User blog:Ultra64Detective2401/The Search For More Anomalies, Part 1

Sequence:The Basics of Anomalies

Previous:Personalization and AI Safety

Next:TBD

Where we left off, we learned that there is an experimental AI that can be found in every copy of Super Mario 64. The AI adapts the game based on your playstyle. In some cases, it may experiment on you to learn more about said playstyle.

But... these personalizations should appear as anomalies. We already found one such anomaly, the cracked wall texture in Whomp’s Fortress, but shouldn’t there be more?

In fact, many more such anomalies have been reported. Unfortunately, because there exist people that also like to make up things about the game, the real reports are mixed in with a bunch of fakes. This makes trying to sort out what really happened a tricky job indeed.

Fake reports have always been a thing in video games... Like Waluigi in Super Mario 64 DS, Mew under the truck in Generation I, and so on. Many of these are quite popular as well, so we can’t just decide to use popularity as our metric for figuring out what’s real and what’s fake. And, since these anomalies are all personalized, it’s not like I can experience them all. I’ve only ever experienced the cracked wall texture one in all my time playing the game! (Note:No, the wall isn’t actually cracked in the DS version. If you think that’s how I learned the 1-up in the N64 version and I just “misremembered” a crack and got the 1-up... it’s not. Go look, no indication in the DS version either.)

But, there are a few things we can do to help weed out the fakes. We have to remember that the anomalies come from an AI that personalizes the game. Taking what we know about the AI into account, we can debunk some of the fake reports.

So, here, we’re going to be looking into these reports, and attempting to analyze what could have happened, and what didn’t. Afterwards, we’ll try to classify each kind of anomaly that can be found, and see if we can use this ot learn more about the AI... and perhaps, why its existence has been hidden away from us for all this time...

So, let’s take a look at some of these reports, shall we?

The two most common kinds of reports we get involve Luigi being in the game, and new areas of the game being found. (There are many supposed new areas:Chroma Tundra, a 4th floor of the castle, the Bowser Room, the interior of Whomp’s Fortress, and so on...) This is quite interesting, because these kinds of things were often the most common rumours that were passed around. Unfortunately, that means it’s hard to check for their reliability.

The next most common kind of report refers to something known as the Wario Apparition. While it is likely that this apparition refers to a real phenomenon, exactly what it is and what it does is surrounded with rumours of just about anything (creepy) you can think of, up to and including the idea that it can somehow manifest into your reality just by experiencing it and not turning off the console in time. As a result, we don’t have much of a lead involving said apparition.

After that, there are reports of a strange negative emotional aura around Wet-Dry World. Players can feel quite uneasy in this level... and nobody knows why. Could this be one of the AI’s experiments...?

You might be wondering why the most common kinds of reports refer to large anomalies like this, and very few reports are about small anomalies like the first anomaly we found. The reason is that smaller anomalies usually would have gone unnoticed. If you’ve experienced the cracked wall texture in Whomp’s Fortress, you probably thought that was normal and thus never bothered reporting it. This kind of selection bias needs to be taken into account when analyzing how frequently specific kinds of anomalies happen.

Either way, it looks like we don’t have very many leads. In order to find the truth... we need to go deeper.