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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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".

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

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

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.

"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.

"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.

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

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.

Veritasium's video describes the event with much uncertainty, because it was never proven or disproven, which is good scientific communication. In his video he said: "This is *possibly* the rarest thing...", "...it *seems like* a newly discovered glitch...", and "The *best explanation* anyone can come up with is that a cosmic ray caused the glitch." That he cited The Gamer is cause for concern, but Veritasium never, as you suggested, used this incident "...as an example of a bit flip *definitely* happening..."

'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.

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.

that cuphead journalist is never going to live that down.

I’m not sure you disproved the null in this video. Working around spacecraft, we have modeled these events on hardware, and while it is significantly harder the closer to earth you are for such an anomaly to occur, we have documented cases every year of this happening.

"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"

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."

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?

This was clearly a conspiracy put into place to harm speedrunner Kosmic by making it harder to find his content on the internet.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Teacher: "Why didn't you do your homework" Me: "A cosmic ray ate my dog"

>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

Highly improbable does not mean "impossible". You didn't really definitively rule it out. And like you said, it's still unsolved.

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.

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.

13:21 Guys, he tried to run a blender next to the console and nothing happened. I'm convinced. No more tests needed.

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…

Is Mario's position something that is transfered between console and cartridge at that time? I would assume it is loaded at the start of the level from the cartridge, but then it stays in RAM. That makes a faulty/tilted/slapped cartridge seem unlikely to have caused that behaviour for me.

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

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.

Im a researcher in radiation effects in electronics. A bit flip, although very unlikely on Earth's surface is absolutely possible and has been observed in labs and simulations multiple times. The problem with bit flips caused from cosmic rays is that they are highly unpredictable and hard to confirm after the fact.

Why do we do any science or testing when we can just run a blender next to a Nintendo and poke it with a stick asking it to do something like this.

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

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.

Love when you seperate the "general public" and sm64 runners like you're talking about the scp foundation

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.

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.

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.

I'm not saying a cosmic ray bit flip was definitely the cause, but bit flips due to cosmic rays are VERY common. They just usually don't cause noticeable issues. They are one of (though not the only) reasons why ECC memory was created. One research I read a while back said that on average 4 bits are flipped in every gigabyte of RAM per month. Another said that a system with 4gb of RAM has a 96% chance of experiencing a cosmic ray bit flip every 3 days.

18:38 the idea that a sun fart affected a speedrun is still funny, sorry fun police 🤓🤓

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.

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.

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.....

“Bad game journalism” implies that there is good game journalism. Basically an oxymoron.

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

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.

LOL Veritasium is very very thorough with their research. Mentioning that article doesn't mean they reached their conclusion from that article.

"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

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.

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.

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, 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 flipped bit is more likely than you may think, complicating things is that the Mario height variable is stored in hexadecimal, and Mario was still moving vertically, so depending on where in the process and part of the system the flip happened could radically change the outcome, as it would make nonlinear changes to the value because of the conversion from hex, 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

This is why I always cover my N64 in cow manure to protect it from cosmic rays and cart slaps.

