The Biggest Myth in Speedrunning History
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- Опубликовано: 5 мар 2024
- TWITCH: / lunaticj
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10 years ago, a mysterious upwarp glitch in Tick Tock Clock during a Super Mario 64 speedrun happened for no apparent reason. Years later, a myth about cosmic rays causing this glitch spread across the Internet, with people believing it to be true despite Mario 64 experts disagreeing. This is how this wild theory spiraled out of control.
Edited by: @OfficialGlitchDoctor
beautiful sky (Xandrey): • beautiful sky
CCM→BBH? (Atogami): • CCM→BBH? 17:15
Dupdome Moving Bar: • weird teleporting thing
• moving bar glitch (ful...
www.twitch.tv/dupdome/clip/En...
Ian_1243 BitFS Downwarp: • 2022 12 08 00 45 41
SM64 - TTC Upwarp $1000 Bounty (pannenkoek2012): • SM64 - TTC Upwarp $100...
The Universe is Hostile to Computers (Veritasium): • The Universe is Hostil...
TTC Upwarp: Ceiling Warp vs Byte Change (pannenkoek2012): • TTC Upwarp: Ceiling Wa...
Ukikipedia TTC Upwarp Timeline: ukikipedia.net/wiki/Tick_Tock...
Ukikipedia Unsolved Glitches List: ukikipedia.net/wiki/List_of_u...
Was it Really an Ionizing Particle, Though? (TeabagSRL): • Was it Really an Ioniz...
#speedrun #mario #supermario64 
Игры
Please check the description if you want links to videos and the Ukikipedia pages featured in this video. i highly recommend checking those videos if you liked seeing those weird anomalies.
EDIT: Here's a link to the SM64 TASing and ABC Discord Server for those interested. Many SM64 experts are active there: discord.gg/ECskvyF Also I want to make it clear that cosmic rays have likely caused bitflips in computers like that one election in Belgium. I'm just saying it probably didn't happen to DOTA_Teabag in this specific scenario.
Ok
11 years* you round up from 6 months. we're in march now.
I find it hilarious how you call the glitches "anomalies". Keep up the good work man.
You've earned it 🏆
Hey Lunatic! Just want to say that it’s been great watching your channel grow, especially since you’ve had such high production quality right out of the gate. Can’t wait for that 100k!
....was this not a joke outside of literally the person who suggested it?
A cosmic ray traveled 92mil miles to flip a bit at Google HQ so this video got recommended to me.
Ok, but what if I told you it happened TWICE
@@kr1v twice you mean 3 times
A series of cosmis rays typed this comment
Thats crazy, because that JUST NOW happened to me.
Your here
Dies in CCM, gets mad, slaps his N64, then goes to re-enter CCM but ends up in BBH instead.
The creepypasta writes itself.
Imagine a kid happening unto that, but in 1996, lolz.
@@glidershowerI literally wouldn’t go to sleep for like 2 weeks if this happened to me (even though I was born in 07). I had a deathly fear of boos when I was little.
Vindictive N64 sends abusive Japanese player on a wild goose chase!
*wild Ghost chase! ;)
Revenge of abused Mario
Until I see definitive proof that outside rays didnt cause a bit flip, I'm sticking my N64 in a microwave at the start of TTC and hoping for good IRL RNG.
gl bro wish you luck 🙏🏿
Gl man wish you the best
But microwaves aren't ionizing radiation 😂
@@R3SerialDreams 🤓
@@R3SerialDreamssimply place some uranium ore on the console then.
The footage you showed comparing DOTA's run to a TAS isn't even identical before the upwarp occurred, and the only difference after the bit flip is a slight change in the camera angle. The fact that, in both cases, DOTA and Panen reach the same height and hit the ground at the same time should be clear evidence that a bit WAS flipped. Even if it wasn't cosmic rays, the height that DOTA got in his speedrun was exactly the amount you would get switching the leading byte of height to from C5 to C4.
This seems like a concrete explanation.
This. And as the editor noted, a bitflip can happen because of the noise in the powerline.
I noticed that when mario took the same damage
Yeah it seemed exactly the same
Thank you. Personally, I also dont find it too far fetched to think that with the millions of computers/consoles etc. running all the time, a cosmic ray could hit a person playing a game. Yes its improbable, but not impossible
It was originally "speed run", until we found a glitch to drop the space, so now its "speedrun"
Space skip
Going for that spedrun any % e skip
saved 1 second off the initial run but not a pb
Verb
spdrn
***WORLD RECORD*** 3-7-24 😂
your opponent getting hit by a solar flare would be one hell of a way to lose a speedrun race
I lost the run to CME, dude!
For real!!
Krillin coming in with a solar flare
@SteveNeubauer smh not even giving credit to Tenshinhan.
PANNENKOEK 🥞🥞🥞🥞🥞🥞🥞🥞🥞🥞
hey, weighing in with this is a programmer and systems administrator, bit flips happen constantly, be it from heat, radiation or cosmic rays and are usually caught by inbuilt error correction, the n64 used 4mb of RDRAM running at 400mhz on a 9 bit bus, using it's built in error correction bit for the GPU instead. early versions of this RAM standard had no error checking but the standard used a pretty big transistor which would require more energy comparative to the phone in your pocket or your laptop's modern hardware, so a high energy particle is more likely than you may think.
changing this bit at the right time seems to me like the most likely cause of the error. weather its ionising radiation from space or because the passively cooled memory was overheating or a solar flare is completely academic and unknowable, but IS more likely to be the case because of the energy requirement to flip a bit in that kind of memory module and it is a compelling story, and one I will continue to tell to comfort people when they can't open their word documents due to data corruption
tl;dr we live in a world where ECC memory has made us forget that this isn't even unlikely anymore, it just goes unnoticed because Richard Hamming is an underappreciated genius
edit: removed erroneous assumption about hexadecimal conversion because it was incorrect and not really relevant, I couldn't even remember what I meant by it when it was pointed out. I also corrected myself from "a bit flip is more likely" to "A high energy particle is more likely than you might think" because its what I meant and it didn't really make a lot of sense before
people have also pointed out that I say in the TL;DR it's because of ECC memory and when they google ECC memory they find the Hamming module and find out that isn't applied to consumer hardware, then assume consumer grade memory has *no* protection from errors which isn't the case, every stick of memory since DDR4 has had a Cyclic redundancy check (CRC) and parity bits on different parts of the memory module, and DDR5 has a sort of on die ECC even in it's "non ecc" variants, the ecc variants send additional parity bits to the cpu for a second check (unless you're on intel, since I don't think their consumer CPU's even support true ECC), which will catch any errors in transport, because the density of a ddr5 chip is kind of insane now, it bit flips constantly. there's also all of this on the non-volatile storage side which as I understand it wouldn't be a problem for this error, if there was an unhandled error in the non volatile storage it would be consistently reproduced, and I don't think it could happen at all in a variable because the CPU creates and references these in memory
also wtf are you talking about when you call those clips too different, they match perfectly, except one is running on native hardware with shitty 90s frame generation
@@gunslingerspartan I think his point is that they don't overlay 1 to 1 over each other, but the outcome shown is completely identical.
A rather silly gripe to claim "Not identical"
A flipped bit? In MY N64 game? Its more likely than you think
Fking thank you man. Frustrated me watching this video him claiming "this definitely wasn't caused by a cosmic ray" while citing 0 evidence that it wasn't. When the TAS practically lines up 1 to 1, the bit flip is pretty much what caused it, and again, whether it was caused by a cosmic ray or not is unknowable. But to make an entire video essentially making the claim that "No, it was 100% not a cosmic ray" is infuriating when it's essentially unknowable. ECC memory and error correction is so commonplace nowadays in all software that this essentially doesn't happen anymore, but this did use to happen quite a bit and caused data corruption all the time. It seems like we've forgotten that, goes to show how unbelievably effective these algorithms are at protecting our data from random corruption.
Might be the most genuine and educated comments I've seen on RUclips since like, 2014.
I never expected to see a person so angry at cosmic rays in my life, the internet is truly boundless
who's angry?
@@TweedleDeem LunaticJ, watch the video
He's not mad about cosmic rays. He is just correcting misinformation.
@@Gigamex2 it's just a joke don't take it seriously
@@UCgx7OseCrundqkE8oEVeobg since you read my comment telling you to watch the video, read that same comment to find out who was angry
As an aside, cosmic ray interactions are in fact very common when working with some equipment! They're a regular nuisance for Raman spectrometry, for example, as they interrupt your spectra by creating 'spikes' at random wavelengths.
Speedrunners, please take care while running Mario 64 on your CCD detectors.
They’re also a big problem for autopilot software on airplanes, since airplanes have less protection from the atmosphere when they’re in the air.
Whoa, I just made a comment talking exactly about raman spectroscopy! The first time I saw that huge spike I got excited! Then after having seen it over and over again it lost some magic.
Good to know since the lab I work at just got a Raman IR. I'll just blame the cosmos every time a sample fails 😅
Also, computers _do_ experience random bit flips fairly often (it's why ECC exists); just, most of them are caused by less interesting interference.
Sounds like it's Rayman speedrunners who should be concerned
that cuphead journalist is never going to live that down.
The guy didn't even review the game, and even had positive impressions of it. Yet here we are years later using him as the frontliner example of "bad gaming journalism" because he was bad at a video game once
@@supra_sr Also worth noting that he wasn't a "regular" (for lack of a better word) gaming journalist, he mostly covered the industry-side of gaming, not gaming itself.
@@supra_sr Gamers don't let skill issue slide, you know the rules and so do I
@@supra_sr deserved
Have they finished the tutorial yet?
"The clip of the bit switch and what happened is actually slightly different so it couldnt have happened" he says as the two clips match up perfectly except for the frame interpolation and fails to give anything else than even resembles the clip.
They’re so similar it left me confused as to why he was claiming they were different.
Exactly, either if it was a cosmic ray or not, its hard to believe it was anything other than a bit flip.
nope.
