How lucky is too lucky?: The Minecraft Speedrunning Controversy Explained

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Minecraft Viki (video wiki) ➜ https://minecraft.viki.gg

Buy Humble Pi now and get a signed sheet from the typesetting proofs!
https://www.harvard.com/book/9780593084694_humble_pi/

My talk on 4 February 2021 at Harvard Book Store:
https://www.harvard.com/event/virtual_event_matt_parker/

Here is the original accusation against Dream.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MYw9LcLCb4&ab_channel=Geosquare
Paper: https://mcspeedrun.com/dream.pdf

And here is Dream’s reply.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iqpSrNVjYQ&ab_channel=DreamXD
Paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yfLURFdDhMfrvI2cFMdYM8f_M_IRoAlM/view

“Matt flips a coin 100 times.”
https://youtu.be/T2Xtit17snE

“Holy Craps! How a Gambling Grandma Broke the Record”
http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1901663,00.html

Number of casinos in the world in 2011: 3,547
https://www.statista.com/statistics/221031/total-worldwide-casinos-by-region/

Roulette records.
https://www.roulette17.com/stories/record-reds-blacks-in-a-row/

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.

https://www.patreon.com/standupmaths

As always: thanks to Jane Street who support my channel. They’re amazing. And I believe they have no opinion on Dream.
https://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: http://standupmaths.com/
US book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/610964/humble-pi-by-matt-parker/
UK book: https://mathsgear.co.uk/collections/books/products/humble-pi-signed-paperback

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43 thoughts on “How lucky is too lucky?: The Minecraft Speedrunning Controversy Explained”

  4. I haven't watched the video yet but I want to say dreams overall response since the very beginning has been absolutely TRASH no matter how you cut it. and the fans had the strangest responses I've ever seen it was insane

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  8. As for the special effects I think he mostly used a split screen. The angle of his arms in some of the throws isn't quite right when considering the rest of his body in the same frame. The camera is high enough that the bottom of the frame hides the phantom arm and the split. The various takes were all done together while wearing the same clothing but the good takes were edited in on the other side of the split.

    Every time a ball goes off the screen it can be caught and an identical ball can magically appear to go where needed too.

    The book-to-shelf effect was of course recorded coming off the shelf and then played back in reverse in a split screen.

    Good job BTW.

    Reply

  9. When you mentioned the amount of times failed, that made me think about “how many speed runs did Dream not livestream?”. Which could account for the minuscule probability.

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  28. Aren't you (partially) drawing a bullseye though? after all, there are a lot of actions in a speedrun that depend on luck and you picked those that just happened to be the most lucky. If, say, there are 1000 actions that depend on luck and you pick the luckiest ones, shouldn't probability increase by a factor of a 1000? Would be glad if anything could clarify whether im wrong, and if so, why

    Reply

  29. I thought about it for a second, and of course a given length of time is going to be some factor of pi. We are on a round object that is spinning in space, and our conept of time is based on the relative angle of the point on that spheroid we are on and the position of the sun.
    So, time units are tracked using the relative angle over a given length of temporal distance. Also, the most common device we use to track time uses the relative angle of a section of circle. so midnight could easily be translated as 0 degrees. and 3'Oclock as 90 degrees in so on, so it only makes sense that 100 years in seconds would be some factor of pie, unless the ratio of pie. This is even more true given that there are 3600 seconds in an hour which is a factor of 360 which means that the ratios of seconds into degrees should line up nicely.

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  30. well, hypothetically it could be an anomaly specifically on his computer/installation
    while some comptuers cna have physical randomizers java usualyl does not use those
    and javas pseudorandomizer may be influenced by other software running/etc unknowingly
    someone knowing more about hte details of java might figure that out
    though on the other hand based on what ltitle I do know about computer randomizer this would most likely go against dreams favor, not for him
    psuedorandom algorithms are usually designed to produce statistically even outcomes, so while having a LOT of high numbers in a row is… possible though unlikely in true randomness it should bei mposisble for most pseudorandom generators though again, the details are insanely complicated

    Reply

  32. Since this is a computer game, in all likelihood the same RNG is being used for the ender pearls and the blaze rods, so claiming the probabilities as independent doesn't seem to make sense. In other words, having a "good" RNG seed for a small set of playthroughs could completely change the pace of the game, including vast changes in both the drop/trade rates.

    Reply

  33. Had a long post TLDR, I find the use of the phrase 'never going to happen' in conjunction with probability….unfortunate as surely as long as there is a 'chance' no matter how remote, unjustified, unlikely or seemingly impossible, no matter how many orders of magnitude it should be above any calculated limit of 'reasonability', that that in and of itself is not enough to state 'that anything ever done by a human will always have odds better than X', that being said as long as action Y has a chance happening that is more than 0. Something being infinitely improbable doesn't make it infinitely impossible only super unlikely, yes unreasonably unlikely, incredulously unlikely, but not impossible, and not 'never going to happen'.

    And yes I understand the whole point of the video was to calculate a level of 'reasonable luck'; but even the term itself 'reasonable luck' kinda dismisses the fact that philosophically luck is itself unreasonable. The universe as we know can be incredibly unreasonable. And whilst we're very dismissive of unreasonable things happening, and mathematics particularly so, the fact is unreasonable things happen, not often, not likely, and sometimes not ask for, but trying to dismiss an appeal to luck with reasonability rather misses the point I think. And the probabilities solely in and of themselves are not evidence of malfeasance, but rather could be used to point to potential malfeasance requiring a stricter auditing process of speed running, including data save files, video capture and community level meta-data analysis of the alleged files. Just saying 'this thing is unreasonably unlikely' isn't in and of itself good enough….because as I said, appeals to luck aren't reasonable….they are explicitly appealing to the most outliery components of probability….which 2 X 10^22 chances are maybe the most emblematic of.

    Reply

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