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Rough-cut for feedback: Minecraft Dream video (Patreon)

Published:
2021-02-02 00:46:54
Edited:
2021-02-04 10:10:49
Imported:
2026-06

Content

UPDATE: The video out! https://youtu.be/8Ko3TdPy0TU Thank you so much for your feedback everyone; the video is far better for it. (Let me know if I've missed anything!)

Right. About 7.5 trillion people have requested that I make a video about the Dream speedrun of Minecraft 1.16 controversy. So I have finally done it. Given how many young people are suddenly interested in statistics because of this drama, it feels like a dereliction of duty if I don't do something!

This is the rough-cut of my video. As you will see, there is still a lot of polishing to be done. But I'm a bit apprehensive about the level of scrutiny this video is  likely to get, so I thought it would be best to stress-test an early version on you fine folk.

Please do through it with a fine fact comb and let me know any and all suggestions you may have. A discussion in the comments here would be ideal, but feel free to email me privately as well.

- Let me know if anything could be edited out. (eg: could the section from 01:18 to 01:14 be removed to speed things up?)- Flag-up any mistakes. (eg: at 22:23 the wrong expression is high-lighted.)- General suggestions to make it  clearer. (eg: *waves arms around in general*)

If you have no idea what this is all about: I'd also like your feedback on what the video is like for someone coming in cold! I've been thinking about it for so long I no longer know what is what.

PS Please do not share this version of the video! If it gets more views than I have patreon supporters I'll have to take it down.

Files

Minecraft Dream stats controversy: Unreleased Rough Cut

This is a sneak preview! Don't share it. But do let me know if you have any suggestions to improve the video and fix any mistakes I've missed. From this Patreon post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/46989727/ Here is the original accusation. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MYw9LcLCb4&ab_channel=Geosquare Paper: https://mcspeedrun.com/dream.pdf And here is Dream's reply. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iqpSrNVjYQ&ab_channel=DreamXD Paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yfLURFdDhMfrvI2cFMdYM8f_M_IRoAlM/view Holy Craps! How a Gambling Grandma Broke the Record http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1901663,00.html Previous craps record: https://www.gamblingsites.org/blog/stanley-fujitake-longest-craps-roll-in-vegas/ Number of casinos in the world in 2011: 3,547 https://www.statista.com/statistics/221031/total-worldwide-casinos-by-region/ Roulette records https://www.roulette17.com/stories/record-reds-blacks-in-a-row/

Comments

SkaveRat

I ... don't even want to think about how long it took you to film these segments

James Bastone

As someone who closely followed this in the minecraft community as it broke, I think you did a great job of covering it and summerising the situation for non-minecrafters and people unfamiliar with speedrunning. Perhaps the one thing you might also mention (though not strictly required) is that only some catagories of Minecraft speedrunning (random seed) are so luck-based. Set-seed catagories are much more about skill of memorising a route and picking a good seed, like the classic games you mention. Edit: in section 2, looking at Dreams paper, I think the video lags a bit. It could do with some visuals to help illustrate what you are saying, like you made for section 1. Overall though, I really enjoyed this video and I think it will help a LOT of dream supporters understand what the mods are on about. Thanks Matt, great video as always :D

Izzy Omega

I really appreciate drawing the lines between the different highly improbable stats. Each time I tried to come up with alternate examples on my own, it really felt like I was just throwing stats in the air, and struggled to give any sort of meaning to the numbers. The final example of "Everyone on Earth speedrunning at the rate of once a second for the next 100 years would still not come close to the luck he had." Really helps explain the actual magnitude. Great video, highly entertaining and informative!

Matt Parker

Ha. And I still have one shot left to film (the general wrap-up, book plug etc). But don’t worry: I’ve saved every minute and will upload it all once it’s done. Place your bets now on total film time!

Micha

At 8:26, it says 0.47^2 x ..., shouldn't this be 0.047^2?

Matt Parker

Great point about speedruns. I’ll see if I can tie that in. If not: I’ll put something in the description. Yes, still done work to do on the visuals for Dream’s response paper. It’s slow going!

