How the Blinking Animation of a Clown Car Revolutionizes Super Mario Maker Cryptography.

Comments · 2.3K

• CE

  @CeaveGaming · 9 months ago · pinned

  Update Update!<br><br>Congratulations to the murderous criminals of the Mario Maker Technicians Discord.<br>The people that already defeated “It Rhymes With Toad” did it again.<br>Within roughly 12 hours they managed to decipher the hidden code behind our blinking Clown Cars.<br>What problem did our seemingly uncrackable algorithm face?<br>Well, the stage&apos;s main problem is its main problem!<br><br>As it turns out our hashing function was working as intended but unfortunately it was not strong enough to withstand the brute force of a modern computer!<br>A modern computer is capable of brute forcing the problem.<br>They simply implemented Mario Maker’s RNG function in a little program sprinkled some mathematical optimization on top of it and then had it calculate our level over and over again until they found a sequence in the level that resulted on the correct RNG ladder step.<br><br>Congratulations for succeeding with their hit job!<br><br>The general idea behind the level is the right one, however we will have to actually come up with a mathematical problem in Mario Maker so complex that even modern high end GPU’s can’t calculate it anymore.<br>Back to the drawing board!

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• RG

  @rgal · 9 months ago

  I think it&apos;s nice that this cryptography channel sometimes talks about video games

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• BE

  @benschubert9830 · 9 months ago

  Without a doubt the most violent explanation of prime numbers I’ve ever seen

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• MA

  @maadneet · 9 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrBemdhNGyk&amp;t=54">0:54</a> bold of you to assume Nintendo can&apos;t remove a level at any time for any or no reason

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• LI

  @lifinale · 9 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrBemdhNGyk&amp;t=479">7:59</a> “We can immediately tell this because of its lack of aura” was delivered so straightforward and took me out for a second

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• 72

  @72SinSae · 9 months ago

  mario maker mfs really will study Cryptography just to make a impossible level <br>and i love it

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• DO

  @dodleboper · 9 months ago

  Team 0% quaking in their boots

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• DU

  @Ducky0Master · 9 months ago

  Next up: How a Super Mario Maker player broke modern encryption by beating my level.

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• NO

  @nobodynada_ · 9 months ago

  In the Super Metroid community, we ended up having to solve nearly this exact problem in order to save speedrunners a few seconds on the Mother Brain fight. The short version is, there&apos;s a sequence where Mother Brain&apos;s neck bobs up and down in a pattern that changes in a hard-to-predict way whenever Samus jumps up. If we can get her neck to move to a very specific position at the exact right time, then the cutscene progresses several seconds faster. The choice of whether to jump or not on each individual frame is very similar to the choice here of whether to go through the left or the right door each iteration.<br><br>I was able to write a program to solve this using the exact technique which several other commenters here have mentioned. Basically, even though the number of combinations of possible choices is exponential (it was about 2^1000 in our case), the number of actually reachable states is much more limited (a few thousand). Therefore, you can write a search algorithm that that runs in linear time (wrt the number of possible states) by discarding paths that lead to states you&apos;ve already seen (it&apos;s essentially Dijkstra&apos;s algorithm.)<br><br>The extra challenge was that we weren&apos;t just looking for an optimal solution for TAS; we wanted to make it human-viable by searching for clusters of similar paths that all led to &quot;good enough&quot; solutions, so that you didn&apos;t have to hit the inputs with frame perfect precision. That made the problem much more complex, and it may very well be possible to improve upon our work with a smarter search algorithm.

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• PU

  @pug_gamer137 · 9 months ago

  Here to tell you guys that the discord has already cracked the code, in less than 8 hours since the release of the video

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• NE

  @newclarity4228 · 9 months ago

  this is the most entertaining explanation of primes and encryption I&apos;ve ever seen

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• FI

  @five-thirty-five · 9 months ago

  Psycrow: &quot;I bet you can&apos;t make an unbeatable level.&quot; Ceave: &quot;I&apos;m sorry, did you say something about public key encryption?&quot;

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