For the first week, I chose to write about the Dream Minecraft speedrunning drama. This is an interesting case we are looking at data that helped disprove a speedruns validity. Luck plays a part in Minecraft speedruns, specifically for item drop rates and piglin barter odds. If you have better luck with these aspects of the game, you will be able to complete more runs and be on good pace more often.
The drama started after Dream, a popular Minecraft Youtuber submitted a 3rd place run to the speedrun.com leaderboards. When moderators looked into that run and others attempted by Dream on stream, they noticed something odd. It seemed that Dream had incredible luck when it came to blaze rod drop rates (50% chance to drop when killing a blaze) and ender pearl barters (~5% chance per gold traded). Here is some of the data on both scenarios.
In both of these graphs, when compared to another runner (Illumina), the expected value, and the 99.9 percentile, we see that Dream's luck is far beyond what would be considered normal, or even possible. The publication of this data resulted in the removal of the run, and for the moderators to claim that Dream must have altered his game files to give him a better chance at a good run. This spiraled into a whole event with back and forths that were pretty entertaining but I won't go into that here.
I think this is a cool example of data being used interestingly. Just by using data obtained from watching streams, the moderators were able to confidently disprove the validity of the run and prove that there was something else going on. It's cool that a paper was published, and it introduced a lot of people to the world of statistics and probability as a result.