Best Paper of 2020?

ali posted 3 months ago

This is a breakdown of why a speedrunner named "Dream" was likely cheating by rigging the RNG in his minecraft runs.

This gave me a better understanding of the binominal distribution, CDF, and statistics than any of my college classes. Honestly a fantastic read.

yellowriver81 posted 2 months ago

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I agree, this is a very interesting paper. A little off-topic, but I admire articles that take a precise treatment of statistics. It feels like these days, especially in engineering fields, statistics is either ignored altogether or abused. A paper that I thoroughly enjoyed reading recently is actually the yellowpaper on Ethereum blockchain: https://ethereum.github.io/yellowpaper/paper.pdf. The math seems a bit complex at first but things are very well-defined and it sets up a nice environment to begin considering constructs that are *supposed* to be complex, such as contracts, gas (the Ethereum lingo for computational cost), and virtual machines.