I have a soft spot for Super Mario Brothers videos, and am particularly intrigued by a series of hacked versions of various Mario games that have hit the net in the past few years. In these hacked versions, the levels have been rearranged to make them more difficult, requiring players to repeat levels over and over to figure out the way past each little section. Videos appear on YouTube showing supergamers running through the hacked levels, performing seemingly impossible feats of timing and precision — but also dying a lot.

An anonymous blogger/gamer wanted to take this to the next level — he wanted to make a video of one level of Kaizo Mario World (which he describes as “the most evil Super Mario World hack ever”) showing all his mistakes, but without all that time to reload and restart the level after each death. He had to hack his Super Nintendo emulator to support his goal, and the results are bizarre and wonderful — from one Mario come many Marios, but only one Mario survives. Just watch it:

After the jump, we’ll hear a bit about how this video illustrates some principles of quantum physics.

The anonymous blogger/gamer explains:

…tiny quantum events can create ripples that have big effects on non-quantum systems. One good example of this is the Quantum Suicide “experiment” that some proponents of the Many-Worlds Interpretation claim (I think jokingly) could actually be used to test the MWI. The way it works is, you basically run the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment on yourself– you set up an apparatus whereby an atom has a 50% chance of decaying each second, and there’s a detector which waits for the atom to decay. When the detector goes off, it triggers a gun, which shoots you in the head and kills you. So all you have to do is set up this experiment, and sit in front of it for awhile. If after sixty seconds you find you are still alive, then the many-worlds interpretation is true, because there is only about a one in 10¹⁸ chance of surviving in front of the Quantum Suicide machine for a full minute, so the only plausible explanation for your survival is that the MWI is true and you just happen to be the one universe where the atom’s 50% chance of decay turned up “no” sixty times in a row. Now, given, in order to do this, you had to create about 10¹⁸ universes where the Quantum Suicide machine did kill you, or copies of you, and your one surviving consciousness doesn’t have any way of telling the people in the other 10¹⁸ universes that you survived and MWI is true. This is, of course, roughly as silly as the thing about there being a universe where all the atoms in your heart randomly decided to tunnel out of your body.

But, we can kind of think of the multi-playthrough Kaizo Mario World video as a silly, sci-fi style demonstration of the Quantum Suicide experiment. At each moment of the playthrough there’s a lot of different things Mario could have done, and almost all of them lead to horrible death. The anthropic principle, in the form of the emulator’s save/restore feature, postselects for the possibilities where Mario actually survives and ensures that although a lot of possible paths have to get discarded, the camera remains fixed on the one path where after one minute and fifty-six seconds some observer still exists.

By the way, if said anonymous blogger/gamer wants to reveal him or herself to the world, please leave a comment!

(Via Kottke.org.)