I was the original author for the article on TheGamer. I can proudly say I no longer write for that website, nor do I do freelance gaming journalism anymore (and I wouldn't recommend you do it either). I want to clear up a few things about the ways that sites like TheGamer function, because I've grown a little tired about the amount of shit I've been given for this article in particular and others like it. I am very aware that the cosmic ray thing is just a theory, and I was very aware of it when I wrote it too. When I wrote for them (I can't confirm it still works like this), we would submit pitches in Slack, and those that were approved, we could write basically however we wanted to. With features/originals like this one, they weren't likely to pull in lots of page views without being turned into clickbait in some capacity (since it isn't "news"). What I want to make very clear is that turning articles into clickbaity feed-fillers is the job of the editors, not the authors. After I submit it, I no longer have any control over it. Editors re-work the titles and content and push them out. I could point to many articles I wrote that were published as much weaker articles than what I submitted, because the editors prioritize things being concise, rather than accurate, and things being SEO-friendly, rather than readable. When I submitted the article, it fell flat and barely got any page views for the first few months, which is rather annoying considering that authors only got paid for the page views from the first month, so I made basically nothing from the article, minus the flat rate for it ($10 USD I think it was for that word count?). Then of course, it blows up months later and becomes one of the best performing articles on site for a bit, and I make nothing from it, other than needing to hear about it from time to time in videos like this. TheGamer is actually the ONLY site I ever wrote for that paid extra for page views at all, so it always pisses me off when people give shit to freelance writers for just trying to get clicks. Overwhelmingly, freelance writers are just getting a flat rate so page views mean nothing to them. It wouldn't make sense for them to deliberately write clickbait. It's precisely the reason I had my name switched to a pseudonym after I stopped writing for them, and my go-to example of why no one should do freelance gaming journalism. It is a thankless job where editors twist the articles you put passion into, only for you to get shit for it when it's published under your name.

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.

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.

20 minutes of just “STOP HAVING FUN”

So it was definitely, absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, 100% a cosmic-ray-induced bit flip. Got it.

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...

3:47 i love how one comment said: "get dream on this, he has a lot of cosmic radiation in his house"

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)"

I really, really wish you hadn't gone out and tried to say that SEU's caused by cosmic rays are an "out there" theory. It's in fact a very well studied, understood, and engineered against phenomenon. Whether or not THIS specific event was one of these is another matter, as they are much more rare down at the earth's surface, but you didn't need to go out and say something that you either didn't understand, or that you intended to mislead your audience with.

I'll tell you what happened every copy of Mario 64 is personalized and this footage proves it.

Spends entire video showing how cosmic radiation is still the best explanation, then gets mad at journalists for reporting it correctly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

6:20 honestly as a person who loves science the cosmic bit flip theory sounds perfectly plausible. Doesn’t matter if it visually looked jolting if all that was needed was a single binary digit to be flipped. Do yk how many times scientists called discoveries outlandish and discarded legitimate results? Happens a lot more then you’d think and putting it aside due to chance isn’t very scientific.

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%.

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!).

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.

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)

Now that I am informed, I will now intentionally meme about incorrect information.

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 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.)

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.

The best part about the TheGamer article is that the upwarp didn't even save him time, it did the exact opposite.

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.

Im shaking and crying the gamer would never spread misinformatiom on the internet

new category, slap%: slap your N64 until it sends you into the final bowser fight right after entering the castle.

Ok, SRL speedboomer here, the cosmic ray theory was around way before the 2020 clickbait article, i remember hearing about it when it happened in 2013. Furthermore, it was a common rumor back in the 80s and 90s back when computer hardware wasn't nearly as robust as it is today. The rumor goes (yes a rumor) that people would purchase RAM upgrades for their PCs, and when this RAM turned out to be faulty, people would angrily call the manufacturing companies of said RAM looking for answers. Instead of admitting that they sold faulty RAM to the customer, they would blame crazy things like cosmic rays for flipping bits. So yes, this Cosmic Ray Meme has been in computing for at least 40 years lol.

>Misleading thumbnail (otherwise known as "misinformation". Funny that.) >Spends the entire time coming off as a smarmy prick. >Literally doesn't show verifiable proof that it wasn't a bit-flip or cosmic ray. Incredible stuff.

6:22 Outlandish maybe, but it happened once in a very obvious way in a British voting machine. It was obvious as in "that least likely candidate has more votes than the entire area has people and if we flip that one bit of its count we get to something we would expect".

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.

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

Ok... Cosmic Rays are not affecting N64s.... But Cosmic Rays are more fuuuuuunn...

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.

Nintendo: ugh, tilting cartridges causes weird bugs Jon Burton: lol you can make debug menus on Sega Mega Drive by smacking the cartridge

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

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?

It should be noted, food processors, no matter how “powerful”, actually consume much power. Especially compared to a circular saw or other such construction equipment