IT IS SLIGHTLY LONGER BEFORE DAMAGE IS TAKEN
NOT BY MUCH BUT THEY ARENT IDENTICAL
weve moved on from fucking click bait to lengthy bullshit videos, it seems. The worst part, i dont think buddy is in on his own scheme.:(
@kevinnone4728 This is not new. Now the entire internet is filled with pseudo intellectual content creators and audiences alike.
I'm not very far into this video but just wanted to mention that cosmic rays flipping bits in RAM is not an "out there" concept. Server-grade RAM is literally designed to combat this for data integrity.
Cosmic rays being the cause of this is probably what is being questioned. To your point though, there is also something called "functional safety" in ISO and IEC standards. There are dictations to the way code must be written that assumes a bit could randomly be toggled. An example is that there cannot be any "hanging" or dormant code in which it has the potential of being executed even though it would never execute in any expected scenario. Even if that piece of code is commented out, it cannot be present at all if it doesn't belong there.
@@seinfan9 Nah the "cosmic rays are questioned" is just an excuse, do not follow the video creator blindly, the video clearly showed ways to neglect even the existence of cosmic rays and failed at it, the guy talks about it like it was something impossible and magical while it's actually not that uncommon.
I can't believe this video isn't mass disliked due to providing missinformation and confusion just for views and likes, everytime I come back I remember how stupid it is where he shows multiple recreations or possibilities that are already debunked and just says "well cosmic rays don't exist so it didn't happend".
Actual moron he is
LJ: "10 years ago..."
Me: "Oh so like 2003"
LJ "September 21st 2013"
Me: Turns to dust
I honestly have no idea why people keep saying that, although i still feel 2013 like yesterday.
Technology wise, because i always go for low-specs, so when i try something that isn't, i'm amazed at technology's progress LOL.
@@manuelkfc7916the other day i got an ebook and im still baffled at how it works
It gets worse with thinking about how 2009 was 15 Years Ago, and kids born in 2006 are graduating High School this year.
Same age as Pokémon X and Y.
We get it, we're old. I swear I see this exact comment on every video that has even a singular date. Get over it.
I can’t believe Big Speedrun is trying to gatekeep the common tech of cosmic ray manipulation.
Shh, keep quiet, I don't want them to find out I've been manipulating my runs for over a decade with that orphaned source I "aquired"...
(Just kidding. I don't a have an orphaned source and I don't speedrun either. And if I had one, I'd probably be long dead by now.)
Don't. They'll silence us even more than they already are. Keep your thoughts to yourself. There'll be a time where Big Speedrun will fall and cosmic ray manipulation will be a widely used strat.
@c0d3warrior riiiiiight. Just admit you do speed runs in space to manipulate memory
Big Speedrun made my day. Cause the concept is crazy😂😂
@@c0d3warriorAh yes, the caesium-137 strat
"The idea that a cosmic ray flipped a bit in a computer is highly unlikely."
And yet, ECC memory is used in servers all around the world for... what, fun?
Yeah, insane to just rule out cosmic rays like that. I remember going about universities when I was younger, and it was almost guaranteed there'd be some demonstration about detecting cosmic rays with some spark chamber so you could visualize them.
@@plukerpluckit is so funny to me that people look up at the giant ball of flames in the sky that warms up this entire planet despite beings millions of miles away, one of literal infinite more of them in varying sizes from massively smaller to way bigger and think “nah nun’ gettin here”
The BitFS downwarp being around 900 units doesn't automatically rule out a bit flip, because Mario's position is stored as 32-bit floating-point numbers, meaning the highest bit represents the sign, the next 8 represent the exponent, and the remaining 23 give the mantissa, to make up a number of the form (basically) mantissa * 2^exponent. Flipping one of the mantissa bits will add or subtract a power of 2, but flipping one of the exponent bits will *multiply* the previous value by some power of 2, meaning if the Y coordinate started as -900 and the last bit of the exponent was flipped from 0 to 1, it would become -1800, resulting in a 900-unit downwarp. I know the lower sections of BitFS are below Y=0 (because of the A press save on Wii VC) but I don't know if the coordinates perfectly match the clip
Hi, Cosmic-Radiation-Bit-Flip researcher here (I am not making that up, that is actually my job). So to keep a long story short: computers are weird and trying to model anything happening on hardware exactly is practically impossible. I disagree with the statement that a cosmic bit flip cannot be the cause, simply as it is very hard to prove that it isn't and it is within the realm of (at least theoretical) possibilities. However, there are two other things we should consider that make the cosmic ray theory very unlikely. The first is the very low amount of radiation we observe on earth. A satellite within the Low Earth Orbit will still only get a small number of radiation events in the mission time, for a device on earth the possibility is negligible. On satellites we still need to consider the effects of radiation if hardware is safety critical, we have a very bad setup (high amounts of radiation expected), or we have long missions and aging effects, but that is satellite mission stuff. Secondly, we shouldn't forget how much hardware just doesn't work. Modern computer chips have a huge percentage of the chip that just doesn't work due to manufacturing problems. If you produce a CPU with 12 cores but only 10 work: sell it as a 10 core CPU, that's how it's done. Thus hardware malfunctions are definitely not unlikely and again really really hard to identify, even if you have the hardware in your hands.
TLDR: is the cosmic ray theory possible? Yes, it is possible. Is the theory likely: No, it's not likely. Even though it's not impossible, the odds are very low. So we shouldn't say it's impossible, but also not act as if it was definitely the solution.
Well said. this mirrors my thoughts, but it bothers me that people are thinking i don't believe cosmic rays can affect computers when all I'm saying is it probably didn't happen in this specific instance
@@LunaticJI do agree with both of these comments I just think maybe next time use your words more carefully if that makes sense
this is just feedback and not a way to make you look bad, just saying it's a myth and it's rare is not best things to say when making an statement, next time maybe not put that people opinions as much and make people look dumb, im not sure it was your intentions and I know everyone has different views just this is what I think. Over all even if I disagreed and thought sometimes you was a bit dramatic this still a good video just needed some clarification.
@@catlance I agree with you. I feel LunaticJ's tone was too dismissive of the possibility. Stating that other explanations are more likely is more than enough to keep the question open and being dismissive diminishes his credibility, weakening his case rather than strengthening it. Another important point is that even very unlikely things happen all the time. With Mario 64 being streamed all around the world every day, we should fully expect to see all kinds of strange outcomes and glitches from time to time, including random hardware glitches, and yes, maybe even bit flips.
According to what you say in the video (18:25 for one example), you’re not saying it probably isn’t a cosmic ray, you’re saying it’s definitively not a cosmic ray. And some of the evidence you provide for it not being a bit flip is also extremely hypocritical. You take a discord comment of Pannen eyeballing the downwarp distance as “like 900” and proclaim it as irrefutable expert analysis that the distance CANNOT be 1024. Not a minute later, you’re mocking journalists for doing close to the same thing. Honestly, the entire tone of the video feels like you’re mocking your viewers for not knowing the intricacies of the situation and daring to believe a cosmic ray could be the cause. Which it still could, because you provided no hard evidence disproving it. All you did was state that it’s less likely than a hardware malfunction, followed by more talking down to the viewer for ever believing otherwise.
@@LunaticJIt's the tone. You sound really... smug throughout this video, and it really comes off as if you are dismissing the possibility entirely. You sound like you are mocking the idea. To be clear, I agree with you that it's unlikely but possible, but your tone was super off-putting.
Okay yeah, but also the phrase: “Sun assisted speedrun” goes really fucking hard. It’s highly likely that it’s not true, as you’ve already mentioned, but god it sounds cool.
Gotta get some of then neutrinos
Just like aliens*, big foot and whatnot, we may keep making memes about that while ensuring people are informed that they're not real.
*Aliens are real; but they're nowhere near Earth and we have yet to find any.
Tfw you RNGmanip the SUN.
@@0Cazador RNGmanipulating sun so your crops get sunlight for the entire day
Vertassium (I think that's the channel spelling, or at least close) has a great video on bit flips
Better title: "This theory isn't confirmed, so I'll make a video about how it definitely isn't true (I won't provide evidence though)"
Someone stated something as fact when it wasn't proven as such (or even proven as the most likely cause), that's why the video is saying they're wrong, whether their theory is right or wrong isn't the problem, it's asserting it as truth despite there being insufficient evidence to show it as true (or again, even as a likely solution). The burden of proof on any claim is on the person making the claim, hundreds of articles regurgitated the fact that what happened was certainly a cosmic ray, that's incorrect because there's no certainty in that idea, there's no evidence supporting it outside of the fact that cosmic rays exist, there's a myriad of other things it could have been, so stating with certainty that it was one thing is incorrect.
@@Hopesedge Many (but not all) of the outlets mentioned in the video (Veritasium, Hackaday, IFLS, Gizmodo Nintendo Life, PC Gamer) do NOT "assert it as truth" unlike what you and the video author seem to think. They provide it as a possible explanation, and often "the best" or "most likely" explanation. Considering that currently there's no other way to replicate this, they're not wrong. They have enough evidence to make this claim.
Now the burden of proof is on the video author to show that it is NOT the best explanation. This video tries to make that claim, but only his examples with Dupdome are compelling evidence. The rest of the video is just him asserting his opinion with little explanation, or grasping at straws with the cartridge stuff
@awsomebot1 Burden of proof is on you not him. You still have not proven it is true and given the incredibly unlikely chance of it happening, it is safe to assume it is not true without sufficient evidence.
@@daviddow3705 Read my comment again.
We don't know if it's true or not, and regardless that is not the claim being made. The claim is that it's the only explanation that can replicate what happened, so right now it's the best explanation we have however unlikely it is. This isn't the same as saying "it's what happened", because we're being distinctly agnostic about it.
However the video author seems very convinced that this explanation is false (18:23). He's the one making the definitive claim, so the burden of proof is on him.
It’s not the only explanation and cosmic rays were never the most likely explanation. These news outlets were scummy and went with the most outlandish theory in order to get clicks
"We don't know" not only means "it's not proven it DID happen", it also means "it's not proven it DID NOT happen". It's simply not yet proven on either side.
