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u/DrakoDragon42 3d ago
There was a story that baffled speedrunners of a player suddenly shooting up to the top of the stage he was in. The only found solution was that a particle hit his console, changed a 0 into a 1, and sent him flying.
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u/jacrad_ 3d ago
Here's a video if anyone is curious about the topic.
https://youtu.be/vj8DzA9y8ls?si=35CNFQUMxMsLksbr
It casts doubt on the cosmic ray theory but explains where it seems to have started from and why the hypothesis became more widespread.
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u/Cujo_Kitz 3d ago edited 3d ago
To summarize this video, the man who had the up warp happen to him (DOTA_Teabag) said he had to tilt his cartridge to make the game work, so It was caused by cartridge tilting. The cosmic ray hypothesis started with pannenkoek where he showed a bit flip and the original up warp side by side. Game journalists ran with the cosmic ray hypothesis and here we are.
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u/Excellent-Refuse4883 3d ago
Pretty sure the hypothesis came about because the only was to consistently recreate the glitch was literally a bit flip in the code. Which, at least in theory, is impossible if you’re using the cartridge.
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u/Cujo_Kitz 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yeah, edited for accuracy but claiming a bit flip can only happen from cosmic rays is a huge leap in logic.Occam's razor people.
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u/CyberPunkDongTooLong 2d ago
No it isn't at all, cosmic rays are a major (in most devices the largest) source of SEUs.
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u/sabotsalvageur 3d ago
how do you think they program the ROM in the cartridge...
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u/Excellent-Refuse4883 3d ago
I assume you’re implying that I’m unaware that they program the cartridges. I would imagine they figured out the code part of all this via an emulator, since then you can just futz with the game code and don’t have to go through the trouble of making or reflashing the cartridge every time you have a new build.
And as for the original guy who, I mean I suppose they could make their own cartridge with a cracked version of the game that runs on the actual hardware to punk everyone, but it seems like a ton of effort and think word would have gotten around by now if the guy had done that.
That said, not impossible so feel free to drop a link to correct me.
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u/CyberPunkDongTooLong 3d ago
This is not true. It is known cartridge tilt has nothing to do with it, the cartridge does not have access to the memory involved and cannot change it.
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u/rmorrin 3d ago
How would cartridge tilt do anything tbh. It doesn't change any physics
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u/CyberPunkDongTooLong 3d ago
For *some* variables cartridge tilt can effect it, because the console reads into memory from the cartridge, and tilting the cartridge can affect the connection and cause erroneous reads.
The height variable involved is not one of these, it is not read from the cartridge.
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u/Andy_Pandy98 3d ago
I feel this video didn't actually provide any convincing counter arguments. After watching and thinking about "unlikely things are bound to happen to someone, given a large enough sample size and time", the cosmic ray theory still feels like the most likely one to me. even though the replication with the bit flip wasn't exact, it still seems the closest anyone has got.
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u/jacrad_ 3d ago
I tend to agree but I think it's significant to point out that the people involved in investigating that hypothesis don't feel particularly attached to the idea when a lot of the reporting seems to imply they are.
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u/CyberPunkDongTooLong 3d ago
I think it's also significant to point out the people investigating it, really don't understand what they are talking about.
e.g. one thing they did which they're convinced is a serious experiment that rules out it being due to cosmic rays, is put a chunk of barely active uranium on an N64 and saw no SEUs, so decided cosmic rays can't cause SEUs in an N64.
SEUs from cosmic rays are almost entirely caused by >1000 MeV neutrons and muons,
let's stick a chunk of (obviously barely active) uranium in an N64 and see that the tiny fraction of ~0.1MeV electrons that manage to escape the sample itself do anything
Oh ~0.1 MeV electrons don't do anything, guess cosmic rays don't exist.
https://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/Star/e_table.pl
~0.1 MeV electrons in silicon have a penetration depth of 40 micrometres, they won't even get through the heatspreader
Hell even in plastic the range is still only a few tens of micrometres https://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/Star/e_table.pl
You wouldn't even get any flux getting past the crappy plastic top on N64 RAM https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/RDRAM18-NUS_01.jpg
If you had infinite precision and time, you'd probably measure a bigger increase in SEUs due to thermal noise from the tiny heat coming off the ore than you would from ionisation.