_ericBG

So from my watching so far: * The ender dragon has been in the game [since version 1.0.0](https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Ender_Dragon)ish, allowing speedruns since then, but most people speedrun in 1.16**.1**. I wouldn't usually be so nitpicky, but pearl trades [got nerfed](https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Bartering) in 1.16.2, so I think being clear about what version you are talking about is _vital_, as the chances change between the versions. * I feel like the bit at the beginning explaining probabilities wouldn't be clear for a non-mathematician, but kind of weird to someone _with_ a mathematical background. I'm not sure whether this is the case, but probably worth looking into. * More than anything, the last section about man-seconds felt like easily the best part of the video to me. I feel like emphasising that part more, e.g. saying explicitly "if EVERY human did a speedrun EVERY SECOND FOR 100 YEARS! we would never expect trades like this" would add a lot

Matt Parker

The How Ridiculous folks are from the same city in Australia as me! Random side fact: that tower they drop stuff from is at a physics research site in Gingin where I did some work as an undergrad.

Matt Parker

Thanks. I was hoping the ten billion human second century would help give and intuitive foothold on how big 10^22 is.

Matt Parker

Yes it should! Good spot. That’s a slippery zero; I’ll get it fixed. You don’t miss nothing.

James Bastone

" I feel like emphasising that part more, e.g. saying explicitly "if EVERY human did a speedrun EVERY SECOND FOR 100 YEARS! we would never expect trades like this" would add a lot" I have to agree with this! Would be an amazingly strong end to the video!

Christopher Mayfield

1. When you are talking about the events. It is confusing which event you are talking about. If you put the video above the numbers or use icons we can relate the numbers to the event. 2. The times when you were talking and had the activity behind you my teenager was really interested. Those parts are the best.

Shane Gleeson

I agree on the 100 years point. That needs fleshing out as it is such a relatable argument, but could be viewed as a hand wavy bit of woo if not elaborated

Micha

At 9:03, how did you arrive at that result? Edit #1: I initially did not get your answer as I forgot that those were approximations and you were using the actual values, once I did I got the same numbers, but again, shouldn't it be 0.000259482...% = 0.00026% (to 2 s.f.), since the probability of getting pearls is 4.7% = 0.047 not 0.47? Edit #2: So, after reviewing the later part of the footage I see that you had them written as percentages which would account for the 'x100%', does that mean that "0.47" was just a typo and the correct values were used?

Matt Parker

* Great point. I might add those points as on-screen notes to avoid slowing down the voice over with more details. * Yeah, I was worried that the explanation would fall between two stools: not enough detail for non-maths people but too detailed for people who already know it. I might re-write that bit to be snappier to keep it interesting and give non-maths people a flavour of what is going on without explaining it all. * I was also torn between buying the lede like this at the end: vs putting it right at the start. But I felt the other details were worth getting out of the way first. I may change my mind and cut it back a bit. The coins stuff could probably be cut.

Shane Gleeson

Also, the point about the dart and painting the target was fantastic, but the point was a getting a little muddled just before that. I think that could be beefed up a little and maybe refer back to the lottery example as well.

Christopher Mayfield

Speed run notes. Speed runners create better odds they will do the hard and least likely things first. Then they will abandon the run if it does not happen.

Matt Parker

Good feedback! Could you give me example time codes for where 1. and 2. happen as I’m sure I know exactly which parts you mean.

Christopher Mayfield

Minecraft speed runs fail if the village does not have a blacksmith. They will fail if they portal into the wrong nether biome.

Matt Parker

I’m trying to avoid filming that bit again! But I could re-state it in more specific terms in the final conclusion voice over.

Matt Parker

Yes, you are right. That 0.47 should be 0.047. I’ll check all of those numbers and run a new version past everyone tomorrow!

Matt Parker

I agree, the idea around a special event vs any event is a surprisingly subtle one in probability. I’ll be honest though: I mainly bit that thing about twenty D10 rolls in because otherwise someone would use it in a rebuttal as some kind of killer ‘gotcha’ counterexample. I have learned to preempt such things from the Election Data videos!