Yeah, but it's worth getting Occam's Razor involved there too.
burden of proof is on the person who claimed it happened, given the incredibly low probability of it happening
Are u slow
@gmdnikoyou should do it first pal
@gmdnikoChill, I think he might be artistic
I'm an electronics engineer.
It's definitely unlikely to be a cosmic ray bitflip, but it could be as simple as environmental radiation or contamination in the packaging of the semiconductor chips, or a variety of other semiconductor device physics stuff.
Fun fact: did you know that trace contamination of certain radioactive metals in the solder used to put chips down can cause bitflips?
Interesting. There's a 1996 scientific paper called "Single event upset at ground level" that states that (quoting Wikipedia):
"Electrical or magnetic interference inside a computer system can cause a single bit of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) to spontaneously flip to the opposite state. It was initially thought that this was mainly due to alpha particles emitted by contaminants in chip packaging material, but research has shown that the majority of one-off soft errors in DRAM chips occur as a result of background radiation, chiefly neutrons from cosmic ray secondaries, which may change the contents of one or more memory cells or interfere with the circuitry used to read or write to them."
I've talked to astrophysicists about this before and they disagree, cosmic rays (especially neutrinos) are very capable of flipping bits and should actually do it fairly often (over years duh) statistically speaking. You and an astrophysicist should get together to come out with a truly informed opinion.
Where do you think the classic static noise pattern comes from? Radiation, yea, but a lot of that radiation is in fact cosmic in nature (fun fact, a not insignificant portion of that noise comes from the CMB.)
And yes, before you go ''ackchually'', yes, i am aware modern electronic devices including chips are built to self correct enough to make that noise negligible, but that design does not cover all energy levels of particles (and even types of particles themselves) that the chip will realistically be exposed to.
@@thelelanatorlol3978 About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second. With 8 billion people and many many many many more electronic devices, a cosmic particle hitting a chip is not rare at all. Just happens continiously.
Satellite expert here. Bit flips are something we have to constantly design and shield against due to the extremely hostile nature of Space. However, these satalites are orbiting above the protective shielding our earth and atmosphere provide. On earth, bit flips are significantly rarer.
EXCEPT! Our sun goes through an 11 year cycle of rising solar activity (solar flares, sunspots, coronal mass ejections etc.) Eventually culminating in the "solar maximum" before activity begins to decrease again. During the year or so before and after a solar maximum, computer issues caused by the sun are slightly more common. The last solar maximum was in 2014, meaning this run took place during a period of extremely high solar activity.
Btw, the next solar maximum is building up and will be here by 2025, and experts are prediciting that it's going to be a rough one.
Even on earth, cosmic rays can cause hundreds of megabytes worth of RAM data to be scrambled every month. Of course, most modern hardware can comfortably deal with single bit flip events, cosmic ray or otherwise.
@@thelelanatorlol3978the problem is, a N64 is not modern. that leaves the theory open
Satellite GOD here : you don't know what the fuck you are talking about. Please shut the fuck up. Thank You.
A coworker from my first job was testing a component that would end up on a satellite running our software. He would often start running tests on the device, then work on something else while those ran, and would later see that some random test failed. But he couldn't figure out why. He tried catching the failure by running the test suite with a debugger attached dozens of times over night, but came back in the morning to all the tests being green. So this was an enormously frustrating thing to deal with.
How could the tests fail only when he was in the office?
So he tried running the tests in the debugger once again in the morning, and got up to go get a bagel. But the debugger immediately paused on a failed test. It turned out that the slight electromagnetic impulse from his chair whenever he stood up/sat down/shifted his weight was enough to flip bits in the device's cache/RAM and cause a test to fail. With additional EM shielding the failures disappeared.
The local environment can be a much better place to look for sources of spontaneous memory corruption than cosmic rays, though cosmic rays can cause rare bit flips on earth's surface.
i guess 2025 is the time to get into mario 64 speedrunning
Reasons why the cosmic ray flip is a myth:
- there's a different upwarp glitch
- someone had many bit flips happening
- some other person had a slightly similar thing happen that wasn't a bit flip
- uhhh some people had faulty consoles that loaded textures wrong
- uhhhhh someone slapped their console and the wrong level loaded
also I ran my mixer next to my console
>person's game has a history of weird bugs
>weird bug happens in person's game
>hurr must be cosmic rays
@@electroflame6188 You mean
> person's game wouldn't start sometimes
> someone tested the game and there were no bugs
> but some other people had bugs
> clearly, it proves that was a bug
well yes, proof by contradiction
@@spicyseliph Not sure u know what that is
@@spicyseliph It's not proof by contradiction, none of the cited examples for causes of glitches in sm64 apply to this case.
I work in biopharma with highly sensitive equipment. We get cosmic rays happening regularly causing outliers in our data. We have to account for it with our software. On a normal PC size machine this stuff happens once or twice a day sometimes while we are running tests. Tests only capture data for a minute or so. So really we are only capturing data for about 2 hours at most in a workday. And in that time we often see them. Sometimes it'll be a few days without observing one. If just one bit needs to be hit to cause this, then it's just as likely as any other bit being hit. I'd say it's plausible.
Huh, I'd never thought the community had the idea "It conclusively was a cosmic ray", but rather "We can't quite figure out what happened, and a cosmic ray was a possibility, since we can't figure out how else it might have happened yet."
Someone plagiarized a yt video into a short and said it was the only possible explanation and went viral a few weeks ago
yeah this wouldn't be the first time something similar happened and was observable
i dont remember when exactly but in veritasium's video he talked about the small radioactive particles in intel chip's ceramic caused a single flip of bit 12 in a register which caused one of the candidates for an election to receive 4096 extra votes (noticeable and while it wasn't a cosmic ray the particles emitted from the uranium are the same)
@@kadupse yeah, it could have been just a fun video about "what probably happened" but instead was weirdly hostile about the whole thing.
@@korumannbecause videos of accusatory tones get pedalled more to viewers
Basically LunaticJ does a lot of projecting as he does exactly the same which he blames other for doing. Making things up.
New speedrun strat: bring your console with you onto the ISS and play up there where cosmic rays are way, way, way more common and reap the rewards
And then it flips the wrong bit and switches you to the game over screen lol
@@thethree13o epic gamer strats, bring 10 bajillion copies of a game into space, run them all at once, and keep them running and restarting until eventually you get a world record time
i just did that and the iss is now falling down , woops
New speedrunning strat: play with a bag of cesium over your N64
ISS orbits below Earth's magnetosphere
I like how you applied a double standard in how you use the fact that a bit flip didn't match exactly as evidence that is wasn't that while using equally dissimilar events as evidence that it was something else.
I work in the same office at NASA JPL as the radiation effects expert in Veritasium's video. If you have a GB of RAM, then you might be getting a bit flip once per day on earth on average caused by cosmic rays. Google estimated the DIMMs in their study were getting 10 per day. So there are billions of bit flips every day on earth induced by cosmic rays. A single event can cause one bit to flip or many. Radiation induced upset in memories is very well understood; there are particle accelerators all around the world used for testing electronics that run 24/7/365. If N64 had 4 MB of RAM, then a bit flip every 200-300 days would be expected (1/250th compared to 1 GB). So games who only play a couple hours per week may never see bit flips in their lives. But gamers playing 8 hours per day... they may not all see them on their 4 MB systems, but many (10-30%?) definitely saw them on N64 if they played a few hours per week for a few years. As someone whose job is to understand electronic interconnect reliability, solder joints, intrinsic memory cell reliability, and radiation effects; by far the most likely explanation is radiation induced upset rather than any of the other possibilities mentioned. Anything to do with interconnects or solder joints or anything at a package level (cart slap) would cause catastrophic malfunction; not a single bit flip. Intermittency on one or more signals between the cartridge and system does not cause a single bit flip. That leads to major memory corruption. The only other credible root cause in my opinion is a weak bit; one that is marginal and beginning to fail. This is common in memories. All electronics have a limited lifetime and will eventually fail; process marginalities in memories create a distribution of bit cell lifetimes with some failing before others. However, in that case, you would likely see further degradation over subsequent months and years of use. Not sure if that was the case for that user. If the glitch was isolated to a single run, it was most likely cosmic ray (not EM interference; that also does not flip specific bits...) This is not conjecture; it is 25 years of daily first-hand experience dealing with electronic component reliability issues including the ones mentioned in the video. (the explanation at 14:00 about powers of 2 is total nonsense; what about a bit flip that changes mario's position 512 to a position where there is no floor and he falls the rest of the way to 900? i'm not saying that's precisely the case, but it's not remotely as simple as described in that section of the video.)
13:21 Guys, he tried to run a blender next to the console and nothing happened. I'm convinced. No more tests needed.
I really don’t understand why that is in the video. Does the editor think that a food processor/blender has significant electromagnetic radiation?
Does bro get his food processor from aliens?
@@zaxtonhong3958its to try and cause a power surge some high power blenders are known to cause them, not saying it was a good test of course
New M64 category: 70 stars w/ powersurge
@@zaxtonhong3958 Blender%
I NEED MORE VOLTS thousands millions billions trillions
>complains about people taking "it could've happened" and making it "it did happen"
>takes "it probably didn't happen" and makes it "it didn't happen"
>refuses to elaborate
>ends video
Let's be real though A cosmic ray traveling 8 light minutes through earths electromagnetic field into some guys house and into a very specific part of a circuit board at the exact perfect time causing mario end up on a higher platform isn't very likely.
@@lol-de4lo That's like saying a dart hitting an exact spot down to the millimeter isn't that likely. But throw a dart in hindsight, and wow, look at that. At exactly 1:13:004s I hit exactly 10.413cm by 5.143cm on the dart board, even though the probability of hitting that exact spot should be impossible!
His smug tone while fighting misinformation with more misinformation really makes me angry.
@@lol-de4loYou're missing the point. Your devices get walloped by cosmic EM radiation all the time. Radios have static for a reason. The only reason computers don't glitch all the time is that they do, but programs handle errors like that all the time. And when they do fail, it just crashes. The fact that this glitch was blatantly visible is the only difference.
