The strange relationship between RTA and cosmic rays in Super Mario 64
There are cases where a bug suddenly occurs while playing a game and makes it impossible to continue playing, but the causes of this can be software-based or hardware-based. However, even after fixing software and hardware problems, bugs may continue to occur. It has been pointed out that the cause of the bug in such cases may be
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Veritasium , a YouTube channel with over 10 million subscribers, has released a movie called ``Space is hostile to computers,'' showing that cosmic rays falling from space to the ground cause plane crashes, interference in elections, game bugs, etc. It has been pointed out that it is causing
The Universe is Hostile to Computers - YouTube
According to the movie, Intel's DRAM determines binary 0 and 1 based on the presence or absence of electrons stored in the semiconductor. Since the same alpha particles contained in cosmic rays pass through DRAM, it seems that cosmic rays can cause bit reversal . This is called a Single Event Upset (SEU).
Dr. Leif Scheick, chief engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), who appeared in this movie, said, ``Cosmic rays can change the functionality of your device.'' 'The blue screen may actually have been caused by elementary particles such as neutrons,' he said, talking about the effects of SEU.
In fact, some bugs in the past were found to be caused by cosmic rays.
In 2013,
TTC Upwarp Highlight - YouTube
If you can reproduce this bug, it will be a big advantage in Super Mario 64's RTA, and a reward of 1000 dollars (about 110,000 yen) will be paid to those who find a way to reproduce this bug. It becomes.
Many players aimed to reproduce the bug after the bounty was set, but even if DOTA_TeaBag matched the behavior when the bug occurred in every frame in the emulator, the bug could not be reproduced. did.
Therefore, it was finally concluded that the Tic Tac Rock ceiling slipping bug experienced by DOTA_TeaBag was caused by SEU.
To explain in more detail what exactly happened due to SEU, when DOTA_TeaBag was playing Super Mario 64, neutrons derived from cosmic rays reversed the bit related to Mario's height, and the binary changed to ' 11000101' was rewritten to '11000100', and Mario's height information was changed from 'C5837800' to 'C4837800'. This happened to be an appropriate change in height for passing through the ceiling, so it behaved as if it were a bug that could be used for RTA.
In fact, by using a script that manually rewrites specific binary information, pannenkoek12 , who set up the bounty, confirmed that the ceiling slipping bug experienced by DOTA_TeaBag was caused by rewriting the binary information.
In addition, game media TheGamer wrote, ``If the ceiling-passing bug is a bug that consistently occurs, there is a very high possibility that Super Mario 64's RTA world record can be broken,'' and ``RTA players. 'The probability of encountering this type of bug (derived from cosmic rays) is astronomically small, about 1 in a trillion,' and the possibility that a bug derived from cosmic rays will help RTA break records is extremely high. It is pointed out that it is low.
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