Tyler Kehne Discovers “Quantum Tunneling” Tech, Two New 16 Star WRs – Ukikipedia News Week 1

Earlier this month, Tyler Kehne announced he was theorizing a new “godlike wall clip tech.” If it works out, it could allow Mario to pass through a seam between two walls under very precise conditions. Here’s how Tyler explained quantum tunneling:

Basically, due to floating point rounding error in the wall collision calculations, it’s sometimes possible for a very small gap to exist on the seam between two wall triangles.

Unlike a misalignment where an opening exists because walls don’t match up, quantum tunneling would create gaps where wall seams are mathematically identical. Tyler, bad_boot, and Ystem made programs to brute force for these floating point oddities. Initially, their programs found many wall overlaps, but no gaps. Finally, they found some quantum tunneling gaps, including this one below the TTC entrance that Tyler posted on YouTube.

These gaps are so incredibly precise that Tyler had to hack Mario’s position to get in one, but pannenkoek2012 developed a brute forcer to tunnel through the TTC gap organically, and rcombs verified the technique works on original hardware.

Tyler first dreamt up quantum tunneling as an idea to get past the SSL elevator with no A presses for the A Button Challenge. Although no quantum tunneling spots have been found on the elevator, a gap in the right place could allow Mario to go straight through a wall, land on a platform higher than he can normally reach, or do a glitchy ledge grab in places where he couldn’t before. It remains to be seen what quantum tunneling will contribute to the A Button Challenge and speed TASing.

Finally, for those more technically inclined, I asked Tyler how quantum tunneling works. Here’s his explanation:

To calculate whether a point is inside a 2D triangle, the game checks to see if it is inside each edge of the triangle. It does this by comparing the slope of the edge to the slope of the point and one of the vertices on the edge.

In this image, the slope of line 12 is compared to the slope of line 1P, the slope of line 23 is compared to the slope of line 2P, and the slope of line 31 is compared to the slope of the line 3P. The direction of the inequality, as well as whether the vertices are ordered clockwise or counterclockwise determines if the point is “inside” the line. Only if it’s inside all 3 lines is the point inside the triangle. This method works really well, unless the point is right at the edge of the line. In that case floating point rounding error can give an incorrect inequality. For this reason, if you have two triangles that share an edge, sometimes a point on the edge will fail to be calculated as inside either triangle. We call this a wall gap, and it’s possible to tunnel through it with precise movement. The gap extends through the entire wall hitbox at the same coordinates, because wall hitboxes are basically 2D.

It’s also possible for a point on the edge to be calculated as inside both triangles. In this case, the push from the wall at that point is doubled. We call these wall overlaps, and they’re much, much more common than gaps. We don’t fully understand why, but we’re pretty sure that it’s partly because if the slopes are exactly equal, the point is an overlap (i.e., overlap is the “tiebreaker”).


In Other News

 

3 thoughts on “Tyler Kehne Discovers “Quantum Tunneling” Tech, Two New 16 Star WRs – Ukikipedia News Week 1”

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.