@@Darkra98
I feel like those are very very very very different levels of unlikely/impossible/improbable & aren't comparable in the slightest.
Dram engineer here. My job is literally to debug these type of silicon bugs. There isnt really enough info to determine what is failing in the memory chip. Could be capacitors losing charge due to lack of refresh cycles, unintentionally causing a row hammer attack, bad voltage reads on sense amps...
Most likely, software issue as a bit flip in these cases could happen to any of the million bits in the array. Its weird how the bit flips would only happen to player coordinate.....
That is my impression too. If a bit has flipped somewhere in memory, the chances are good that it would just crash the game because it tries to read from different memory than it otherwise would, messes up a return address or a stack or something. The way that it seems to only affect the position of Mario is very strange and suggests that this is the result of a bug, not cosmic rays.
'It happens if a bit flips, and nothing we know flips bits, but it definitely can't be cosmic rays because I don't like that idea' - this guy.
Exactly lmao
It doesn't help to misrepresent someone with your own argument. The sad reality here is that people were fed a lie that was more spectacular and special like it absolutely happened and was the most magical event in speedrunning history, because that was the popular theory they all loved to just go with because they didn't have a more satisfying answer. "We don't have an answer, so lets just assume it was something magical." That's literally humanity for ya. They do it with UFO's all the time, jumping right to conclusions with the exciting/newsworthy answer they want it to be. Whereas if we're being sensible we'd go right to it's "probably a bird" / "probably a hardware issue".
And if someone were to push a more realistic conclusion, who would listen to them when there's a more popular exciting answer being pushed at the time? (as if it's fact too) This is the video to set the record straight, at a better time when people wont be as blindly stubborn over something they just got convinced of just because it's a more exciting answer. And of course as expected, the few hardcore believers have gotten upset, trying to discredit the uploader and calling him smug for not being as kind to their faith and explaining how misinformation can spread like wildfire. "A lie travels around the globe while the truth is still putting on its shoes."
Good job, you completely missed the point.
The problem with the situation is that it was that the cosmic ray hypothesis was represented as fact, when it is just a theory. Whether or not you believe that theory is up to personal opinion. He never disproved the theory at all during the video, just that he (and many SM64 experts) personally thought it was too unlikely to be the cause.
Everybody has the right to believe whatever they want, as long as that belief isn't hurting anyone or themselves. If you want to believe that it was a cosmic ray, then there's nothing wrong with that. But just like you, LunaticJ is also entitled to his own opinion. And he didn't shame anyone for having their opinions, so neither should you.
@@eyesistorm that’s not his point necessarily
"I'm gonna make this guy a straw man because I don't like any of his arguments and other theories" - literally you
the part about Veritasium "using the article and video as an example of a bit flip definitely happening"
in his video all he says is that no one has been able to replicate it and a bit flip from cosmic rays is the "best explanation anyone can come up with". does not seem like he was claiming it definitely happened to me.
But this guy ran a blender by his N64 so he clearly knows what he's talking about.
If there is any channel I trust to do the proper research it is Veritasium. One of the most prolific scientific channels on the platform that routinely has experts in their field on to discuss their work.
While watching this video, I couldn’t help but grow annoyed by Lunatic constantly attacking the theory. He didn’t even provide a theory of his own.
The idea at the time is that cosmic rays were the explanation that just made the most sense. And it’s true; it did make the most sense at the time. Aside from the cartridge or console just being faulty.
And even coming out of the video, it isn’t exactly firmly debunked, either. Unlikely, but was it definitely not a cosmic ray? We don’t know.
@@richboy455hate to break it to you, but every other video Veritasium makes is an explicit sponsorship where the science is secondary to promoting the product. Not to say that this makes these videos completely inaccurate or anything, but you should be critical of the media you consume and shouldn't put blind trust in anything on RUclips, especially in the pop science sphere
@@richboy455unless he is being sponsored to do the video. The one about dandruff, the one about self driving and the one done with Mercedes are utterly corporate propaganda nothing more.
There was an election in Belgium in 2003 where a candidate got 4096 extra votes (2^12) due to a cosmic ray bitflip. It was found and corrected, but strange and unlikely things happen given a large enough sample size and period of time.
From an outsider to this situation, it sounds like a guy tried to cheat then paid media to paint it as an accident when he got caught, lol.
@@Dante02d12 i can see why you would guess that, but circumstances dictate otherwise. It happened within the machine and was immediately spotted and fixed; she was among the least popular candidates out of 10ish, and as a minor candidate on a local election (iirc it was about 7000 votes for the whole race) had no ability to control the machines.
@@alexanderolson6622 Thanks for the added context!
computer calculating voting counts doesnt have ecc ram? nice.
also all ram has parity bit so it should've given error
You said that in the veritasium video he used the glitch as an example of a bit flip definitely happening but this is what he really said "...the best explanation anyone can come up with is that a cosmic ray caused the glitch".
thats... just as bad and just as wrong? we had better explanations
@@ouravantgarde maybe, but lets be honest, if you are making a scientific video about a common think that is not that rare to happend and you come across a good example that seems legit you wouldn't search in forums and communities for hours just to check if it is true
@@lorenzobuero7115 it didnt require that. LITERALLY the video the article referenced said outright that they disapprove of it. they didnt do basic fact checking, a science channel like that should be doing basic research, but honestly theyve never been the best
@@ouravantgarde No you don't, what you have is a bunch hypotheses with a significantly lower burden of evidence, all which which have failed to be met. Not even by physically tinkering with the hardware involved in the glitch has the memory error theory been proved. The only problem with the cosmic ray theory is that it's non falsifiable since you would have to replicate the exact conditions of the entire universe to test that theory, that doesn't make it a bad theory.
@@ouravantgarde we literally do not have better explanations. If you critically think about this video at all, nothing else he suggested is as likely, and he also continually said that it wasn’t a bit flip, when the bit flip perfectly re-created the timing of the fall, meaning it warped him to the right height. The only other explanation is, a bit was flipped, but we don’t know why. That’s not a full explanation. That’s just describing the phenomenon.
Im shaking and crying the gamer would never spread misinformatiom on the internet
Teacher: "Why didn't you do your homework"
Me: "A cosmic ray ate my dog"
@@TheGameMakeGuy after that the rumbing started
I spelled dog backwards and he created a reality without homework.
@@abloogywoogywoo Everyone deserves to live in that reality. I don't think I have to do the thing I do in school at home lol
"why were you drunk driving?"
"a cosmic ray bitflipped me"
Don't get me wrong, you've absolutely convinced me that hardware issues are the far more likely culprit here, but I feel like you MASSIVELY underestimate just how common cosmic rays are. They're not some out-there weird physics concept, you've had several pass by you in just the time you've read this alone. Single flip events are a good chunk of the reason error correction codes are as robust as they are.
That's also why cosmic rays couldn't be the culprit. They pass every console everywhere.
@@wyattcensored9361many bits to flip, redundancies and fabrication techniques in modern technology to prevent single event upsets from affecting normal use, eec memory
@@wyattcensored9361 most of those rays aren't strong enough to cause a bit flip, but some of them are. That's why servers use ECC memory
Yep, if your PC has enough RAM there are actually scripts you can run to detect them based on bit flips.
According to IBM, for each gigabyte of RAM your PC has, you will experience one cosmic ray induced bit flip per week. Though, this was in the 1990s and technology has changed since then, so the numbers might be a bit different now.
@@thelegend8570 Data corruption on hard drives is super common as well. Modern file systems do lots of integrity checks but even so people who are in the habit of doing extra validity checks on their data often find that errors have crept in!
Highly improbable does not mean "impossible". You didn't really definitively rule it out. And like you said, it's still unsolved.
he... he knows. you said it yourself that he said it himself (several times, even)
Guys the chance of finding a shiny pokemon in gen 2 is 0.0001220703% which is highly improbable so it's impossible
"ya DONT get it dude! I need this video where I pass off what I say in a condescending tone as a fact, and where nothing substantial can come out of the conclusion to be exactly 20 minutes, I JUST NEED THAT AD REVENUE"
it doesn't have anything substantial because it's an unsolved mystery. newsflash: not everything has a satisfying answer.
@@youraveragerobloxkid This whole video boils down to "Hey, you guys remember that unsolved mystery? WELL, erm ACTUALLY, it's still an unsolved mystery". This whole video is unnecessary
@Finn-po4kt This video's purpose is to say how the cosmic ray theory is highly unlikely all things considered
@@youraveragerobloxkid It doesn't though. It just lists out random terms and rarity claims with the source being "because I said so." The claim that cosmic ray bit flips are such a rare occurrence that it is absurd to say it could have caused this wrong warp really shows he has no idea what he is talking about.
@@cileavictoria1229 dude, a cosmic ray has to travel 93 million miles through the earth's atmosphere affecting the specific bit that changes mario's height. It's hella unlikely, especially so if you consider his N64 doesn't work properly.
this happens in science journalism all the time. A journal is released where the author of the paper states that the study MIGHT show [xyz] to be true, and then people go around saying that [xyz] is DEFINITELY true and is PROVEN BY SCIENCE.
Science is dead, it used to be about finding the truth, now it's "take my word for it and TRUST THE SCIENCE or you're an evil conspiracy theorist"
"the science"
That’s why science journalism articles are no credible sources for dissertations and papers and why scientists read the studies itself.
Doesn't help that terrible science education has left the vast majority of the population believing that science "proves" that things are "fact", rather than just being the process by which we eliminate impossibilities through repeated observation and analysis.
Here's my life hack, look for the words "peer reviewed".
Peer-reviewed = the science version of "pics or it didn't happen"
Definitely a case of “technically possible” getting warped into “100% confirmed”. But look, either I’m an idiot who accidentally put a dirty bowl back in the cupboard, or someone broke in and put a dirty bowl in the cupboard. Both are possible, guess we’ll never know.