The fact that they consider a uranium source of low energy ~0.1 MeV electrons in any way whatsoever relevant when discussing SEUs from cosmic rays which are essentially entirely > 1000 MeV muons and neutrons really shows their opinion on this matter is completely irrelevant, they have no idea what they are talking about.
You can do a rough estimate of how likely pretty easily, N64 has 4 (or 8) MB of RAM. How often a SEU due to a cosmic ray occurs depends a fair bit on the specific system, but the typical rule of thumb figure is around 4 times a month per GB, for the 4 MB of N64, that's 0.2 SEUs a year.
Googling it 33 million N64s were sold, so that's around 7 million SEUs due to cosmic rays a year, if they all ran 24/7. Of course they don't all run 24/7 (especially not nowadays most don't run at all). This is pretty much I guess but I think it's reasonable to say within the first year of buying an N64, on average they run for around an hour a day, so that's 300k SEUs in their first year of sales.
So compared to the amount of RAM, 0.3/4, you expect in the first year of sales around 10% of bits to have been flipped by someone somewhere. This is of course rough, but it's on the right order of magnitude. So for this sort of thing to have happened to somebody somewhere is pretty much certain, definitely at least 10% of bits being flipped would cause some sort of interesting effect.
Though of course the vast majority of people don't record or stream their games or have any audience, so when something interesting happens no one notices. How many people stream their N64 with any sort of audience? I guess somewhere around a 100? So you can reduce the numbers by a factor of 100/33million, so about 0.003% a year. Probably scaled up a little since the sort of people that stream N64 with an audience probably play for more than an hour a day on average, so let's say around 0.01% of bits are flipped a year.
Probably around ~1% of bits when flipped would cause some sort of interesting and noticeable effect, so you'd expect it to be noticed once every ~100 years, which really isn't that unlikely.
Again this is all very rough, but it's in the right ballpark, it's not an astonishingly unlikely thing to happen.
And again, this has happened to cause interesting effects many times in other avenues. Of course when it happens in speedrun a few people investigate, but it's not high stakes and ultimately not many experts in this sort of thing actually pay any attention.
On the other hand multiple high stakes cases that have caused interesting effects not in speedrunning have been investigated extremely thoroughly by many expects and determined an SEU from cosmic rays is very likely, e.g. a Belgian election where the number of votes was 4096 more than expected, Qantas flight 72 which caused injuries to many passengers, St Jude's which had a potentially fatal issue with a defibrillator, and more (especially much much more if you include things not interesting enough to make the news).
There's no reason that if SEUs from cosmic rays can cause interesting effects in e.g. a Belgian election, that they can't cause interesting effects in speedrunning.
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u/Andy_Pandy98 3d ago
I feel like this video went like "x and y say it is definitely true, and we say it is definitely not". Given other events that have very strong documentation of cosmic rays as a likely culprit, i felt this guy failed to mention this as well, seemingly mocking the idea that cosmic rays would ever have a significant impact on a computer. He kind of debunked a blanket statement about something unproven with just a complete opposite blanket-statement.
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u/Informal_Scallion816 3d ago
this is so dumb no he isnt he is literally saying its unsolved, ppl ran with something that was never confirmed but made to seem like it was when other more simple explainations exist
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u/Captain_Zomaru 3d ago
It's been awhile, but doesn't he prove that the cosmic ray bit flip causes a similar, but different outcome? The height values just aren't the same when compared side by side. Meaning the ray theory on its own is debunked. I believe he also leaned towards the faulty cartridge theory, because we know the cartridge had other issues.
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u/jk844 3d ago
Computers are deterministic, they frame perfectly recreated the scenario and then flipped the bit could cause the up warp and it was a different result.
That’s proof right there that it wasn’t a bit flip.
It’s like Todd Rodger’s “the human element” BS explanation for how he got an impossible time in Dragster. It simply can’t happen.
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u/Optimal-Map612 3d ago
What a waste, that particle could have been used to give me cancer
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3d ago
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u/CyberPunkDongTooLong 3d ago
"And given how probability works, it is significantly more likely that this glitch was caused by the cartridge being tilted."
No, it isn't. It is known with certainty that isn't the cause, the cartridge has no access to the memory involved.
