Multiple teams of scientists from around the globe joined tens of thousands of gamers in a quest to prove Albert Einstein wrong, and they were successful. They were tackling the concept of entanglement, which was what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” since it describes things that are separated by oftentimes a great distance yet seem totally connected mathematically, with one affected by what happens to the other.

It was called the BIG Bell Test, and participants generated more than 97 million data units playing a video game back on Nov. 30, 2016. Pairs of entangled particles were sent to separate locations, and then the attributes of those particles were measured.

The results confirmed that hte particles seem to be linked in some mysterious way, and are capable of transmitting information at faster than the speed of light somehow. This totally contradicts Einstein’s “local realism” view that the universe is totally independent of human observations and that nothing can travel faster than light.

“A Bell test is a randomized trial that compares experimental observations against the philosophical worldview of local realism, in which the properties of the physical world are independent of our observation of them and no signal travels faster than light,” reads the abstract from the paper, which was published in Nature. “A Bell test requires spatially distributed entanglement, fast and high-efficiency detection and unpredictable measurement settings.

“Although technology can satisfy the first two of these requirements, the use of physical devices to choose settings in a Bell test involves making assumptions about the physics that one aims to test,” it continues. “Bell himself noted this weakness in using physical setting choices and argued that human ‘free will’ could be used rigorously to ensure unpredictability in Bell tests. Here we report a set of local-realism tests using human choices, which avoids assumptions about predictability in physics. We recruited about 100,000 human participants to play an online video game that incentivizes fast, sustained input of unpredictable selections and illustrates Bell-test methodology. The participants generated 97,347,490 binary choices, which were directed via a scalable web platform to 12 laboratories on five continents, where 13 experiments tested local realism using photons, single atoms, atomic ensembles and superconducting devices.”