Jonathan Shaw

I was disappointed not to see your character being immediately killed by a dragon.

Matt Parker

I’m convinced: I’ll add it to the conclusion.

DrDelvan

I think this is great, and for me I don't know if I would edit out any of these sequences (but I also enjoy nearly-hour-long SummoningSalt speedrunning history videos). My only comment would be, especially as you say this will get scrutiny, is what you spend just a couple dozen seconds on near the end: that 'random' components in games that people speedrun are often not truly random, and many of the big jumps in speedrunning times come from players learning how to set those up in a predictable fashion. (What comes to mind to me from my experience is Zelda 2 on the NES, where the random number sequence value at any given frame rule is always the same order starting from when the system powers on, and certain in-game events that will reset to the beginning of this sequence, so players can achieve the outcome they like by setting up their run to hit key actions at key times). This same analysis on, say, a player getting a perfect monster pattern on the overworld in Zelda 2 several times in a row would also make it seem unlikely they could ever do that consistently between runs, when in fact they're not dealing with a truly random set of outcomes if their timing is on. Like you, I do not know Minecraft's speedrunning well enough to go into it, but I'd expect folks from that speedrunning community might know a thing or two about how those get generated and whether there is a way (legitimate or not) to get into a known number sequence where you can get the outcome you like by timing things at the right time. Edit to add: If this is the case you'd think they would have said so when challenged and the result thrown out, but they might not want to give away their secret methods if its giving them a competitive edge.

Christopher Mayfield

I agree setting the standard of the earth century at the start of the video you can relate everything back to a fraction of that earth century. Instead of numbers you can use partial icons of the 🌎

Matt Parker

Ha. I’ll talk to Oliver who captured the Minecraft footage for me and see what we can do.

Matt Parker

I have also spent hours of my life on SummoningSalt videos (also: Retro Game Mechanics) so I know what you mean. I did not find anything in my research about players learning how to seed the pseudorandom number generators. I assumed in modern games they were now too complicated (using clock times etc) for that to be a strategy. But please someone correct me if that’s wrong.

Tyler Wolfe

I'm glad to take the 10 billion human second century opportunity of you seeing my comment to help out! Overall, I thought the pacing was great. There was good balance between talking about the game and the maths. And I really liked the casino tie-in at the end! For the critiques...FYI, what follows is probably a bunch of nitpicks. I fully appreciate how long even simple changes can make in video editing, but thought I'd still throw it out there anyway. * 04:05 - It's probably better to cut it before the player jumps in, as the expectation is that the next clip will be whatever is on the other side of the portal. * 05:52 - It may be helpful to list the numbers on screen, as you end up throwing around a lot of numbers and for me it was a bit hard to track exactly what you were saying. Even something simple like what you do at 7:01. * 07:01 - The differences between "trades" and "opportunities" were confusing, especially as you later talk about the 262 trades and even later (@8:08) just call them "successes". Maybe change "trade" to what you have at 7:19 - "trade success" - or alternatively "successful trades". * 09:28 - The pauses between each time the graph grows mades me think there's some significance to what you're saying, especially with the long pause between showing the values up to 25 vs up to 270. I think it would help to reduce the pause length or make it linear. * 18:36 - I'm not seeing where the 88.3% is? * 18:49 - The dark font color is readable, but hard to see with the bg. Maybe swapping to a white drop shadow would help. * 19:21 - I watched that throw a few times because of how spectactular it was :) * 22:46 - There's a few black frames here * 23:47 - The video jump cut is mildly jarring (and makes the audio cut somewhat more obvious) * 25:40 - Maybe move this back ~10 seconds? Small thing but it's frozen on page 6 then jumps to page 1 for half a second before fading out. * 31:20 - This glance back had me sitting in great anticipation. With the rebound around the wall, it was well worth the 3 minute wait!

Andy Clarke

Looking forward to that! That's the kind of content I irrationally support 😁 Edit to say, I guess it will be about a 90 minute video

Tahg

That sure is a Parker equation in the Dream response paper. They have an unbalanced amount of parenthesis which really drove me crazy.

