How lucky is too lucky?: The Minecraft Speedrunning Dream Controversy Explained

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My talk on 4 February 2021 at Harvard Book Store:

Here is the original accusation against Dream.

And here is Dream's reply.

"Matt flips a coin 100 times."

"Holy Craps! How a Gambling Grandma Broke the Record"

Number of casinos in the world in 2011: 3,547

Roulette records.

CORRECTIONS
- At 09:08 I say “1 in 110 trillion” when I meant to say “1 in 110 billion”. The number on the screen is correct, it was just a verbal slip-up.
- At 25:27 I showed the 118 craps record as “1 in 1.2 × 10^9” when it should be “1 in 2.2 × 10^9”. The voiceover says the correct number.
- I slip and “more likely” instead of “less likely” at 33:47 (I think I may have even been going for “more unlikely”). But everything in the screen is correct.
- Let me know if you spot any more mistakes!

Thanks to my Patreon supporters who mean I can spend [[REDACTED]] hours filming myself trying to achieve improbably things. If you support me, you can get access to all [[REDACTED]] hours of bonus footage from this episode.

As always: thanks to Jane Street who support my channel. They're amazing. And I believe they have no opinion on Dream.

Endless filming by Matt Parker
Editing by Alex Genn-Bash
Some graphics by Ben Sparks
Minecraft consultancy by Oliver Dunk
Music by Howard Carter
Design by Simon Wright and Adam Robinson

MATT PARKER: Stand-up Mathematician

[standupmaths]

I’m not commenting on how many takes that took. But feel free to guess!

[_WhiteMage]

'I'm not saying he's cheating. I'm just saying if the _entire population of Earth played an entire game of minecraft every second for a hundred years, _ he's still many orders of magnitude luckier than any of them would probably have gotten.'

[jes]

I feel bad for dream, he can't even go for a 5 minute walk without getting struck by lightning ten times

[Adderkleet]

I can't tell if the book-toss was:
1) Good enough to count, no more takes, just move on.
2) Better than intended, since it didn't slot into the others but it's upright and fully visible.
3) Exactly as intended.

[Sparts]

"So you're saying there's a chance!" is basically Dream's entire defense, btw. Which is hilarious.

[duckface]

The fact that this man actually went to the lengths to understand minecraft is just wonderful

[WalkingTaako]

The missing bracket just means that the rest of the paper, and indeed the rest of all existence after you started reading the formula, is now part of the formula.

[PracticalEngineeringChannel]

Obviously, the talking head scenes were shot in reverse and dubbed.

[AlKohaiMusic]

Fun fact; one of the guys who noticed this statical unlikeliness and called dream out got caught cheating by also futsing with the games probability. I guess cheaters recognize cheaters

[keyboardstalker]

Dream when he’s walking down the street and suddenly wins the lottery while simultaneously getting struck by lightning and then is eaten by a shark:

[RealEngineering]

Okay, I played minecraft in like 2009-2010 and I did not understand how someone could possibly speed run that out it has changed a lot in 10 years

[toycat]

I love when you see a Minecraft event so big it hits the wider YouTube world, including educational content

[hoi-polloi]

My probability class did an exercise... they had one student flip a coin 100 times, and another student was told to just write down H&T randomly, without any props. Professor claimed that he could tell which was the true random series from the coin, because the student doing it by hand would be too shy to put in appropriate-length strings of heads (or tails) in a row. It was a neat game!

[yonko_Z]

This reminds me of a quote I saw online from a journalism class. “If one source says it’s sunny outside and another says it’s pouring. Your job is not to cite both sources, it’s to look out the f*cking window and find out which is right.”

[whatdamath]

If only this video came out about 8 years ago when I was trying to present my thesis on "Teaching Math with Minecraft"

[GBloxers]

"What I'm saying is, if every single human in existence was doing a speedrun of Minecraft every single second around the clock-- every human doing it!-- for a century, the odds are still you would never see a result anywhere near what Dream got."

That settles it then.

[priestofsyrinx]

Fun fact: 1 in 2.0x10^22 is like 1 millimetre in 2000 light-years.

[somedudeok]

The fact that he definitely played on an altered version and then paid a mathematician to create a biased paper, is such a disgusting move.

[doggobind]

To put that kind of "luck" in perspective, flip a penny 13 times, and if it lands on heads on all 13 times, go buy 3 lottery tickets with chances of winning, if you win all 3 lottery tickets, that's the kind of luck dream would have had to have to pull that off legitimately.

[TheB]

"154 dice rolls in a row without getting a 7"

Whenever the stupid robber is on my bricks in Catan, it feels like we've broken this record...