Probably not even technically possible. Cosmic rays are pretty common, and I've never heard of a confirmed bit flip as result.
someone broke in 100%
@@gloweye Bit flips from cosmic rays are very common. They just don't usually result in much as modern computers have ways for correcting the flip. Especially if you go above sea level, aviation and space get it the worst and it used to be a constant problem.
Copied this from a blog post by some guy (john d cook). This incident is well documented:
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Radiolab did an episode on the case of a cosmic bit flip changing the vote tally in a Belgian election in 2003. The error was caught because one candidate got more votes than was logically possible. A recount showed that the person in question got 4096 more votes in the first count than the second count. The difference of exactly 212 votes was a clue that there had been a bit flip. All the other counts remained unchanged when they reran the tally.
It’s interesting that the cosmic ray-induced error was discovered presumably because the software quality was high. All software is subject to cosmic bit flipping, but most of it is so buggy that you couldn’t rule out other sources of error.
Cosmic bit flipping is becoming more common because processors have become smaller and more energy efficient: the less energy it takes for a program to set a bit intentionally, the less energy it takes for radiation to set a bit accidentally.
@@gloweyeWell that's just a matter of you not hearing about them
the only thing this video proves is that there are many POTENTIAL causes for the up-warp, but because nobody knows exactly what happened it could still be a cosmic ray event. just because it's unlikely doesn't mean it is impossible. so saying that it's a totally impossible myth isn't very accurate. It is unlikely but that does not mean impossible.
But we also have to consider this happened ONCE in the entire history of mario 64 speedrunning. Out of the millions of people, only one recorded instance had an instance like this. This means it is still very plausible that out of every speedrunner this one just happened to trigger a bit flip.
It’s definitely a bit flip (the video’s reasoning why it isn’t is basically vapor), but whether it’s a cosmic ray is completely unprovable either way. Because, as you said, it’s only happened once, and because there are millions of hours of speedrun footage recorded, I think it’s totally possible and even makes sense that somewhere in all that, there would be a single instance of a cosmic-ray-caused bit flip.
@@WiggyWamWamI don’t see why the dude cares so much, a bit flip from the stars is dope and just helps the Mario speedrun community get a spotlight. It’s not like it is even proven to be wrong and also seems like the most plausible reason presented
@@LegitChipmmunk1002 Putting aside if it actually was a cosmic ray bit flip or not, why should someone believe an unproven truth just because it's dope?
At the very least, assuming it wasn't a cosmic ray bitflip, the fact that so many people think it was one means that they aren't going to try to figure out the actual reason it happened. That alone is a good enough reason to not want people to sit on the theory when it hasn't been proven conclusively.
@@LegitChipmmunk1002 Presenting an unproven and not even the most likely hypothesis with undue confidence is also dishonest
@@spectaclesspectacle2327 I think the people intelligent enough to investigate what actually happened would already assume the cosmic ray theory is unprovable. The event has gained loads of attention from the outside because of the cosmic ray theory, without it there wouldn't be nearly as many engineers and scientists thinking about it.
At this point I just want more people to understand what a bit is and what a cosmic ray is. I'm never a fan of dropping the nuance, but in this case I don't think it's a big deal.
With all due respect, I have issues with this video from a perspective of an EE in aerospace.
Regarding Veritasum's video, you said: "There's a short minute-and-a-half segment about the TTC upwarp using The Gamer's article and pannenkoek12's proof of concept video as an example of a bit flip *definitely* happening thanks to a cosmic ray." What Derek of Veritasium actually said was "The best explanation anyone could come up with is that a cosmic ray caused the glitch." I don't think that's very fair to him.
SEEs happen all the time, and we even get some here on Earth ("terrestrial SEE") where we are shielded by the atmosphere. I get the impression you hear "cosmic ray" and immediately think "that sounds too esoteric, that couldn't have happened, it feels so unlikely."
Out of all recorded Mario 64 footage on the internet, it doesn't actually seem that unlikely a random bit would flip in at least *one* of these videos due to a "cosmic ray" in a way that could be helpful in a speedrun. It only needs to happen once.
I completely agree that this problem isn't solved yet. I agree there are other, potentially more likely causes (one of my theories is EMI compounded by a poor connection with the cartridge edge connector - the two aren't necessarily unrelated). But you haven't shown me anything that rules out an SEE. And no, bad journalism about the hypothesis doesn't make the hypothesis unreasonable.
Edit: Mario's position isn't stored in the cartridge, just in memory, so a cartridge tilt would have had to cause this upwarp in a less direct way.
Exactly. Nothing in this video refutes the Cosmic Ray hypothesis or even shows why it's unlikely. They didn't even find a way to replicate the glitch with hardware malfunctions the way they said it happened!
Yeah because you cant refute it as its possible...
If you actually watched the video you would know that it is THEORETICALLY possible BUT not even close to the most probable theory
Thank you, there were a lot of leaps of judgment and faulty logic in this video, not to mention the self-contradictions. What a weird RUclipsr, will steer well clear of him.
Ironically, Veritasium's (perhaps the biggest spreader of the theory going by viewcounts) wording was a lot more open to the possibility of the cosmic ray theory being wrong, and the fact that it's still a mystery, than this video is!
When discussing the cosmic ray theory, saying 'it's just not true' is just as silly as saying it's definitely a cosmic ray; especially when you immediately follow it with "we just don't know".
@Hithere-uz6wd What is being said is that cosmic rays is the most probably explanation, not that it is a likely explanation
I thought this was a solid proof it is not cosmic rays. I'm disapointed, it could still be cosmic rays, it is not ruled out
hahahaha he had to change the thumbnail
Exactly what I was thinking, he makes it sound like it's been for sure disproven but people still don't know what caused it. Went back and watched the Veritasium video and he does a great job at saying it's just a very likely scenario not a proven fact. The guy in this video act's like cosmic rays flipping bits is some outlandish thing but yet if he actually watched the Veritasium video he's criticizing he'd know it actually happens way more often than one would think, normally just not in such a visual way. I definitely agree that a lot of video game journalist do a very poor job at getting the facts right and it sucks, but calling this the biggest myth in speedrunning history when it's still a very plausible theory is just disingenuous.
The chances are very low, but it can't really be fully ruled out. It would be amazingly lucky for it to happen at that exact moment, but not impossible.
What about the fact that by RECREATING the bit flip it didn't match? That's pretty solid evidence.
@@blueberrimuffin6682 Iirc, it was pretty damn close, no? And couldn't that be up to user error? Even for someone so experienced, I feel like it would be hard to replicate it perfectly. Unless there's some more tech I don't understand- I'll admit I'm not very in to this space.
If anything, I am MORE convinced that it was a cosmic ray after watching
how does your brain function
@@Facu28_ Firstly, they don't even disprove the possibility, let alone even make an attempt at roughly estimating the odds of its occurrence. You would actually have to be borderline lobotomized to think this video shows a counterargument even remotely definitely lmao
Just a big nothing burger of a video, really
@@KumoriNP it shows that the dudes n64 was damaged and that this kinda thing can happen from a damaged n64, if you still think andromeda sending that one cosmic ray in the perfect angle a billion years ago sounds more likely than n64 malfunction, idk whats wrong with your intuition
@@KumoriNP just because you can't disprove something, doesn't mean it's true. i could say the empire state building is hiding aliens from jupiter in its basement. you don't have to prove me wrong to know it's not true, because there is such a low probability of it being true that you don't have to wonder if it is. that's how myths and conspiracies are born, being unable to be disproven, so you assume it is solidly true
18:38 the idea that a sun fart affected a speedrun is still funny, sorry fun police 🤓🤓
14:00
Mario's position is stored as a floating-point number, which is stored vastly differently than an integer. A bit flip in the mantissa would change the value by a power of two, but a bit flip in the exponent would multiply or divide the value by a power of two. If the Y-position were, say, 1800, a bit flip in the lowest bit of the mantissa could change the value to 900, a difference of 900.
Nice catch, that seems reasonable!
No, stop! You are scaring him with first semester computer-science knowledge!
Honestly it's really disappointing that you've included disinformation of your own in your criticism of disinformation about this. You have, and present, excellent evidence that the upwarp has far more likely explanations, but you also include complete garbage. Bafflingly, at 10:21 you somehow claim there's no confirmation that any bits were flipped at all, as if Mario's position didn't change or his position isn't a bit value, as if the game runs on magic instead of bit operations.
Literally within your own video, at 12:37, alongside compelling examples of same-game same-stage same-type positional glitches repeatedly occurring, you show a comment discussing how cartridge tilt causing this type of glitch is "bunk". This is shortly after you spent about 4 minutes claiming cartridge tilt could be the cause. You appear to lump every type glitch together as if they're all the same thing, bizarrely treating cartridge-read errors as if they're the same as positional data being corrupted in real-time.
The bit being that value is the same thing as Mario being in that position, so for the video to say the bit didn't flip is to say that Mario is not at the top floor when we see him there. The console can flip bits too, but the implication of his statement would suggest that the bits don't change and the game runs without memory management.
@@drednaught608 I thought the implication was that bit flips sometimes happen outside of the game's programming, not that no bits flip ever.
This! A cartridge read error would occur as the level is loaded into the console's memory upon level start, not randomly during the level. Mario's position isn't determined based on cartridge data, because that would be insane.
What happens is that the console copies the level data from the cartridge into its internal memory, which is then used to compute Mario's position in the game world, which is then used to control everything from the renderer to enemy AI algorithms and other such mechanics.
"some other kind of memory error" a bit flip from a charged particle (could be coming from the universe, could be coming from a nearby piece of uranium) is the most common memory error
That doesn’t mean it was a goddam solar ray, you dolt.
learn the difference between impossible and highly improbable
Thought this was gonna prove the bitflip theory wrong but it just goes over all the likely theories and in the end the bitflip is the only one that has had any sort of evidence that could be reproduced, and you even bring up the dupdome instance which only reinforces the idea of a bitflip caused by a cosmic ray. In dupdome's scenario it is far more likely that a hardware error was in effect, as there were multiple bitflips occurring in predictable ways, but in the dota_teabag scenario we've taken apart the N64 and cartridge itself and in your own words "nothing notable popped up." Faulty hardware can be ruled out completely due to those tests. As for cartridge tilts and slaps, nothing in the dota_teabag clip indicates any sort of sudden harm to the console like in the atogami clip. In every other example shown of faulty cartridge connections, the interference is far greater than the upwarp and anomalies occur for far longer, animations and textures glitching out for several seconds at a time that isn't in line with the sudden, one frame change we see in the dota_teabag clip.