Spuddy

This video is shaping up great, look forward to seeing the final version! I have one bit of feedback about the Ten Billion Human Second Century (the TBHSC) 31:08 to 32:31. After thinking about it for a while, I see where you went, but the value of using the TBHSC didn’t jump out at me on the first watching. This is my attempt at an explanation, please read aloud using your best Matt Parker impression ;-) … take ten billion people (rounded up from real population), doing something every second (not ever sleeping), for a whole century (longer than the average life span). Imagine they were opening chocolate bars, looking for a golden ticket. That’s a lot of chocolate bars — TBHSC chocolate bars. If there was only one ticket to be found, that’s 1 in TBHSC probability that someone will fine the golden chocolate bar _each_ time they open a chocolate bar. Which ten billion people are doing. Every second. For a century. That is our upper bound on crazy probabilities for human activities. If you are not doing it every second, that’s less than TBHSC. If you are not doing it for a century, or not doing it with the whole population, that’s less than TBHSC. If something is less than 1 in TBHSC, then it’s not _too_ crazy. Just pretty crazy. If it is over 1 in TBHSC, then it is just too impossible.

okkypr

loved the video, but everytime you mentioned upper bounds or the entire compensation aspect it really confused me, so maybe that part needs more clarification? :D

Falcon Scientist

Great video! Also noticed the 0.47 already commented above. Maybe shorten the part around 1:28 where you define disinterested. You raise some important points in the last few seconds about RNG, (it also could have been a bug or some artifact of the code, but just generally saying "RNG" basically covers that) this is an important point that could have been mentioned earlier? On the other hand, this is a video about stats! Not really about minecraft... But, the idea of a bug or artifact in the RNG may be just as relevant as the bit about bias? My 8 year old loved it! Especially the Minecraft happening in the background, that was great for engagement. Loved it as usual, thanks!

Spuddy

If you wanted to avoid reshooting, I would cut at 32:05 (up to there it is great), and show a graphic with the chocolate bars and a new voice over. For me, I think you need to make a stronger point about the ratio “one in TBHSC”, not just the size of TBHSC. And then cut back in at 32:28.

DrDelvan

Yeah I can definitely find posts by folks who are trying to crack Minecraft's RNG (and a 3 parter video series here I don't have the patience to go through beyond the first 8 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAc0DAZRSGI), didn't find any sort of confirmed "here's how it works" posts like you can find for classic games unless its hidden near the end of those videos. He does show them using Java's Java.util.Random for the random world seed generation, then shows lots of the code relying on that same seed (makes sense, all the objects in the world need to populate in the same initial states each time for fixed-seed playthroughs to work and probably some client-side stuff to be the same between players in multiplayer to avoid the server having to send literally all the data), but if I was going to look at it further I'd grab the source code and go through the Java myself to get to the bits on loot tables and such to see if they did something silly.

Peter

First off, I enjoyed the video immensely, even though I have no interest in minecraft specifically (other games take my fancy much more). There are a few things missing from this in terms of statistical considerations: 1. There is a big assumption that the two events are actually independent in order to come to the conclusion posited. An error in the code of either the PRNG or minecraft itself could mean that these aren't. Alternatively, we also have to remember that this is a game. There is a chance, in the code, the developers have set upper bounds on the amount of time to receive Ender Pearls and Blaze Rods specifically, due to their requirement for the game to "end" (you don't want some poor sod to spend 7 hours grinding away to get one of those items if you want a successful game). 2. By virtue of being run on a computer, the assumption of being actually random breaks down, which in and of itself means the probabilities are not independent (though for a good enough PRNG they may, in some cases be good enough to seem that way). This is why PRNGs are never used for mission critical systems that rely on randomness (instead things like atmospheric noise, or lava lamp bubbles are used). 3. The data presented will have a significant amount of censoring in them (eg aborted runs that contained no trading due to failing at an earlier part of the speed run). If those censored runs had actually been played to completion, then the proportion of "successful" trades may actually have been closer to the peak. 4. There is additional censoring due to the fact that not all successful runs will have been played on stream. The actual universe of games that should be considered for the purposes of probability calculations should include his off-stream games as well. Speed runners in all games have a tendency to play the games off stream for statistically significant amounts of time compared to their on-stream gaming. Additionally these off-stream games will also feature the same sort of censoring as mentioned in point 3. Of these, the two censoring effects will likely be the most significant to the sort of analysis everyone is doing on this issue (as those are the ones most likely quantifiable by people outside of the development team...unless minecraft is open source). (Actuarial modeller by trade here btw who has to deal with censoring of data a lot...and as a result is likely pretty sensitive to its appearance in things. Just declaring my potential biases up front!.)

