How lucky is too lucky?: The Minecraft Speedrunning Dream Controversy Explained
6,794,824
Published 2021-02-04
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/610964/humble-pi-…
UPDATE: Harvard Book Store have totally sold out.
My talk on 4 February 2021 at Harvard Book Store:
www.harvard.com/event/virtual_event_matt_parker/
Here is the original accusation against Dream.
Video: • Did Dream Fake His Speedruns - Offici...
Paper: mcspeedrun.com/dream.pdf
And here is Dream's reply.
Video: • Video
Paper: drive.google.com/file/d/1yfLURFdDhMfrvI2cFMdYM8f_M…
"Matt flips a coin 100 times."
• Matt flips a coin 100 times.
"Holy Craps! How a Gambling Grandma Broke the Record"
content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,190166…
Number of casinos in the world in 2011: 3,547
www.statista.com/statistics/221031/total-worldwide…
Roulette records.
www.roulette17.com/stories/record-reds-blacks-in-a…
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.
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.
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/books/610964/humble-pi-…
UK book: mathsgear.co.uk/collections/books/products/humble-…
All Comments (21)
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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 )
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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:
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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.
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"So you're saying there's a chance!" is basically Dream's entire defense, btw. Which is hilarious.
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"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"
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'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.'
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I feel bad for dream, he can't even go for a 5 minute walk without getting struck by lightning ten times
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that mathematician dream hired is the equivalent of a lawyer having to defend someone who committed murder in front of the judge.
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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 😂
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Joke's on you Matt, I'm here for the maths AND the minecraft
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"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...
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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!
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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
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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Fun fact: 1 in 2.0x10^22 is like 1 millimetre in 2000 light-years.
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"As an expert in getting things wrong" The Parker Square will follow this man to his grave.
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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
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As a Minecraft lover, hearing you describe the process to beat the game made me realize just how strange this game is.