Every alternate scenario you've presented has other caveats and such that make them differ too greatly from the dota_teabag clip. Faulty hardware has been disproven by further testing. Faulty connections cause wildly different scenarios from the one we are trying to recreate. The bitflip is the ONLY scenario that has shown a correlation to what actually happened in the clip. It is the only scenario that actually hits the mark, and no matter how unlikely a SEU is, the results suggest that it's still more likely than anything you've shown. Hell, the idea that cosmic rays are "unlikely" is even questioned in your vid. You say yourself that bitflips usually don't effect a computer in "a visually observable manner." This implies that they happen more often than we have observed, thus making our own perception of how likely they are to happen to be inaccurate. Which, of course, they do. Hardware and software usually just has ways to handle errors that the end user doesn't perceive, like simply crashing.
I'm not gonna argue that poor journalism leads to myths, but if YOU are, then you should be doing your due diligence. You said that Veritasium used the clips as an example of a bitflip "DEFINITELY happening thanks to a cosmic ray." This is objectively incorrect and can be proven wrong by simply watching his video. His actual words were "the best explanation anyone could come up with is that a cosmic ray caused the glitch," which is a perfectly reasonable take that still leaves room for doubt. If you're gonna criticize him for poor journalistic integrity, criticize him for getting pannen's name wrong, don't shove words in his mouth. The fact that you're willing to put such blatant misinformation in your video calls in to question your own integrity.
tldr, bitflip is still the most likely scenario as nothing else has come close to replicating it. Cosmic rays affecting hardware is more common than we think. You should stop making up quotes to make others look bad.
This should be at the very top of the comment section
Perfect description of what's wrong with the video IMO.
Essentially saying 'the cosmic ray bit flip theory "simply isn't true" (his words)' while providing evidence that a bit flip is the most plausible theory for that exact glitch is wild to me. Trying to call out bad journalism through _this_ video of all things is just peak irony.
Adding another comment here to try to push this comment to the top. People tend to open comment reply sections with more replies, and upon reading the replies are psychologically more likely to actually read the long original comment, and thus more likely to like said comment, pushing it further to the top, where more people can see it as it rightfully belongs to be.
Doing my bit to push this comment up.
This
The electrical surge segment reminded me of a clip from Runnerguy2489. The framerate in his game chugs briefly at the exact same moment that lightning struck outside his house.
EDIT - Never mind, just saw the clip and it's a stream lag rather than a game lag.
Oooh that's interesting - iirc the N64's CPU runs with a 1.5x multiplier on the base clock frequency. If Pin 112 is 3.3v, then it runs at 1.5x, however if it's grounded then it runs at 1x. I wonder if the strike somehow dropped the voltage enough on pin 112 that the CPU dropped to it's 1x base frequency, which resulted in the framerate chugging.
"Was that lightning?" I think it was called.
@@kargaroc386Just saw the clip, looks like it's a stream lag rather than a game lag unfortunately :(
You can see the webcam freeze too, and immediately after the unfreeze you can also see a slight flash in the door frame.
@@Jademalo the N64 does have a rare bug in its clock generator(?). Maybe once every several thousand times you turn it on, it runs at half speed. The audio is all slowed down and spoopy and the video is a weird static (TV not properly syncing to a very-off-time signal). There are a couple clips of it on Twitch.
While that evidently didn't happen here, I wonder if it ever could happen while the game is running? It wouldn't be helpful at all, though.
@@Jademalo Heh, if it's Stream lag maybe the lighting still caused it, maybe via packet loss from interference somewhere
Imagine being upset by a meme though. The cosmic ray meme is successful not necessarily because people believe it happened, but because the idea that it could happen is really funny.
Funfact: Bitflips occur way more often (caused by various reasons) than you think and most of the time have absolutely 0 effect on whatever you're doing. But there is a reason for ECC Memory in the professional world, where 1 second of downtime is the equivalent to your yearly salary (or more)
I think this video adequatly covers ways other than cosmic rays this could have happened, however, it does not adequatly disprove the general idea of a bitflip to a degree that justifies the language used.
Came here looking for this comment. If it's not solved, you can't say it WASN'T a cosmic ray just like you can't say it was.
@@paytonhearn2502 How else would he get to bring up his tired "ethics in gaming journalism" points?
It's not even relevant here too
@@paytonhearn2502 that’s exactly how science works. If there is a likely solution backed by evidence(the faulty console) and someone comes up with another solution which is orders of magnitudes less likely, the science community doesn’t go „we can’t determine which one it is because both are possible“. They go „There is a very small change it _did_ happen like that, but the general consensus is that it happened like this“.
If it wasn’t that way we’d have to consider that gravity might not exist because there is a possibility that all things just fall downwards through random quantum tunneling.
@@foximacentauri7891 What evidence? And how do you define which solution is more or less likely? If I was paying attention, the video said that upwarps have not been proven to happen because of faulty consoles. If that's the case, it's not obvious to say that faulty console is more likely source just because it can create other types of glitches.
At least the bitflip has some kind of experimental evidence to back it up since the TAS recreation was close enough to not rule it out(i.e it was *really* close to what we saw).
So we have one hypothesis about cosmic rays that can and was tested and it resulted in good but inconclusive evidence, and another hypothesis which has no evidence and is untestable and is basically just "faulty console can result in any kind of glitch, so it's probably that even though we don't know how". Either one could be the reason, but neither is "orders of magnitude less likely." because we lack data to make such claims
What you didn't mention is that most of the articles and some of the memes say the warp "saved time" or would have saved time, but it doesn't even do that. He was going for the red coins and it only moved him away from them and would have forced him to move back down to where the platforms were
Yeah he went for "Get A Hand" as a backup. If he got that star already, it certainly would've lost more time
Yeah the whole reason there was a bounty in the first place was for future use in A Press challenges or speedrun categories. The glitch is still in the first phase of speedrun metamorphosis but articles are treating it like a crazy time skip for a wr pace or something.
@@beangorl7005if we had a cosmic ray gun that could change bits on demand it could be used for a WR run.
But it could help if there was some way to replicate it elsewhere in the game, I imagine
Counterpoint: If the actual cause of the upwarp hasn’t been definitively proven, then you can’t say with certainty that the cosmic ray hypothesis is untrue.
I choose to believe…
It’s maybe a counter argument but as you said, rooted in nothing but belief. There’s nothing scientific about saying “it could be this, so you should entertain it”. You go with the explanation that’s most likely, and remain open minded enough to change your mind if you see that something else is more likely.
@@Cosmalano Nope, wrong! Every other hypothesis has resisted demonstration despite having a much lower test-ability treshold, it's literally anti-scientific to refuse entertaining a perfectly plausible explanation on grounds of odds when none of the other more mundane ones can be proven despite having the exact offending hardware that experienced the glitch in the first place.
@@TheCamps10 that is not “anti-scientific,” let alone literally so. Science doesn’t depend on “proving” an idea right, it depends on proving them wrong. Cargo cult science seeks to prove things right. In science you always seek to disprove a hypothesis.
The bit flip hypothesis did not produce the same effect when tested, which ruled it out. If you want to entirely rule out the faulty hardware explanation, then you need to demonstrate that it doesn’t work. If you’re not after ruling things out, then we’re back to my original point, whatever is most likely is the one you should go with, until it’s proven wrong. That’s the only way science works. Nothing in science has ever nor can ever be “proven right”.
Even if the bit flip produced the same effect, this wouldn’t mean that a cosmic ray caused it, nor that this is indeed what happened. Just like how saying the Earth is flat works as a hypothesis when you see a couple of effects, but doesn’t hold up when you consider even more, where as the globe Earth model captures everything you could throw at it.
Bit flips caused by gamma rays happen much more often than you would think. The term "cosmic ray" used in English is offputting and makes it sound outlandishly unlikely. "Background radiation" is more accurate as it originates from space, earth, radioactive decay or any other thing producing exotic particles. Try turning on a geiger counter at home and see for yourself. Just because something sounds unbelievable to you doesn't mean it didn't happen.
This video really frustrates me. It keeps saying that cosmic rays are bad and implausible because of [some reason] (probably because it's fancy physics), so some mysterious other error has to be causing it. while i myself think that it's more likely that it's just faulty hardware flipping a bit for some electricity reason (N64s are old), it's just not rigorous or well explained at all. there's not even a single number on how rare cosmic rays altering bits on earth is, how often N64s fail, etc., there's nothing. it's just a cycle of "here's something kinda similar that happened that dosen't look like a bit flip" into "experts think it's dumb" repeat.
Yep. It is CLEARLY a bit flip from the TAS replication. I can't see how you could look at the replication and not think that. At which point the only question is what can cause bit flips, and this video basically doesn't go into that detail at all.
Bits flip occur because of hardware degradation, electrical interference, random imperfections in the chips, or radiation. The last of those could be cosmic rays, which is one of the more common ways bits are flipped, and is the reason that all enterprise level hardware uses error correction to detect and fix those flips.
Im not sayung it's cosmic rays but i just wanted to point out that cosmic ray bit flips are insanely common (unless you use ECC memory, they still happen but they get corrected 99% of the time). Like they happen to computers at an hourly rate, and if you gain elevation above sea level they massively increase in frequency. Aviation and Space deal with them by having so many redundancies and protections that the bit flips dont matter much. But a Nintendo 64 has no such protection, its bits will be flipped. Its not a matter of if they will happen but when. But this rarely (as in on an individual basis, on a provincial/state level they have caused issues all the time we just account for them nowadays) results in much issues let alone a bit flip like we saw.