slugbiker

Fascinating. It wasn't until the end that you got to what seems to be the biggest question, namely that we can't be sure of the actual randomness/probability of the events in the game. As you know, it's notoriously difficult to generate true randomness, and do we know how the minecraft software works to satisfy the trade probabilities you showed in the table? Did someone study other speedruns to see if the trades aligned with the probabilities in the table? I'd be curious to see that. On a semi-unrelated note, I was involved in the investigation into a cheating accusation at a (live) Scrabble tournament. In the game of Scrabble, there are 100 tiles, including 2 blanks (which are very powerful), and the accused player had gotten both blanks in something like 20+ games. These are all two-player games, so typically you should expect to get an average of one blank per game, so to get both blanks in every game raised huge red flags. Granted, a better player will play more tiles per game and thus have a greater chance of getting more than one blank since they are drawing more tiles, but that still didn't account for this player's "luck". Someone calculated the minuscule odds of the player having drawn all the blanks (I don't remember the actual numbers, but it was tiny), and said that was proof that they must have cheated. We didn't have any other evidence against the accused player, so nothing else was done. However, directors and players were made aware of the accusations and the following year this player was closely watched and was caught palming the blanks at the start of a game (tiles are laid out on the board before the games starts and then placed into the bag by the players, so that was when the cheating took place). At that point, the accused player admitted to cheating that year and the year before and was ousted.

Matthew Schuster

Great video. Despite my hatred of Minecraft. My three boys _may_ have wasted millions of youth seconds, well not really. One is a making a comfortable living coding now. Anyway, for calendar math, flash up “ignore leap years”. For someone who has poked fun at leap years and such. In the end rounding to 3x10**19, this difference is washed away. Comparing 2x10**22 to 3x10**19 is 666 times, not 1000 times. Accounting for leap days, it works out closer to 634 times. Again GREAT video. I found myself looking at the bookshelves trying to find eggs and Humble Pi copies while following the math and trying to figure out how you recorded your own lucky shots. Fantastic.

Samuel Gélineau

> I assumed in modern games they were now too complicated (using clock times etc) for that to be a strategy. speedrunners are definitely going through extreme lengths to beat randomness, see this very entertaining video about Wind Waker for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hs451PfFzQ

Timur Sultanov

7.5 trillion? Isn't that around 10 times more than population of earth?

Christopher Mrstik

Just watched this. Overall I thought it was a great and fair treatment from what I recall from the controversy in December and statistics many years ago. As a few others have noted, I think it would be good to preemptively open with the info. stated at the end that this isn't about cheating but just how likely the events are *if* normal math applies (independent events, etc.). That keeps it less confrontational and more "curious about the math" so to speak.

