Dream hires Harvard astrophysicist to disprove Minecraft cheating accusations

Popular Minecraft speedrunner Dream has released a lengthy video as a response to cheating accusations brought in regards to one of his runs.

For the purpose of this response, Dream has hired a statistical expert with a PhD from Harvard who is a practising astrophysicist.

The document, called Dream Minecraft Report, is 19 pages long and according to Dream, it should prove that the 1 in 7.5 trillion odds, shown by the Speedrun Mod team, are completely wrong, and it provides a step by step explanation of what the mods did wrong.

The document concludes that "the data show no statistically significant evidence that Dream was modifying the probabilities, given that he was investigated after it was noticed that he was lucky."

In the video, Dream explains that the math was off by "at least 7.49999 trillion", referring to 1 in 7.5 trillion odds presented by the Mod team.

In the response video, Dream uses a seemingly endless field of blocks to visualise just how wrong the Mod team was (Picture: Dream)

You can read the lengthy document provided above or watch Dream's response video for more details, but basically, Dream's (and his hired expert's) main point is that the YouTuber's run was only investigated because he got lucky. 

"Extremely low probability events happen all the time," the document states, with a purpose of showing that perfect runs are probably happening "multiple times per hour", and considering the number of players that are playing Minecraft, "even 1 in a trillion events happen daily."

Furthermore, the document provides a rather complex statistical analysis in order to prove that the mod team did not correctly account for several factors in regards to trades with Piglins, which supposedly shows that Dream's odds were "extremely more likely".

Dream's document further claims that the mod team used completely random numbers while presenting them like "the best possible numbers in Dream's favour", while they were actually far from it and often "the worst possible numbers."

• Read more: Minecraft speedrunner Dream apologises after clip of "lynching" joke goes viral

The second part of Dream's response addresses the claim that he didn't provide any evidence and that he wasn't cooperating, which was stated in the video posted to YouTube by Geosquare, one of the moderators.

According to Geosquare's video, Dream failed to provide the Mods Folder because he “deletes the content of his Mod Folder pretty regularly.”

"That obviously makes me seem very suspicious," Dream says in his response. "Except for the fact that I didn't ever say that."

Dream says that he provided the mods with everything they've asked for, but that they were "very disorganized" and didn't ask him anything in regards to his Mods Folder "until 10 days after the investigation started."

He explains that at that point he already made changes to Mods Folder because he plays many different versions and has a lot of sub-mod folders. One of the mod team members appears in the video to confirm that "there was absolutely no hesitation to provide us what was needed."

Finally, Dream provides his World File and Jar File to prove that nothing was modified and that there are no data packs within the data packs folder.

The evidence presented in Dream's defence looks quite strong and it will be interesting to see the reaction of the community to the video and the document.

There is a theory that this "Harvard astrophysicist" doesn't actually exist, and some members of the r/statistics subreddit claim that the document contains several amateur mistakes and is deliberately manipulating numbers in Dream's favour.

• Read more: Dream to donate "RESPONSE" video revenue to speedrunning mod team

Dream urges his fans "not to send hate to the mod team members" because he thinks that their intentions were not malicious and that they are "just young people who have made a mistake".

Additionally, he pledges to donate all revenue made from the response video to the Minecraft Java Edition Speedrun Mod Team in order to fund the development of an anti-cheat speedrun client.