That said, this isnt a fact of the situation; cosmic ray bit flips may have had nothing to do with it. But the fact that the height change from one bit flip was nearly identical it feels safe assuming its a bit flip of some kind. But i wont say it as a fact since there is no such thing as 100%.
20 minutes of just “STOP HAVING FUN”
3:47 i love how one comment said: "get dream on this, he has a lot of cosmic radiation in his house"
ok so why is the ionizing particle theory a myth though
I was expecting some level of evidence to be weighed against it, but instead it's just touted as ridiculous, seemingly on principle?
I think the myth is that it was ever proven to have happened. It's still a possible explanation, but there's no hard evidence that (1) the glitch happened because of a bit flip or (2) that said bit flip was caused by an ionising particle.
However, I personally think that the bit flip, since it is the only reproducible method to quite accurately achieve the same result, is the best existing theory. However, I know a decent amount about computer science, but next to nothing about particle physics, so I have no idea how likely it is that a bit flip would be caused by a cosmic ray.
@slynt_ The funny thing is that no one really knows how likely it is. Single Event Upsets are likely underreported, and even when they happen, you're never gonna be able to get evidence that it was via cosmic rays. Additionally, nowadays, there is typically redundancy to ensure Single Event Upsets do not affect anything, so we might not know when they do happen
@@byeguyssry It would be interesting to see scientific research into the probability of Single Event Upsets and to what extent different variables affect that probability. Maybe there is research on that, but probably not since it's a pretty niche thing to be interested in and like you say, it isn't really a practical problem because of redundancies we've developed.
@@slynt_ If you do know a decent amount about computer science, you should know that modern electronics are specifically designed to error correct for cosmic rays flipping bits in things like memory. AFAIK the nintendo 64 does not have any of this error correction, if a bit is flipped than the console just rolls with it.
Of course, the vast majority of bitflips will not cause any visible effects at all so you'll be unlikely to see it happening.
Dies in CCM, gets mad, slaps his N64, then goes to re-enter CCM but ends up in BBH instead. He gets what he asked for; a different level.
"Fuck this level man *hits console*
Here ya go bud, a better level
Every-
4:55 - Obviously the videos don't match perfectly. It's a movement/input recreation, obviously it's a little bit different here and there. It's different since before the glitch happens, it will also be slightly different while and after the glitch happens. Unless you have the TAS for the original button presses, I don't think you could ever recreate it 1:1. It still is EXTREMELY CLOSE to the original video. So the bit change still looks like the most probable cause of this.
Cosmic rays are a well established part of video game history. Maybe their effects are less prevalent due to the shear volume of bits contained in newer games, but older gamers are familiar with them. I recall an Atari racing game that was quite susceptible to these rays.
I literally stopped watching the video to see how more than 90% of the comments against argued in a polite and plausible way, I have rarely seen this, epic
nah fr everyones pretty chill with disagreeing with the video and the like
I dislike it
They may be respectful but some are delusional, (unintentionally) making it easier to argue against it by twisting his words (strawman).
Fringe nerd shit like this will sometimes bring out the worst... but occasionally the intertwining of two different technical fields that rarely interact (speed running and TAS experts meet survivability and electrical engineering professionals in a friendly debate on the the existence of funny mustache man breaking the laws of game physics because of a stray ionic particle exacting ultimate justice.
I'll gladly change that😅
I'm annoyed because this whole video is speculation arguing against other speculation😅
So it was definitely, absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, 100% a cosmic-ray-induced bit flip. Got it.
yeah honestly him being so aggressively against even the slightest possibility that a journalist might be right once that he denies the possibility altogether without even disproving it makes me just want to believe it more.
@@loafodisease614I know the feeling, but I think it’s very unlikely to be a cosmic Ray. LunaticJ really doesn’t do a good job of arguing his point, but the odds of one cosmic Ray striking an N64 and causing this particular glitch is already a very very low chance, and how that we’ve seen multiple TTC bit-flips, it seems incredibly unlikely to blame them all on cosmic rays. And if we find there’s an alternative cause for some of the bit-flips, it’s much more likely that it’s a similar cause for the original TTC upwarp. Technically it is possible that some of the bit-flips were caused by cosmic Rays still, but it becomes a lot more unlikely.
I think the real takeaway from this is not to trust badly research journalist articles that contradict their sources, and not to latch onto one theory that doesn’t really have any evidence. But it’s also just as bad to ignore unlikely theories in favour of explanations that can be disproven, or don’t satisfactorily answer the question, like a bad cartridge read.
@@justanotheryoutubechannelwell i was making the implication that the result of the video is harmful, since his wild assertions are the exact same misinformation he claims to be challenging in the beginning of the video. The point is his certainty in said assertions is fueled by spite for gaming journalist sensationalism, not any actual observable proof that there is no possibility.
wtf, did literally any of us watch the same video?
@@chillmadude There's an obvious joke I could make here, but... just use your imagination
It's not discussed in the video, but memory corruption is usually a more prevalent cause of errors than cosmic ray bitflips. Typically you'd have a wrong address stored in memory (e.g. memory already freed reallocated to another variable) and then one part of code would modify the memory at that address, causing strange behavior observed by the actual owner of the memory location. So it could easily have been a second-order effect by hardware corrupting a pointer that then subtracted one in the wrong place. Partially in the case where a lot of errors happened in a short timeframe.
Its actually not that uncommon for bit flips to happen in computer science.
It's actually something hackers and server administrators deal with pretty regularly and it can be used to exploit certain cryptographically encrypted software.
I'll tell you what happened every copy of Mario 64 is personalized and this footage proves it.
Every copy of your mom's onlyfans JOI video is personalized
Question, we know ur joking but, I wonder how the “personalised” part would work, I bet if a game were to see all of your search history and then track down your personality using digital footprints it could possible change the the game to fit you? It sounds cool, could be done perhaps, I’ve seen that video about a guy who made a game that sees your search history so I don’t think it’s that far fetched
@@sciburger8000 your mom onlyfans joi video is personalized
@@sciburger8000 LLL_Mantis? The one that imitates psychomatis' ability to read the memory card in a playstation but with the browser history. Would be pretty cool if a game could use that instead of telling you that you are in to random fetishes lol
1. A bitflip seems to be the most plausible explanation to the upwarp considering how well it matches the movement of mario.
2. There was no better explanation given in the video. Just speculation about faulty hardware with no technical details as to how they could have caused a bitflip. Also all the examples mentioned about funny things happening in Mario 64, that cannot be explained by a bitflip are completely pointless. We all have experienced one glitch or another even casually. We know gaming systems aren't perfectly designed.
3. As for the reason the bit flipped: I don't know. Since there were similar discoveries on Tick Tock Clock, maybe the answer lies within this level.
However I want to point out, that cosmic radiation is not as far fetched a theory as it is made to believe here. Especially if you assume this being the only instance in recorded Mario 64 history where the only good explanation was a bitflip. Since it could happen at any moment in time, even if it is highly unlikely, after collectively pouring enough hours in, someone somewhere in the world would experience a bitflip with visual effect sooner or later. There could be happening many we wouldn't notice until finally one did.
Simply put: how likely is it to never ever happen to anyone recording Mario 64? Should we be dismissive when it eventually does?
does comic rays explain why bit errors only recorded in tick tock clock so far 4 fucking times instead of the other like 23 other stages and openworld that are likely played much more.
Sounds to me like it's not fucking cosmic rays flipping bits it's just tick tock clock.
@@TheKingOfApples100 bro I've seen you comment this exact comment on like four people's replies. Are you okay? Like don't get me wrong I kind of agree with you to a degree but that is a really aggressive copy paste on such an unimportant topic.
@@TheKingOfApples100signs of mental disability:
@@papascronch so people responding to see it if you don't reply to the person's comment they have no reason to click on the video again this way they see it if they have notifications
@@TheKingOfApples100the comment you've responded to doesn't mention cosmic rays, just that it could have been a bit flip, which could happen due to reasons other than cosmic rays
How can you possibly look at that TAS bit flip and not think that is EXACTLY what happened?!?! The only reason it's not a perfect 1-to-1 match is the not-perfect starting positions. But the height climbed is literally identical and Mario lands on the platform at the same time. Sure it may not be cosmic rays, but there's no way that wasn't caused by a bit flip.
Also, with the downwarp later in the video. Why can't it be a bit flip? In floating point numbers there are ways to get non-power of 2 shifts (flips in the exponents), or there could be a frame correction where Mario's position is shifted because otherwise he'd be in the middle of a block or the ground etc.
Bit shifts happen all the damn time, and for so many reasons. Simply having a bunch of other bits changing around one can have effects. It could well be that this bit location is in a hotspot location, and then cosmic rays pushed it over the edge. Every tech company realizes that cosmic rays can flip bits, so while it is true that the myth was never solved or proven, it is definitely not ruled out.
I don't care whether it was truly a bit flip or not. The idea that a random particle coming all the way from the sun, travelling space, hitting the earth and specifically a n64, flipping a specific bit to make the character teleport to the top of the stage and saving time on a speedrun is simply way too funny to give up.
this is the way people need to look at it, the fact it's even a possible explanation, regardless of probability, is funny on its own. but people instead want to insist anyways
6:00
it's not nearly as rare as you think. just, most systems are memory managed and almost 0 bits of your memory are system critical so you don't ever notice.
I've actually tested this with older ssds and have a few examples of where a single bit of a bios rom chip got flipped and disabled a whole computer. lucky for dual bios and flash back.
this is the biggest fault with the video imo. the experts that are cited are always speedrunners or tas engineers, never a person who is actually an expert on gaming hardware or storage or physics. if a bit flip seems plausible, then why not leave the video at "this is still unsolved" instead of "cosmic rays are impossible to have caused this"
@@angrymurloc7626Thing is, based on the other TTC anomalies experienced by a different person, cosmic rays being the cause gets less and less likely, bordering on being impossible
@@grunkleg.3110 Dupdome had faulty hardware which is why he not only had multiple bitflips occurring one after another, but they were all reproducible by himself in the same play session. Dota_teabag on the other hand could never reproduce this and neither could the person who bought and inspected his hardware. So that actually increases the odds that this was a bitflip caused by something non-reproducible, which means it could have been a cosmic ray. It could have electromagnetic too. No one knows, but to say "it simply isn't true" like this video creator said seems really short sighted even if you are annoyed at misinfo being spread.