Samuel Gélineau

I had to watch the 15:09-18:40 section several times in order to understand it. I think it's because of the double-negation. We're no longer interested in how unlikely the run is, but in how likely an opponent could find a suspicious-looking run (first negation), and then we're calculating the probably of "not that" (second negation), and so when we discover that there's some overlap, I no longer have any idea whether that means the true number should be higher or lower, or whether 100% is good or bad for Dream. How about moving the negations as late as possible, and then immediately naming the negated thing, so it is now represented as a first class concept rather than a negation in the mind of the listener? Something like the following. 10 tails out of 12 flips. How likely is it? 1.6%. Call a sequence which is that rare or rarer a "unicorn sequence”, and a sequence which is less rare a “mundane sequence”. Unicorn sequences are 1.9% likely, while mundane sequences are 98.1% likely. 1.9% is pretty small, so how did I achieve a unicorn? I flipped the coin one hundred times. It is in fact very likely to find a unicorn sequence among such a large number of flips. Another way to say that is that it is very unlikely that all the sub-sequences of my 100 flips are mundane sequences. There are 5050 such sub-sequences, and even though each of them is very likely (0.981) to be mundane, the chance of all 5050 of them being mundane is 0.981^5050, which is basically 0%. But wait! Some of the sub-sequences overlap. This makes it easier for all 5050 sub-sequences to be mundane, because if I got one mundane sequence, I’m already half-way done on making this shifted-by-half-the-length sequence a mundane one as well. So all we know so far is that the probability of getting all mundane sequences is higher than 0%, which… we could probably have figured out without doing any calculation. Equivalently, the probability of getting at least one unicorn is less than 100%. Alright, now suppose I have submitted my 10 tails out of 12 run to speedrun.com, and people on social media claim that my run is a statistically impossible unicorn. If you are trying to prove my innocence, you can run the above calculation, conclude that the upper bound on the probability of me getting at least one unicorn is less than 100%, and conclude that there is nothing out of the ordinary in achieving something whose probability is less than 100%, so I am exonerated.

Keith Moser

Starting around 5:50 - when you start giving numbers from Dream's live streams, I'd love to see text on the screen showing the # of trades/kills and the expected # of pearls/blaze rods. Around 8:24, it looks like you have the wrong value (0.47 instead of 0.047) since the two terms add up to more than 1. Similar thing around 26:50 - I'd love to see text on screen for the working out of the dice rolls in the craps example (I just got to ~27:30 so maybe you already planned on adding these to the drone shot over Vegas?) At ~30:45 you imagine the craps player getting "two consecutive royal flushes in a row" which is a bit redundant and repetitive, no? ;-) No clue how easy it would be to rerecord that small bit but figured I'd mention it. Anyway, love the video—I had never heard of this controversy before but I have watched some streamers play Minecraft so I'm not completely unfamiliar with it. I think you explain both it and the math well. I have watched some other speed running (Super Mario Bros & SM3) and I know that the experts have figured out ways to manipulate the game into doing what they want. For example, Kosmic knows exactly how many seconds (or frames) into the loading screen for when he should start the game to get the best RNG (random number generated) data in World 8. GrandPooBear figured out ways to manipulate the RNG Hammer Bros movements on the screen by grabbing the end tile of SMB3 worlds at the exact right second... If Dream tried to defend themselves with a poorly-written and incorrect paper instead of admitting he found a way to "control" the RNG, it's probably not what they're doing... But it might be worth looking into and mentioning it perhaps...

xje4

The things I've noticed so far: 1) Sections 3:05 - 4:15 and 5:21 - 5:48: I think, these two sections contain too much unnecessary information about Minecraft. Every Minecraft player will already know these things and every non-Minecraft-player will probably find it uninteresting, as most parts of the explanation aren't relevant for the rest of the video. 2) 6:52 - 12:25 I had to rewatch parts of this section several times because I got distracted looking at the gameplay in the background. I think Minecraft gameplays are just drawing too much attention. 3) 14:51: There's an unclean cut at the word "stream" in the sentence "I'm gonna look mainly at 'Sampling Bias in Stream Selection'". 4) 26:23 - 27:58: For me, the background music is too distracting, especially at the end of the track. Maybe replace it with something more quiet like a marching band...

Henrik Ilgen

Just a little nitpick in case nobody has brought that up yet: In your calculation of the Ten Billion Human Second Century, you didn't account for leap years.

Sjoerd Smit

Great video so far. There's one thing that bugged me though and it's not your fault, but at 22:43 in the footage of the second paper you can see multiple formulas with unbalanced parentheses and it's just uncomfortable to look at. It would probably be a bit harsh to really slam the author for that kind of thing, but I also feel that at the very least you should acknowledge this fact to reassure the viewer they're not the only one bothered by this.

