourish under that work ethic.
@@hammurabii.3173 Sure, I can see the speedrunners making a living off of popular games (like Minecraft!), but the mods that oversee the leaderboards don't get a share of that pot, right?
Speed runners are something else and I admire it. They often delve DEEP into the technical aspects of the game, in order to break certain parts of it. When I say break, I of course mean break the vanilla game so everyone is on the same and fair starting point mind you, not mods. Point is, they're often very skilled and nerdy homies. I also thought the paper was neat
@@benjaminoechsli1941 Mods don't typically get paid, but are almost always made up of people who stream themselves. For 99% of games, modding is a side hobby for streamers in the community to help continue to build the speedrunning scene.
I've noticed this happening more and more. I think the Internet and public schools get a bad rap for making us dumber by misinforming them, and there's probably some truth to this, but I think when used for good we're seeing more and more "citizen science" by people who would have just been farmhands 150 years ago.
I appreciated how you made your points without wading into speculation or assigning blame. The human-second-century is a nice way to get some intuition in a very unintuitive range of probabilities. Thanks!
One of the beautiful and frustrating things about probability is that everything can look familiar and be strange or look strange and be familiar or look strange and be strange. All you can do is calculate to understand.
Thanks, that's a really great video. I think another interesting layer on top of that, which may be relevant for many situations and comparisons is how difficult would it be to stack up the odds in that particular situation. While it is much harder to quantify, I think it can add perspective.
The ten billion human second century needs a much better name, how about "Parker's limit"?
!!
YES
As long as it doesn't carry the same hex as Parker's Square.
Parker's Limit Can't Lose
Someone make the Wikipedia article
Dude holy crap. Like, I look at “getting 42/262 when 12/262 is the drop rate” and think “eh that’s lucky but doesn’t seem insane” until you actually do the math on it. That’s bonkers.
Yeah. The intuition that's important to have is that doubling the amount of trials obviously doubles the mean, but it doesn't double the standard deviation (how much we expect something to vary) It only multiplies that by the *square root* of two. So when if you have *four* times the amount of trials, you only get twice the deviation, even though the mean is four times as big. So suddenly this relatively small deviation (in absolute terms) becomes a completely unsurmountable mountain.
@@XCC23 I know you're right but intuitively it still feels like the odds should be similar to getting 4/26 when you expect 1/26.
Funny thing is, that same intuition is why we know about the cheating: the hacker knew they couldn't make things TOO lucky, but they used their intuition instead of crunching the numbers and they inadvertently made a change drastic enough to expose them. What this makes me wonder about is how many other, smarter cheaters may be out there, manipulating game probabilities just by a standard deviation here and there, gaining an edge while maintaining plausible deniability.
@@Alec____ how many heads do you expect to get if you flip a coin once? 0.5 If you flip a coin 100 times? 50.
@@polendri4812 Well, you do have to keep in mind that for every game they play they need to make sure the standard deviation is going to even out. If Dream had used the hack for a small amount of runs, it easily could've been chalked down to luck.
Fabulous video. Also; I bet the the missing close bracket was a cut&paste error
Its like if you flip 15 coins, and they all get hit by different meteors.
As an Astrophysicist I can tell you we shouldn't be allowed to do statistics 🤣
Bayesian stats..
I mean, there's a reason they didn't put their name on there, they knew the paper doesn't hold water
Wait, aren't you the people that tell us how likely we are to be wiped out by an asteroid or supernova?! Please check your work right now!
My roommate last year was an astrophysicist. Completely agree.
The chances are ASTRONOMICALLY low. That's all that needs to be said.
I did a search to see whether this is being discussed elsewhere, and found that there's a singer called Matt Parker who has a song called "Dream".
Talk about piggybacking on success
@@Olegach21 Eh, I've also found three musicians called Tom Scott.
WOW what are the odds?
@@ashleycrow8867 like 1 in 10^19 or something
Oh yeah, CCM producer/songwriter Matt Parker. Makes me laugh, sometimes.
Hey I did not expect to sit through the entire video. Now I'm glad I did, and I even ordered a copy of Humble Pi! This year I've been assigned to teach Pre-Calculus/Calculus courses and I've rekindled my love of maths. Thank you for doing what you do!
This is one of my favourites for the simple fact Matt came up with a human second century to make it easily understandable
It's interesting that he probably only increased his odds by a little bit, thinking it wouldn't be noticed, but forgetting that when you do things a lot of times, even a small increase in chances has a large statistical impact
Excel and taking simple data is so useful, it does make you see how incredibly impossible is what Dream has done
The funny thing is, the situation in which it *wouldn't* have a large statistical impact is ... the situation in which it wouldn't have any noticeable impact at all. Which, if Dream intentionally modified the game, would make that act of cheating kind of a waste of time - why bother if you can't even tell the difference?
I strongly recommend Karl Jobst's video on Dream's semi-confession. It's fascinating. There's a plausible theory that he had modified his Minecraft for practise and didn't know he was *still* using a modified version when he streamed. It raises an eyebrow but honestly he makes a compelling (and very nuanced) argument on the possible interpretations of what is now known.
Thanks for summarising this video for me
A slight increase in odds wont go noticed in a single run, the problem he had here was he kept using the mods run after run. In an unmodded game you're going to end up with extremely good luck and extremely bad luck in games. He effectively removed the bad luck games getting to his perfect game much faster and with less effort.
10:12 The smile of someone who won't need to record the lines again.
