I randomly found a video and the subsequent PDF that tries to proof that a speedrunner was consistently cheating in Minecraft speedruns. I am neither playing Minecraft nor do I have any skin in the game, but I found this PDF very interesting and wanted to share it with you.

While I know many of the elements used in the paper (bias correction, bonferroni correction,...) from some classes, I still find this paper a very good example how all of the methods are used to make a compelling argument. This is something that I am missing from many classes, where we either look at the theory, or use one method in isolation on given data. The document on the other hand constructs a narrative and combines all of the "separate" elements and shows how statistics can be used "in the real world". Lastly, it's also interesting to see how difficult (read: how much knowledge you need) it is to prove that some numbers are off in a system where we know the odds (because we have the code). This only shows how difficult it is to do proper statistics about systems in nature, where many more unknowns exist and even unknown unknowns.

Here is also a video introducing the paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MYw9LcLCb4

Short background: The accused is a streamer (or youtuber?) who does random seed Minecraft speedruns. This means that a random world is generated and he tries to finish the game on this random map as fast as possible. Some people thought that he was a tad too lucky and started digging deeper.