Em Raymond

At 08:10 you say zero point zero zero three, but have written 0.0003 on the screen. Just one order of magnitude off between the two figures. Plugging into a calculator it looks like the value on screen is correct, but not the voice over In the following calculation you say four point seven percent, but show the value 0.47 on screen, should this be 0.047?

Timon S. Gutleb

He does not claim he's manipulating RNG in-game at all, which would be fine and if he was doing that then it would be easy to prove by sharing how it's done. Dream still claims he just got *that* lucky. Kosmic is a fantastic speedrunner btw.

Richard Dickins

Great video! Thanks for the preview. Others have picked up on a number of points so I won't, just saying it's a great investigation of an interesting topic.

Lisa Ugray

I disagree about the minecraft cuts you suggest. As someone coming in without minecraft knowledge, while those parts aren't strictly necessary to understanding the maths, a little bit of extra background knowledge about the game is useful to ground the information that is necessary.

ViliamF

Nice beard! So: 8:12 - You said "zero point zero zero three", but there were 3 zeroes in the number on the screen 8:23 - Wrong number on the screen. 0.47 is 47 percent. Other than these mistakes, I don't think the video should be cut down. I am perfectly fine with it composed as is because nothing is ever perfect, and there is a certain occasional beauty in imperfection.

The Dean

So you're saying there's a chance. 19:25 is pretty bad ass. How many SD cards did you fill up before you got that take?

xje4

Ok, I understand that for newcomers the first section may be relevant. However, the second section seems to go too deep into the game and I find it strange to get a "pro tip" for Minecraft from a maths video.

Luke

You mention the book just came out in US but I got it months ago??

Matt Parker

This is the US paperback edition which has just come out. It joins the already published: US Hardback, UK Hardback and UK Paperback.

Michael Ehling

Halloo! I am not in the gamer world and my probability skills fall out of my head every time I think I understand it. But I was able to follow this quite long and detailed video without rewinding or "what the...?" at all. I did think the ending was rather abrupt. I get you want to be precise. But where's the Matt Parker warm, winking smile that communicates we're all in this (mathy) world together?

Matt Parker

I still need to film the very last closing shot. It’s not in this rough-cut as it’s all admin, no maths.

Kadin Tucker

I think the way you explained the maths is pretty much as good as it can get. I think for this particular audience it might be helpful to briefly touch on what a difference orders of magnitude make. At a glance 10^-11 and 10^-22 don't seem to be especially different, for example, but they are of course very, very, very different. A mistake I noted: from about 11:00 to 12:00, where you rephrased the probabilities as fractions you mistakenly said that 1 / 1.8 x 10^11 is 1 in 180 trillion, while it is actually 1 in 180 billion. (Unless there is some linguistic difference I'm not aware of? I'm from the US). There was another similar mistake around that same time. Lastly, I was unsure if this occurred over multiple different speedruns, or if the numbers were taken as the totals over a selection of several speedruns. This was not especially clear to me from the video. I am unfamiliar with Minecraft speedruns in general.

Neil Spencer

Seems good to me, although quite long. I wonder if the bit about the 100 coin flips could be shortened as you are essentially using it to point out the possibility of someone having chosen the worst case scenario for Dream rather than to do the calculation for the coin flips itself. You mention independence when combining the two very small probabilities but I did not notice you doing this when calculating each of the two very small probabilities. Of course, the assumption of independence is there as well and I actually wonder if this issue could be the source of Dream's luck. You say there is a table of probabilities in the Minecraft code but is there anything which promises that successive trades are actually independent of each other? It is not impossible that individual pig-things might have biases towards certain sorts of trades and if Dream gets a pearl-biased pig then the probabilities would not be so small. It might still be the case that overall the probability of getting a pearl is 4.7% but if you capture certain pig-things and put them in a pit then you can get better odds of getting pearls. I hope that makes sense

Simone Emiliano Matteo Palla

At 30.45 I sort of expected that you were going to say that the odds were like Patricia making her dice record wile at the same time making a record like 32 reds in a row playing roulette. I was surprised by the unexpected introduction of a poker example since poker was not mentioned before.

