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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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

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.

"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 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.

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?

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)"

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

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

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.

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.....

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".

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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

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.

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

"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?

>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

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.

"UHHHH WELLL, YOU CANT PROVE IT WASSSSS" Yeah, and YOU cant prove it wasn't, collar boy.

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

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.

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

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.

"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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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”

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.

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.

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

learn the difference between impossible and highly improbable

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)

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.

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.

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.)

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

the REAL reason he mysteriously warped to the top of the level is because every game of mario 64 is personalised

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

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.

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.

Great video, I need that additional context 😀 The clip recreating a bitflip does look almost identical (to me at least) to the original event

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.

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

"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"

I absolutely believe that it could be a bitflip, especially if he lives at a higher altitude. There is a reason planes have redundant computer systems with error correcting memory, because bit flips actually have happened and nearly caused the death of passengers on a plane. I've experienced two Single Event Upsets in my entire life on two devices. It's absolutely possible. However it doesn't even have to be a "Cosmic ray" dude could have radon in his house and not even know it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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!).

Video conclusion: I have no fucking clew why it happened. Just literally anything other than a cosmic ray.

It seems clear that the cause was a bit flip, the replication looks close to perfect. No better theory at the moment. The chances it wasn't a bit flip and happened to manipulate the height almost perfectly to the point where it was a bit flip, is rather dubious. The cause of the bit flip is more debatable, and yes, probably not cosmic rays, but can't be proven that it wasn't. However it has a decently likely probability, and thats because the other theories don't really hold up too well, here is why: - Malfunctioning memory cache - Possible, but would have seen other glitches through more play which I assume DOTA_Teabag continued to use and stream with, additionally original console was bought and tested, with no notable issues. - Electromagnetic interference mentioned by editor - THIS COULD BE THE COSMIC RAYS!!! EMI is defined as interference to an electrical circuit by an external cause, sure it could have been something else, but it is any external source! Unless he lived next to a radio tower, or happened to buy some dodgy fridge. - Power surges aren't a cause of EMI, it simply doesn't work like that. Devices emit EMI, they don't emit more if something surges, instead devices break and turn off, Some devices could emit more with more power, but you're talking industrial level devices, which is why I mentioned radio tower, above, or a constant source like a poorly built fridge. The conditions fit the cosmic ray theory is the issue. No obvious broken devices nearby, no pattern of repeated issues (unlike Dupdome), console was inspected and without issue in general, assume that someone asked him if he lives near a power station or radio tower, so what's left.

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.

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

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.

It is almost certainly hardware malfunction, considering how old and fragile N64s are. But cosmic ray bit flips are much mode common than you suggested. Every second, many cosmic rays are passing through your body. On average about once per year, a cosmic ray will flip a bit in any electronic device you are using. With how many electronic devices there are worldwide, there are billions of bit flips every year. Its not actually that rare. What is rare is a flipped bit having such a clear visual effect. And the rarity is in part because over the decades, engineers have learned how design computers to be resilient to bit flips. Important distinction.

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

i remember when pannen put out the bounty for this, but i NEVER heard anything about cosmic rays lmao. this is wild

damn i thought this video would be an actual discovery or something but it's just saying "actually it was probably something else and not a cosmic ray". how wildly informative

i think it would be funny if in later years, it’s proven to be an actual cosmic ray that did this despite it being absurdly stupid

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

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

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.

A TL;DW for this video would be "Many people have been led to believe that this exact scenario (cosmic ray bit flip) is what happened to cause this bug, but there's no conclusive evidence to show that this is what caused it, so anyone stating is as fact aren't being honest, as the true answer is that it _could_ be this thing, rather than it _is_ this thing." It's not an impossibility, but it's also not like that specifically cosmic rays caused this exact thing, there's a lot of other things that are just as likely (or just as unlikely). I believe the video is trying to say that the correct answer isn't that any particular thing caused it, but rather "we don't know" what caused it, so arguing any of for a specific outcome hasn't met it's burden of proof, and the constant repeating of the assertion that X caused Y has cemented it in people's minds as a fact rather than an unknown possibility. Also calling it a myth feeds the fire of this push back in the comments, since that can be interpreted as both a widely held but false belief or as simply a legend/story that people talk about for years after the fact, at a certain point people are going to hear what they want to hear, and if they come into the video expecting an outright debunking of the theory they're going to go away more steadfast in their belief, regardless of whether or not your intention was to simply disabuse them of the certainty of the claim that it was a cosmic ray, as to many people failing to persuade them that it definitely wasn't the cause was what they interpreted the whole video to be about. There's just a bit too much content to this video that important details like 12:12 get lost in the labyrinth of statements and assertions, seeing how glitchy this specific level is with up and down warping should make the cosmic rays theory less likely as cosmic rays causing all these problems only on this specific level is insanely unlikely, but when you start conflating this find with other people's opinions and the copy-paste system of journalism it buries it under a ton of weaker arguments that people can't see the great point beneath all of the weak/unsubstantial ones.

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...

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?

How many ads would you like in this video? KZfaq: "yes"

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

You'd be surprised how often people blame the cartridge connection ("cart tilts") when it's actually a loose power supply in the back side.

So….. after watching this video… it was cosmic rays.

It is incredible the amount of scientific research that Mario 64 has just to perfect speedruns, I respect that dedication