In the summer of 2017, the gamer Beck Abney sat in his room playing Mario Kart 64. What happened next has been described as one of the greatest achievements in gaming history. Many doubted it could even be done at all. He was trying to perform one of gaming's hardest glitches: the Weathertenko, a trick that if done correctly can finish a full lap of the stage Choco Mountain in just a handful of seconds. To do it once requires immense skill, but Abney wanted to do three in a row, a feat never before achieved in recorded history.

In the competitive pursuit of speedrunning, gamers vie to complete a given video game as quickly as humanly possible. It's a sport for the nerdier among us, and it's amazingly popular: Videos streaming and recording speedruns routinely rack up seven-figure view counts on Twitch and YouTube. So when one very prominent speedrunner--a U.S. YouTuber with more than 20 million subscribers who goes by the nom de game "Dream"--was accused in December 2020 of faking one of his world-record runs of the block-building game Minecraft, the online drama exploded like a batch of TNT. Specifically, Dream reported that he'd finished Minecraft in just over 19 minutes, faster than all but four players had ever managed it, because of an incredible stretch of good luck. According to their impressively detailed probability analysis, Dream's luck was just too good. He was the equivalent of a roulette player who gets their color 50 times in a row: You don't just marvel at the good fortune; you check underneath the table.

Details Hello! all Greetings from *GDG Hildesheim* We're sure most of you are interested in learning new technologies and tools. That's why we're excited to participate in the first Community Speedrun Challenge that Google is organizing for developer communities in Europe. And as part of the GDG-Hildesheim, you're among the first to know about this!! The Community Speedrun Challenge is a training program that will run in May where you'll have the opportunity to join four Speedruns and get hands-on experience with Machine Learning on Google Cloud and Tensorflow, and take your first steps with tools like BigQuery, Cloud Speech API, and Cloud ML Engine. Every Speedrun is open for a week to give you the ability to finish all labs in your best time, scoring more points and winning prizes.