The Biggest Myth in Speedrunning History

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.

A cosmic ray traveled 92mil miles to flip a bit at Google HQ so this video got recommended to me.

Dies in CCM, gets mad, slaps his N64, then goes to re-enter CCM but ends up in BBH instead. The creepypasta writes itself.

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.

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

It was originally "speed run", until we found a glitch to drop the space, so now its "speedrun"

your opponent getting hit by a solar flare would be one hell of a way to lose a speedrun race

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.

I never expected to see a person so angry at cosmic rays in my life, the internet is truly boundless

LJ: "10 years ago..." Me: "Oh so like 2003" LJ "September 21st 2013" Me: Turns to dust

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.

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.

"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.

I can’t believe Big Speedrun is trying to gatekeep the common tech of cosmic ray manipulation.

that cuphead journalist is never going to live that down.

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)"

"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.

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?

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.

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