Possible but unlikely b/c the person making this claim is the current No. 2 Donkey Kong player in the world Wes Copeland, not Joe Schmo off the street.

Even if Mitchell's disputed scores were accepted they would still be far off Copeland's scores. So when the No. 2 player speaks it carries more weight than just some random dude in his basement.

It's like when speedrunners attempt to complete games in the fastest time. If they make a mistake at any point in the game that will cost them a lot of time, they will most likely abandon the game and keep trying until they are able to complete the game without making any costly mistakes.

Again, the numbers need to be run. There's no way to tell without them, the truth could be either way.

If "you" is some abstract entity with infinite time, perhaps. Even if you do ten three-hour runs a day, you can't actually get a very high deviation from average in any given century. Getting a certain deviation requires exponential time in proportion to the number of RNG calls.

And you can see from the numbers that it's not just Mitchell's values that deviate from the expected mean, it's the others as well (he's just more extreme), which also shows we can't expect them all to converge to the mean, there's some more complex statistical process going on.

His deviations being more extreme might be explained by him playing more games, or it might be cheating. So far we can't tell.

In such a game if each player can choose how many times they play then they can gain an advantage simply by playing more. And their top games will look more and more statistically unlikely. That can be especially surprising if they only report those top games, which is the case here.

What would be interesting to compute is how many more games does a player need to be playing in order to reasonably get the results in the article. If it's 2x, it's not proof of cheating. But if it's 1,000x then maybe it is, because who has that much free time?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean

Yes, the RNG is not perfect, as the article says,

> the points derived from those enemy smashes are assigned semi-randomly

(which apparently solves an old mystery there).

In any case, the numbers for total smashes is 380 for Mitchell and 242-371 for the other players. Percent of score from smashes is 17.7 versus 10.6-14.8. In both cases the large variance among the other players shows that while he's an outlier, we can't expect the numbers to be close to a specific average, this isn't a simple statistical process where we average out thousands of independent variables.

It's unlikely, but possible, to roll a 6-sided die 100 times in a row and get 100 6's.

In basically every PRNG algorithm, there is _no_ reachable state which will result in 100 6's in a row.

It's exactly as unlikely, but possible, to do the same and get the exact sequence: 6 2 2 4 5 4 4 1 4 4 4 3 5 4 2 4 6 2 4 4 1 1 2 4 4 4 6 6 4 6 6 1 1 2 4 4 1 5 1 2 3 6 3 3 3 1 6 4 1 4 1 5 4 2 2 5 6 2 1 6 3 5 3 3 2 6 6 6 3 6 5 5 1 5 4 6 2 6 4 3 2 2 5 1 5 3 3 5 4 5 6 4 1 5 5 6 6 6 6 3

(generated via https://www.random.org/integers/?num=100&min=1&max=6&col=5&b...)

http://lcn2.github.io/mersenne-english-name/m19937/prime-c.h...

Expect to get length 1 in a number 10 digits long, 2 in a number 100 digits long (10²), 3 in a number 1000 digits long (10^1000)... So expect to find a run of 100 6s in a random number 10^googol digits long I think.

> 10 digits long[...]100 digits long[...]1000 digits long[...]10^googol digits long I think.

Not 10^googol digits. Googol digits long. Except you don't even need that much, because die rolling is base 6.

But what Wes showed was that all the top gamers (with higher scores than Billy) average 13-15% of their total points from barrel smashes while Billy averaged almost 18%.

Details: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVDyEHrX4AEnxP0.jpg:large

Wouldn't this rather be a sign of people making different strategic tradeoffs? Mitchell spent more time breaking barrels but at the cost of getting fewer bonus points for finishing the level in time.

Another possibility is that Billy figured out a hitherto unknown RNG manipulation trick. This is how a lot of TAS runs work. Again, I doubt this is the case but with the source it'd be easy to rule out.