My exact thought
My exact thought
My exact thought
My exact thought
I love potatos
This is such a good video. I still come back and watch the full thing. It’s fun, witty, informative on a nice casual topic. Much love ❤
You did good with this one Matt. Very nice work. Thank you for supplying us with accurate and digestable maths!
I love when you see a Minecraft event so big it hits the wider KZhead world, including educational content
not expecting to see you here man
It's cool isn't it?
I love to see my fav maths ytbers getting into Minecraft theory 😁
Yeah but... this ain’t good for the game at all
@@dixoncider8372 negative publicity is good publicity
Imagine cheating and still not breaking the record
Tbf the WR run is going to have the same luck, this just gives dream many more possible chances to have a run with the rng where he just has to do well Not saying dream isn't in the wrong though screw him
Cheaters Arent Cheating To Get A Faster Time Cheaters Are Cheating To Get A Time Faster
@@xrefed True true.
@@xrefed - Karl Jobst
Funny you say that, because when Dream got to the stronghold he WAS in world record pace. The reason he placed 4th was because he lost considerable time finding the ended portal. Had he gotten lucky in the portal spawn, he could’ve placed much higher. Maybe even first place!
Still watching the video but the smile you have at 10:17 and knowing you channel tells me that you actually you've recorded these segments many many times till you had a perfect shot. I love your persistence. Guess I'll see at the end how you did it
I originally watched this when the video came out for the Minecraft stuff; I'm later coming back, now as a statistics major, and I'm really happy such verbose real world examples like this exist! 😁
Lol, he recently admitted he faked it
Lmao
Lmao I just saw that on google too
Yo Go make more dupes
hello gamer, glad to see you here!
Well it took long enough, but better late than never I suppose
Okay, I played minecraft in like 2009-2010 and I did not understand how someone could possibly speed run that game.......turns out it has changed a lot in 10 years
You are now a boomer
Believe it or not, a lot of circuits in Minecraft like or and and gates are very similar to circuits in real life.
wow
everything can be speed runned some even speed run life
Woah that's awesome @Real Engineering, not many people played that far back. Actually, many versions from those years are missing! There's an entire community seeking lost versions of Minecraft mostly from 2009-2010 so if you could find one in you folders that'd be incredible!
You totally aced it, and you brought back the discussion to the level it belongs. Deep maths and statistics shall not be abused unless necessary.
I love your way of saying things. It's amazing. It's funny, creative, and informative in the same time. How could you not love it? I'm a math/statistical geek occasionally software engineer, and i approve this message. :D
who asked
@@villyintheflesh I asked, put on the dress.
"Probability calculations are hard." Q.E.D.
[insert square]
⬛️
[insert Parker Square]
Matpat's video be like
GEOSQUARE S Q U A S H E D
Can we agree that "10 Billion Human Second Century" should instead be called Parker Odds?
I think we have enough power as an audience to do that
Yeah, let's do that. Who will make a Wikipedia page?
@@shambhav9534 We'd need someone to publish it in a paper or some other publication
@@squelchedotter I suggest that someone takes the opportunity to make it one of those one-word articles: ``` \title{How unlikely would an event have to be to have a 50/50 chance if occuring if every human tried for it once a second for a century?} \subtitle{A new method for judging likelihoods of human accomplishments} \subsubtitle{The Parker probability} \begin{document} \maketitle \begin{equation}\label{p} ... \end{equation} Very (see eq. ef{p}). \end{document}
@James R It felt natural. I skipped the actual math though because I'm on my phone.
I love these longer real world videos, hopefully more to come
Matt's Method is phenomenal. At least to me as a non mathematician it seems so elegant. Upper bounds are standart in maths I know, but used like this it shows why its useful. There is a fairly brutal dunk in here as well, one that Matt is too nice to go for, but it is completely mercieless. This is too lucky to be true, one person cannot expect to have results anywhere close to this - Well but there is a lot of people trying to get this, maybe if... - No. All of humanity trying wouldn't make this plausible. - But What if people were really dedicated and spent a lot of time trying it? - No, all of humanity wouldn't get this if they spent the next century trying - But speedrunners are really good, they know when a run is not gonna make it, they will just reset, what if Dream was just incredible at optimizing? - No, the model assumes all of humanity is absolutely insane at speedrunning and takes on average a second per run. They aren't taking breaks either btw, not to eat, drink, sleep or work, this is all they do for a full century, and they still only have odds of one in a thousand
It is a fantastically elegant method. But we've gotta remember, it only works because Dream's claimed result is ludicrous. So ludicrous that if we set the upper bound millions of times above the rarest observed event in a game of chance, we still don't catch Dream's result. For anything that's a little bit more reasonable, this method's not going to help.
Having warmed up with elections, now Matt is dealing with the real important issues.
hahahahha
LOL.
+
I was kinda on dream's side. But then I saw the parenthesis wasn't closed in the papers that sided with him. Unforgivable.
I kinda think he’s stupid
To be fair, even though in this specific context the missing parenthesis doesn't matter, a misplaced parenthesis could result in completely different equations.
@@tiredboard I would assume a professional doing analysis for a paying customer would be more focused on details like that when dealing with math. That's ignoring someone not willing to putting their name on their work.
@@erronblack308 who? Dream?
You saying that a world-renowned mathematician would seriously not remember to close a parenthesis? I mean if you dedicated your life to math you would pretty much not make this kind of mistake. Face it; Dream himself wrote it to look better or the "mathematician" does not know what he is talking about.
This video is like comfort food to me. I've watched it probably 10 times now! It never gets old! Who knew probability and statistics could be so entertaining?