Super Mario World and quantum physics

You may recall a post last month about Kaizo Mario, the ridiculously cruel fan-made Super Mario World level. Hackszine reader Guy Russell sent us a link to an article on the Mechanically Seperated Meat blog that uses this level to visually illustrate the concept of the “Many Worlds Interpretation” of quantum physics.

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.

To create the many-worlds video, the author hacked together a custom version of the SNES9X emulator. The application, which you can download in source or binary form, allows you to record the hundreds retry attempts you make through a level. It then compiles all of the attempts into a single Quicktime video that represents all of Mario’s potential histories.

Super Mario World vs. the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics
Previously: Cruel Super Mario World hack