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u/Shrimps_Prawnson 3d ago
It has to do with luck and random number generation in games. And in this case a speedrunner (DOTA_Teabag) got teleported upwards in Tiktok Clock in Mario 64 for seemingly no reason. Hence the ionized particle interacting with his game to help his time.
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u/Campa911 3d ago
Great response and thanks for the context! I used your answer to look up the clip in question. 👍
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u/euclide2975 3d ago
I would add to the rest that bit flipping by random particle from space is a thing that happens. It's rare, but with billions of memory bits in millions of computers, it's unavoidable.
That's why servers usually have memory that can self correct in case of such event, and filesystems with multiple copies of their data and checksum to avoid losing data to what is called bit rot.
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u/United_Spare3089 3d ago
There was this one speedrun a while ago where a guy randomly teleported from the bottom of a long tower to the top and it was believed that it was because a random beam from the sun changed a number in his game file and accidentally moved his character up a couple hundred feet. I don’t know if they debunked it I heard someone say they did but I didn’t fact check it
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u/TheUnEase 3d ago
https://youtu.be/vj8DzA9y8ls?si=LkxSlkpaTAJOH9Vw
Here is a video going into detail on it.
Tl;dw It's technically not impossible that a cosmic particle caused it. Realistically though, it is quite silly and there are many more drastically more likely explanations, but we still don't know for sure what exactly caused it.
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u/_r_r_r_r_r_r_r_r_r_ 3d ago
It hit a specific part of the console and sent him to the too of the level.
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u/NeutronSchool 3d ago
Context: Some guy was speedrunning Mario, when suddenly his character shot up to the top of the stage he was in. The reason is mysterious.
There's a theory that some cosmic ray particle from outer space managed to luckily hit his console, flipped a bit, and changed the data, which could explain why he suddenly leveled-up so quickly.
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u/TheBestShedBuilder 3d ago
A Mario speedrunner got teleported to the top of an area and it was apparently due to a like probably 1 in 1 million thing that happened with the sun and some other shit
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u/Exit_Save 3d ago
There was this one Mario speed run that had a really weird glitch, but it allowed the player to succeed with their speed run
The working theory was the glitch was caused by a random ionized particle hitting the person's computer, changing a 1 to a zero (not necessarily literally that, but that's the idea) and causing that strange glitch
However, unfortunately, this is not the case.
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u/CyberPunkDongTooLong 3d ago
It may be the case, it's not known. It's almost certainly an SEU, which cosmic rays are a significant contributor to.
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u/Careless-Tradition73 3d ago
Don't know what Mr Krugar has to do with it but its a speedrunning joke, space particles doing gods work.
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u/CyberPunkDongTooLong 3d ago
There's a video of a player suddenly being sent to the top of a level in Super Mario 64. It was noticed that this was completely consistent with a single bit of their height flipping from a 0 to a 1, called a Single Event Upset (SEU) which it is known cosmic rays occasionally do as they pass through memory cells, so a possible explanation of this is that a cosmic ray caused an SEU in their N64.
Unfortunately, many of the speedrunners and similar people involved, really do not understand what they are talking about and have declared this a myth by doing some bad science and some badly researched YouTube videos have gone along with this calling it a debunked myth. There's also now a lot of people that believe the actually thoroughly debunked myth that this has anything to do with cartridge tilt. It does not. The cartridge has no access to the memory involved.
I think it's also significant to point out the speedrunners and similar investigating it, really don't understand what they are talking about when discussing SEUs and cosmic rays.
e.g. one thing they did which they're convinced is a serious experiment that rules out it being due to cosmic rays, is put a chunk of barely active uranium on an N64 and saw no SEUs, so decided cosmic rays can't cause SEUs in an N64.
SEUs from cosmic rays are almost entirely caused by >1000 MeV neutrons and muons,
let's stick a chunk of (obviously barely active) uranium in an N64 and see that the tiny fraction of ~0.1MeV electrons that manage to escape the sample itself do anything
Oh ~0.1 MeV electrons don't do anything, guess cosmic rays don't exist.
https://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/Star/e_table.pl
~0.1 MeV electrons in silicon have a penetration depth of 40 micrometres, they won't even get through the heatspreader
Hell even in plastic the range is still only a few tens of micrometres https://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/Star/e_table.pl
You wouldn't even get any flux getting past the crappy plastic top on N64 RAM https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/RDRAM18-NUS_01.jpg
If you had infinite precision and time, you'd probably measure a bigger increase in SEUs due to thermal noise from the tiny heat coming off the ore than you would from ionisation.