The Live Toad

I agree about orders of magnitude. It's tough for most of us. I do like the 10b human second century -- maybe you can expand on that?

Matt Parker

That is an excellent point! I’m changing it now.

Matt Parker

Good call. I’ve put some more about it in the wrap-up.

Matt Parker

From what I have read: people have done a lot of looking into the code to make sure the random numbers are independent and it seems they are. It that is also now part of my wrap-up: one conclusion we can come to is that the in-game probabilities are simply not what we think they are. (That said: they seem to be correct for everyone but Dream.)

Chris

Around 6:30 you're rattling off some numbers. I think putting them on the screen might work well. For the 10billionsecondcentury, (and the dream chance), what would the equivalent crabs (or heads/tails) sequence be? That might be an interesting comparison to put the dream-chance in perspective. Other than that, interesting video, but it's rather long.

Matthew Lotz

Coming in with no knowledge of these events, a shaky grasp of probability, and an even shakier grasp of Minecraft; I can at least confirm that the video makes sense as a self-contained entity. I didn't have any issues following your explanations.

Dimo

Around 34:53 you say 'like just a thousand times bigger', maybe you should avoid the generalization or at least say more than 600 times bigger, because it is actually just 666.666 times bigger (less than a thousand)

Mik Scheper

I guess I'm one of the –7.492 trillion people in the world who have no idea what you're talking about, then, I suppose. 🙂

Richard Aquilina

Great video that I am sure will be even better when the remaining graphics are added. I've never played Minecraft so I watched with my 12 year old Minecrafting son who couldn't find fault with your Minecraft part of the video. I only undertook A-level Maths and Stats so am not qualified to comment on the Maths part of the video!

sim1

I think it would be interesting to see if anyone else has had very good or bad 'luck' as maybe is a interaction between the game and the hardware (Pc random number generators are not random.)

Micha

As Christopher mentioned, setting the image of the "earth century" at the start gives people something to compare or reference throughout rather than just going through it 'confused' and then being hit with realisation at the end, but also depends on the type of effect you want to go for. The final sentence kinda rammed the final nail into the already damaged coffin, giving it its final hit. If used at the start it will help with visualization, but it would lose that big final nail.

Micha

I mean, he was rounding up in both cases to find the "Upper Bound", no? So even using lower figures would not help with the fact that the posited numerical value for Dream's run still vastly outplays the TBHSC value.

Micha

These numbers were plucked from the couple of speedruns Dream broadcasted live on his Twitch channel.

Henrik Ilgen

No, he actually rounded down, effectively, by not taking leap years into account: The number of seconds assumes exactly 365 days in a year, when it's actually closer to 365.25 (rather a bit less; he's done a video on that 😋). As I said, it's just a nitpick; I just would've assumed that Matt would at least mention that he's discarding leap years and leap seconds.

Tom Collins

As someone who has never played minecraft but knows many people who do, i loved this video. can't wait for the final version to share!

Dave Ensminger

😥 so sad I didn’t see my name in the list of Patreon supporters at the end of the video. But great work as always Matt!

Matt Parker

Sorry, I only had space for 200 this time. I’ll try to get more in next video!

Matt Parker

Yep, it took about 24 hours to render out the bonus footage and it had been gradually uploading for a while now…

Bret Scofield

Maybe as a random patreon only video, you could do some random maths around patreon supporter names. e.g. if you were to sum the number position of every letter of every letter of all supporters. This is probably a bad example, but there might be some fun or silly maths somewhere in such an idea.

Rik Boss

didn't know you did this sort of thing, only here after already having watched the video on your channel. I'll keep a look out for feedback opportunities in the future!

Michał Leszczyk

Gotta admit, this amount of work truly deserves a patreon sub. Well, here I am, creating a Patreon account. This video is a masterpiece. Keep it up!