I also don't like how he says "pannenkoek's tas doesn't line up completely, meaning the bitflip theory might be wrong" but the tas didn't even line up correctly when Mario was on the ground, he was several frames off the entire time.
@@angrymurloc7626 He stated it was possible multiple times throughout the video, he was just rejecting the games journo myth that it was conclusively proven by a guy who's name they couldn't even get right since they're all too busy chasing clicks to worry about making sure they're not just repeating the same falsehoods.
I didn't really mention that when I was pulling bios off of boards to check them against clean bois install, I regularly found dozens of flips per year running. most of them were inconsequential but I'd be willing to bet the 20yr old problem of hardware just not working one day is somehow related. a large portion of your bios is just channel controllers for hardware.
Luigi: Oh hey! You are back early
Mario: Clock's haunted...
Luigi: What?
*Mario loads a gun and climbs back into the clock*
Mario: Clock's haunted...
That's what the Mario 64 shotgun mod is for.
XD
Is this supposed to be a B3313 reference?
@@andreasjoannai6441moon's haunted
This is why I always cover my N64 in cow manure to protect it from cosmic rays and cart slaps.
Speedrunners Microwave their N64s to attempt to recreate the glitch.
I will weigh in and say that it's extremely unlikely for a faulty cartridge read/cartridge tilt to cause an up-warp. There's a reason those glitches in games are often limited to animations, models and sounds/music freaking out. Cartridge tilting tends to not affect things that are always loaded in memory, such as the game's code and its associated memory. It would be very unlikely for that to be the cause of an upward warp. That's an effect you would only see if you used a ROM corruptor for amusement.
I wouldn't dismiss the bit flip theory entirely, for that reason. The only other viable option at that point is some sort of undiscovered bug/quirk in the game's physics. I'm not saying the bit flip is necessarily caused by a cosmic ray, but it's exceedingly plausible that a bit was flipped to make that happen.
DOTA_Teabag made a YT video(a YT short for some reason?) showing the game crashing with Mario doing the classic corrupted animation with corrupted music. So it seems like hardware issues is(or are?) the culprit.
9:57
Yeah I don't see how tilting the cartridge would affect the mario position variables stored on the N64 ram. I mean I guess hypothetically it could read a faulty instruction of the cartridge that would do that, but that's VERY unlikely.
@@jakob_ch Except it doesn't. Logic on N64 cannot be executed directly from ROM, it must be loaded into RAM first, and if you don't set up certain memory segments correctly, only the first megabyte of RAM can ever be used for executable code. Additional logic is never loaded in the middle of a level, only during transitions.
The actual impossible hypothesis is that it was a cartridge tilt. Mario's height is stored in RAM, not ROM, and is only modified by code that was already loaded at that point.
Now that I am informed, I will now intentionally meme about incorrect information.
Ikr? I love this meme, the thought of cosmic radiation affecting sm64 is so silly and wacky, kinda ruins the fun to be like, "um, actually..." ☝️🤓 Just enjoy the fun, no one give a shit if it's factual
How many ads would you like in this video?
RUclips: "yes"
I wish a cosmic ray would up flip my bank account
Ok... Cosmic Rays are not affecting N64s.... But Cosmic Rays are more fuuuuuunn...
But dunking on bad gaming journalism is more fun
@@LunaticJI mean, based on how funny that but in the Gamer was, that might be true
I mean in theory they can affect any computer. It's why enterprise hardware tends to have error correcting memory and why satellites need multiple layers of error correction in some cases even having multiple processors output the same signal. It's highly unlikely, but it was well known in the past to cause computers to crash, but newer hardware tends to be more hardened to it and have software protections.
Did it cause this glitch? That's rather unlikely, but anyone saying impossible would be a fool. It's something you can never prove as even if you put a radiation source right up to a computer you'll get constantly different results, usually just a crash. You can never rule it out but you can never authoritively say it was either.
@@LunaticJ Keep preaching king!
@@Skylancer727 Error correction in computers is NOT because of cosmic rays. It's to account for things like local electromagnetic interference, or ordinary hardware issues that are a risk in any electronic circuit. Meanwhile, satellites aren't just subject to occasional cosmic rays, they're CONSTANTLY being bombarded with unfiltered ionizing radiation directly from the sun. On Earth, the atmosphere prevents nearly all cosmic rays from causing issues. It's so unlikely that a cosmic ray flipped a bit in that speedrun, that for all intents and purposes, it's outright impossible.
Bro that glitch of the Japanese player going to big boo haunt, if that happened to me as a kid I would have been absolutely terrified
Right? That's some B3313 crap
I would never hit my console again
I think the spread of the cosmic ray theory is just that's it's appealing: it's both completely outrageous and still _sounds_ plausible.
Given that his cartridge caused a lot of other reoccurring strange events it’s safe to say that the upwarp was not caused by a cosmic ray. However since pannenkoeks video proved that a single bit flip could cause such an upwarp it kinda proves that cosmic rays could cause glitches like this one. Maybe future SM64 speedrun strats revolve around playing the game on top of mount everest to expose the console to more radiation and just hope to bit flip into the credits.
The repeated disregard for cosmic rays as a possible reason is unscientific, given how much they happen all the time. I suggest going to a lab that shows it in action, its actually quite fun, but on the more serious side, space agencies definitely have to account for it in their computers, where coding errors are accounted for and auto-repaired to insure failure is minimized as much as possible. The rarity that the rays specifically hitting computer bits is fine, given it's not just likely, its statistically guaranteed when enough people play it, especially for many hours, days, years.
Hell, the existence of ECC RAM alone debunks half this guy's video
I have no idea why the SM64 glitch happened (the cache thing makes sense to me), but I don't know who told you that cosmic rays flipping memory bits is "rare". High performance servers, the main reason you pay extra money for error correcting RAM is in no small part because cosmic ray bit flips aren't terribly uncommon, particular if you have a lot of RAM. I'm not saying they happen all the time, but they absolutely do happen, and if you have data that you want to protect you need to actually consider it. Data centers use error correcting RAM specifically for this .
Now, obviously, the N64 *does not* have a ton of RAM, but considering how many millions of hours have been spent playing SM64 it feels like a cosmic ray bit flip at some point is inevitable, considering that the N64 doesn't have error correcting memory (I'm not even sure it had been invented yet!).
It hadn't been invented yet because bitflips weren't as common. Memory nowadays is built on a much smaller process node, where less current is needed to flip a bit. More efficient, also more susceptible to bitflips from cosmic rays or quantum tunneling. Even non-ECC memory has some error correction nowadays.
This is wrong, parity in memory is as old as memory. IBM had commercially available ECC RAM in the 50s
I really don’t think you know what rare means if you think saying “they don’t happen all the time but they DO happen” somehow contradicts the claim that it’s rare.
You’re basically saying “it’s not rare but essentially it’s rare”
@@zzodysseuszz no, I am agreeing it is rare. I am claiming that given enough hours of playtime an unlikely event becomes basically inevitable. The video had the tone of “it’s rare so it didn’t happen”, and I am arguing that even if they are rare, there have been untold millions of hours playing Mario 64, on systems that don’t have error correcting memory, so it wouldn’t be *weird* if it did happen eventually. Law of large numbers and whatnot.
@@zzodysseuszz The claim in the video is that it's practically impossible for a cosmic ray to flip the bits in an N64, despite the fact that it's a very well-known phenomena that happens plenty of times on other kinds of computers.
cosmic ray bit flips are a common joke among software developers, I always assumed that was what was going on here
my guess would be that the game checked the platform Mario was on and for some reason the game thought the platform was faulty, so it placed Mario on the next, higher stable platform instead. The drop could’ve been explained by Mario having jumped prior without standing still. Not sure, though.
The best part about the TheGamer article is that the upwarp didn't even save him time, it did the exact opposite.
the complete opposite
Yeah cosmic rays flipping bits like this is not statistically likely, especially when other explanations are available, but just because it is not a proven fact, and just because it originally came from a place of literally just guessing and presenting it as fact, doesn't mean it's an impossibility
new category, slap%: slap your N64 until it sends you into the final bowser fight right after entering the castle.
"I refuse to believe it was cosmic rays because that's just too unlikely. It was definitely one of these other options that don't usually lead to bit flips or that we tested but didn't lead to a bit flip"
lmao yes, I dont understand what he's trying to point in this video
I came to this video expecting to be shown why the cosmic ray theory is false but now I believe it much more strongly lol
May I ask why?
@@AldinRamic cos its cool
@@420quickscoper5 ok
Because he doesn’t come up with a convincing alternate hypothesis and also there are so many people streaming this game that even though the chances of cosmic rays are low, it is still likely to happen due to the scale.
So a faulty cartridge, which you pointed out *isn't known to have this effect,* is more likely to cause this effect than a cosmic ray, which only has this effect?
My gripe exactly. I wanted to post a carefree comment about the cosmic ray hypothesis being more of a dated meme than a hard answer to the problem-at least to those of us who were following the story at the time-but this guy is taking it seriously and reaching so far in the opposite direction that it's not even funny. I'm walking away with *more* faith in the cosmic ray than when I was 10 years younger.
Most cosmic rays have no effect.
@@Chapien Doesn't matter. It is the only plausible theory.
Mind you, it could be interference from some other radiation source too.
@@semisixx4967the cosmic ray is still a meme though. There are plenty of things that can cause bit flips. This is why they sell error correcting RAM after all. Cosmic rays are the least likely of those things, they just sounds the coolest.
This was a fascinating watch. I've had a handful of weird one-time things (mostly random wrongwarps in gameboy games) happen over the years, but I never even thought of them as more than weird quirks in old games. That said, I think myths like that are fun. Gives speedrunning another dimension to view them from.