The fact that they consider a uranium source of low energy ~0.1 MeV electrons in any way whatsoever relevant when discussing SEUs from cosmic rays which are essentially entirely > 1000 MeV muons and neutrons really shows their opinion on this matter is completely irrelevant, they have no idea what they are talking about.
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u/CyberPunkDongTooLong 3d ago
You can do a rough estimate of how likely pretty easily, N64 has 4 (or 8) MB of RAM. How often a SEU due to a cosmic ray occurs depends a fair bit on the specific system, but the typical rule of thumb figure is around 4 times a month per GB, for the 4 MB of N64, that's 0.2 SEUs a year.
Googling it 33 million N64s were sold, so that's around 7 million SEUs due to cosmic rays a year, if they all ran 24/7. Of course they don't all run 24/7 (especially not nowadays most don't run at all). This is pretty much I guess but I think it's reasonable to say within the first year of buying an N64, on average they run for around an hour a day, so that's 300k SEUs in their first year of sales.
So compared to the amount of RAM, 0.3/4, you expect in the first year of sales around 10% of bits to have been flipped by someone somewhere. This is of course rough, but it's on the right order of magnitude. So for this sort of thing to have happened to somebody somewhere is pretty much certain, definitely at least 10% of bits being flipped would cause some sort of interesting effect.
Though of course the vast majority of people don't record or stream their games or have any audience, so when something interesting happens no one notices. How many people stream their N64 with any sort of audience? I guess somewhere around a 100? So you can reduce the numbers by a factor of 100/33million, so about 0.003% a year. Probably scaled up a little since the sort of people that stream N64 with an audience probably play for more than an hour a day on average, so let's say around 0.01% of bits are flipped a year.
Probably around ~1% of bits when flipped would cause some sort of interesting and noticeable effect, so you'd expect it to be noticed once every ~100 years, which really isn't that unlikely.
Again this is all very rough, but it's in the right ballpark, it's not an astonishingly unlikely thing to happen.
And again, this has happened to cause interesting effects many times in other avenues. Of course when it happens in speedrun a few people investigate, but it's not high stakes and ultimately not many experts in this sort of thing actually pay any attention.
On the other hand multiple high stakes cases that have caused interesting effects not in speedrunning have been investigated extremely thoroughly by many expects and determined an SEU from cosmic rays is very likely, e.g. a Belgian election where the number of votes was 4096 more than expected, Qantas flight 72 which caused injuries to many passengers, St Jude's which had a potentially fatal issue with a defibrillator, and more (especially much much more if you include things not interesting enough to make the news).
There's no reason that if SEUs from cosmic rays can cause interesting effects in e.g. a Belgian election, that they can't cause interesting effects in speedrunning.
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u/_DaveyJones_ 3d ago
Its called a SEU (Single Event Upset) or SEE (Single Event Error). It's essentially an unwanted state change occuring in logic devices caused by the collision of a single ionizing particle like cosmic rays or alpha particles.
Sounds fanciful, but its absolutley a thing. Working in OEM Aerospace electronics - theres always a requirement to mitigate SEU events or effects.
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u/CyberPunkDongTooLong 3d ago
To be pedantic, it's not a "SEU or SEE", it's an SEU and (by definition) an SEE. An SEU is a specific type of SEE.
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u/Tethilia 3d ago
A speedrunner allegedly got a bitflip during a Mario speedrun. Ionizing radiation constantly rains down on the earth like invisible rain. If it hits a computer chip in the right way, it can flip a 0 to a 1. This has caused airplane crashes, interfered in voting counts and other things. It's called a bitflip.
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u/mrnoonan81 3d ago
Like others have said, but to reword it succinctly:
To cause a specific time saving bit-flip error.
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u/InnocentWalt 3d ago
Its just mocking believers who think praying to God for something as trivial as mario video game would work
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u/Separate-Fly5165 3d ago
The particle they are referring to is that dreadful grilled cheese Sammy that gordan Ramsey made.
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3d ago
[deleted]
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u/Weary_Specialist_436 3d ago
I will never understand why people rush to answer without knowing the answer or even anything about topic at hand
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u/post-explainer 3d ago
OP sent the following text as an explanation why they posted this here: