Working computer made out of Minecraft blocks | Hacker News Reader

Working computer made out of Minecraft blocks

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119 pointschanux60 comments

The good: he spent a lot of time learning about logic circuits

The bad: he spent a lot of time making a simulation of a logic circuit that has no practical application I can imagine

It's probably a net plus overall, since learning and modeling what one knows is a great way to reinforce it, but one is left with the impression that this is a person who can spend a lot of time on things.

I hate to be a prude, and everybody loves a hobby, but we keep seeing these stories of guys who spend hundreds or thousands of hours on these very unusual and detailed configurations of virtual goods -- the maximized Sim City guy comes to mind. Something about our praising this behavior bugs me. I guess it's not clear to me the difference between unnaturally focusing in on small things - -like in Aspergers -- and just having a hobby. Aside from this guy, who seems wonderfully well-balanced, I wonder if we're not praising people who might actually need help.

I don't know. I probably didn't say that as well as I could.

It's a lot better than watching TV 4 fricking hours everyday.(That's American statistics) It's a practically a part time job for many people.

Better to use that attention span for something else, like minecraft.

Really? Why? I can see "learning about computing is better than mindless entertainment", but once we've separated this into "learning" and "building" components, the "building" part seems pretty much exactly the same as being entertained some other way, except for the detail that it simulates achievement, which is arguably a bad thing.

I think building is still a lot better than watching though.

Understood. I just don't see why you believe it's better even when it's simulated building. This sort of thing seems amazing to me, but not necessarily praiseworthy.

All of our educational methods are built around simulations and constrained, simplified problems. We don't ask first-year undergraduates to go out and start working on real-world projects immediately. Some of them can manage with sink-or-swim methods, but there's a lot of benefit to be had from a trivial context - it's like the difference between learning to trade stocks on paper(risk-free intellectual challenge) and putting real money out there(psychological stress, real world consequences). If you raise the stakes immediately, you may defeat the learning process.

And most of the people doing these kinds of things, are, unsurprisingly, around college age.

So what about programming a computer? That's surely simulated building.

I don't think it is, in the same way. There are some languages and environments, though, that would seem very much like this. For example, if you were to reimplement the a linux kernel driver in the Whitespace programming language, it would almost perfectly analogous to this, except that it couldn't be removed by the failure of the implementor of the Whitespace interpreter.

I have no actual criticism of doing this -- I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do. Instead, I'm saying that aside from benefits like aiding learning (separated out by the initial comment regarding good:/bad:), it's just a method of creating the sensation of having built something without anything having really been built, and thus it's very much pure entertainment, like watching TV.

Do you feel that entertainment serves a purpose? Do you enjoy or admire any specific forms of entertainment?

Of course I enjoy various forms of entertainment.

I feel like everyone is trying to drill down into why I feel that having fun is bad or wrong or why I don't enjoy it, when I've repeatedly said I don't feel that way.

kiba: I think building is still a lot better than watching though.

The original point to which I was replying, lest we forget, was that building something (even something which is explicitly ephemeral) was "better than" mere entertainment like watching TV. The commenter didn't say that he liked it more, or that he was more entertained by pretending to build than by watching TV. He said he thought it was better to pretend to build than to watch TV. I merely asked why, but no one has actually offered an explanation.

Why should I regard building this ALU, or building a full-scale mockup of the Enterprise D to pick another Minecraft example I saw yesterday, as a better form of entertainment (presuming the same entertainment utility, I guess) than watching TV? What reasons are there to say, "Playing Minecraft for X hours is a better use of your time than regularly watching television"?

It seems to me that they're basically equivalent (leaving aside the learning component as the original commenter did when he spoke of building), and I'm confused that there seem to be a bunch of people who feel that it's more morally upstanding or something about playing Minecraft than watching TV.

Hm, I see your point now.

So if we can both assume that things are only better or worse in context, maybe we can look for ideas there.

My attempt: If we looked at a mincraft player and a television watcher's brains under an MRI, I can imagine people exercising more decision making and critical thinking areas of their brain while planning buildings and playing in minecraft. I assume in the hacker context people value those forms of mental play more than passive television staring.

once we've separated this into "learning" and "building" components

We should not separate them like this. Building something is often a great way to learn about it.

If fate has doomed you to be a Minecraft fanatic, you might as well be the best damned Minecraft fanatic you can be.

Maybe you're on the wrong forum. Hackers do stuff just because they're curious.

[edit: he should have a monetization strategy!!]

I'd rate this a lot higher than the guy who made a big effort out of trying to build Simcity city with the largest possible population.

SimCity guy spent years on his city. I don't know how long this guy spent, but it can't have been nearly that long since the game is only a year or so old. It probably took some reasonable number of hours -- probably less than the average Minecraft player spends playing Minecraft without producing anything that anyone ever wants to look at.

Secondly, SimCity guy was trying to get the highest possible score within the parameters of the game as defined, which is less creative than this guy who is using the game in an unexpected and novel way.

I agree, but I think the biggest net gain is how things like this show how cool and limitless Minecraft is, which will surely result in new users from the attention something like this gets.

Wait, was this done by the guy who wrote Minecraft? I thought it was done by someone else.

If it wasn't I'm not sure how promoting Minecraft is a "net gain"... certainly encouraging more people to play video games is hardly an especially worthy goal.

This guy learned how to make a 16-bit ALU (Which in my opinion is a great amount of experience) and got a job offer from playing a game on his spare time.

Hackers that play video games want to learn and try out different things with the game, not only play it. I myself am really interested in how the game is saved (How chunks is designed, etc.) and is now currently studying linearly interpolated 3d perlin noise on my spare time because that's how Minecraft design the dynamic world.

Hackers that have decrypted or learned how the game is saved will make tools to ease work, and/or to visually view their world, or to see it from a different perspective.

Minecraft has made hackers design map-editors, cartograms and other things, including a 16-bit ALU in-game.

Making programs and learning how stuff works is a net gain for the community.

Correct, it was someone else... but people like him just want to see things like this succeed so it was net gain for everyone. And it really isn't about video games (I haven't played any game except for some Wii for the last 5 years), but just pushing the limits of what we can do and learn. I see Minecraft not as a game, but as what a single person did through great imagination and effort.

encouraging more people to play video games is hardly an especially worthy goal

Neither is Facebook, Twitter, most of the development we talk about here, or basically a million other things, but doing things to push the boundaries of what we know are.

I'd rate this a lot higher than the guy who made a big effort out of trying to build Simcity city with the largest possible population

Agreed. Which is why this was the time to make my comment. He's obviously a smart person and this has value because of the learning potential. If I had commented on the Sim City guy, it would have been taking a cheap personal shot. Didn't want to do that.

> "this guy who is using the game in an unexpected and novel way."

MineCraft Alpha was built with logic-circuit design in mind [1]. This guy built a pretty extreme example, but it's not any more "unexpected and novel" than, say, making a very large castle.

[1] http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Redstone_Circuits

And the base concept is probably based on Dwarf Fortress, where logic does come from an unexpected and novel aspect: hydraulics.

Part of me has the reaction you labeled prudish, too. The other part of me thinks this is sort of a rich-people's problem caused by a cognitive surplus and a societal decision to subsidize whatever he is doing right now, probably because he is a student. Yeah, Minecraft might be wasted time, but it isn't obviously more wasted than time spent acing the heck out of a degree in Studio Art. [I'm slagging excessively on art degrees. I simulated logic circuits for my Computer Engineering courses -- built an entire CPU, one line of VRML or whatever it is called at a time. It also has no practical application because it was thirty years behind state of the art, but it was a learning experience.]

Besides, the nice thing about students is that they have the rest of their lives to do something important.

I mean, personal experience here: to at least some degree, what I will do today is important: I'm helping a company help their thousands of customers help their millions of customers. Yay. If you were to flip back five years to the second, I think I was probably in a WoW raid. And there were spreadsheets for that WoW raid, and a complicated compensation system to maximize participation from 60+ participants (40 on any given night), and political issues, and blah blah blah. Five years later, does anyone remember that we killed the dragon and got the purple pixels in 3 hours instead of in 5 because of obsessive optimization? Probably not. Did obsessive optimization really help me out in the intervening five years? Oh heck yes. Is it going to help my client out today? Oh heck yes, except 5% of "really freaking big number" is better than 5% of what my sales are.

Who knows where this kid will be in five years? He could be an architect. He could be a project lead. He could do something really important, like being a dad.

Spot on. I agree completely.

I was going to add something to my original comment, but I can't get the wording right, so I'll just express my feelings about the article.

When I read the article, I was amazed! What a huge undertaking! And so much detail! But then, as he walked around showing everything, it hit me how much mundane and tiny little bits of work had to go into doing this. That's fine, but interesting that it has so much detail. Then it occurred to me that this kid actually knew how to build a real logic circuit -- a physical thing with value. The time he spent doing this he could have taken a FPGA and made the next super-bang-whizmo. That no matter how much work he put into his minecraft modeling, one day ten years from now they're going to turn off the game and he's got, well, nothing. Except memories and a story. Whereas he could have spent that same talent, knowledge, and hard work and at least have something you could touch. And here we are lauding him like he built the next lunar lander.

And even that was okay -- nothing wrong with modeling out things you are learning as a way to reinforce your knowledge. I think this guy is smart as hell and is going to go far. But then I thought about all the other video-game creations that we've praised. I started wondering if for every one of these guys there aren't a thousand other guys doing the same thing. Guys building things with no real-world correlation or value. Not a happy thought.

I'm sure it's just my contrarianism, but it bugged me. Enough to comment.

By the way, you saw in the reddit thread that some guy offered the kid a job, right?

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dk1au/hey_rgaming_i_...

Just saying.

You do realize everything you said applies to how we learn things in courses, right? It was a learning exercise. I don't understand the fetish people have to make sure every activity people engage in has a tangible result of value. It's rare that someone can learn something while simultaneously produce something of value.

If he did this for a course, he would have just used a logic simulator (example: http://www.kolls.net/gatesim/), like I did for my intro to computer engineering course. I don't still have those designs, either, but I still have the knowledge. His simulator just happened to be Minecraft.

If the guy had implemented his ALU in LogicWorks, gatesim or in VHDL/Verilog on an FPGA it would not have received the same amount of attention it has.

The fact that Minecraft provides the basic required building blocks to make the various different logic gates, to allow an ALU to be built in the first place is amazing. The fact that someone took the time to sit down and calculate out how to use the building blocks and how to arrange them is novel.

I agree with that. I think it takes a special eye to look at a system and figure out how to get it to do something it wasn't designed for. Some people refer to this practice as hacking. I was not trying to lessen what he did, but explain why it's not a waste of time.

When I was in College I took a course that introduced me to logic gates and how they worked.

Using the basic logic gates in LogicWorks we built a fully functional 8 bit micro controller, including op-codes that could be used to execute certain functionality. It was slow, but from the ground up I KNOW how to build a micro-controller, I know what goes into it.

That doesn't mean that what this guy did is any less valuable. I might not have built my micro within a computer game, ultimately my LogicWorks project was just as valuable as this simulation in game.

Could the time have been spent on implementing the ALU on a FPGA? Absolutely, but it would have been like any other ALU, nothing really special. It wouldn't have been the next super-bang-whizmo. The ALU's in modern processors are much better designed, much faster, and running an ALU on an FPGA doesn't suddenly make it special. People seem to assume that FPGA's are magical. That is not the case. Could he use his talent to build specific VHDL or Verilog to run on an FPGA that is specialised for certain projects, absolutely. But yet another ALU is nothing special.

This project would not have received the same attention it has because implementing ALU's on FPGA's is something that is done in curricula around the world. I've implemented a full micro on an FPGA (as a follow-up to the previous class mentioned) the novelty is in the fact that the building blocks exist within Minecraft to simulate an ALU. THAT is something to get excited over, it means that technically Minecraft possesses the building blocks to create a fully complete turing machine. That is absolutely amazing.

There's also the fact that he made have simply gotten more enjoyment from doing this in Minecraft. Perhaps he would have spent some of his leisure time enjoying and playing the game anyway. Maybe he would have made a sweet castle instead. However, he spent his free time enjoying the game and learned something valuable in the process. There is nothing wrong with taking some time in life to have fun.

The time he spent doing this he could have taken a FPGA and made the next super-bang-whizmo.

This is a bad leap of logic right here. He simulated a very simple and well-understood piece of circuitry in a novel environment.This doesn't necessarily translate to being able to come up with something completely new and revolutionary.

No doubt, this kid is incredibly smart though. Probably some day he will be able to come up with the next super-bang-whizmo. To do that he'll need a deep understanding of the fundamentals of his field. He'll need to know it so inside out that he could build a computer out of the most unlikely materials, like say a video game. I don't think this was a lost opportunity cost. The world is not poorer by one gadget because he spent time modeling an ALU in Minecraft instead of on an FPGA. The world is now richer by one engineering student who knows his field a better than he did before.Probably better than he would have by doing it in a more conventional fashion.

Doing the same thing on an FPGA would not have been noteworthy. It's been done probably thousands of times before, and is likely included as sample code when you buy the FPGA kit.

I really liked the part of Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age that had the main character, as an exercise, go through learning how to program all kinds of low-level parts via physical analogs (gears and water sluices and so on) in her illustrated primer’s story, and then realize at the end that she understood how real computers work.

i'd point out the fact that because of this video, this kid got at least one (public) job offer. not from a big/famous company, but a smaller game dev shop.

so, you could say that him producing this was actually a pretty good resume/portfolio.

If that gets you, think about all the time people spend masturbating.

What's wrong with taking pleasure from life?

Art is also pointless in most cases, but--and I'm sure some will disagree with this--there's a value in the process and in what is produced. Whether it be real or virtual. I think this holds true for the logic circuit guy too.

Also, there's no way to know if someone who posts something online "need's help" so that seems liks a pointless debate to me.

I worked for a company that did a lot of DARPA/DoD work, there were plenty of amazingly bright people who spent all of their time making things to make the military better. Sure many were for defense, and often found uses outside of the military. But at the end of the day they all support goals that in the end probably cause a fair amount of more suffering in the world.

So if someone wants to spend their time on something that is completely harmless, and probably brightens a few people's days and may even inspire others to go out and learn something new, I feel that this is a much better way to spend someone's mental energy.

Or maybe he has a tough job and finds this relaxing.

I just dig big holes in minecraft and find it a pleasant, brainless activity.

Remember: This is water.

Give people limited tools capable of building a turing-complete computer and eventually someone will... but it's always impressive to see it done.

Personally I have a railway to my underground tree farm and lava storage facility, but that's not exactly newsworthy :-)

The ultimate end of all this is when he uses Minecraft to compile and run Minecraft.

I'd be really excited to see Notch implement some sort of API or bridge to RL within the environment.

Then it's only a matter of time before people could offer Heroku-style SaaS deployments on MineCraft clusters for our future generations to enjoy.

The book (from which he got the ALU specs) http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/ and a Google Video based on it http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7654043762021156507

See also: working computer made inside of Dwarf Fortress (http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/15/colossal-turing-mach.ht...)

The creator talked about it on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dk1au/hey_rgaming_i_...

It's also worth noting that he basically got a job offer right there on Reddit.

How much would they pay a guy that makes 200k a day?

The offer was to the maker of this ALU, who is not Notch (the maker of Minecraft). These are two different people.

Simply amazing.

I really can't imagine how he wants to implement the compiler he speaks about :)

As it get it, it already exists - since the machine is a standard, it should be able to use already existing compilers.

I think he meant he can use the compiler on his regular computer to cross compile things for the minecraft computer.

I've never really had any interest in how an ALU works. I use one every day, and I take it for granted. But after seeing what an ALU looks like, in video game terms, the scale and complexity becomes apparent. Now I'm absolutely fascinated.

Unless I misheard him, he made a working implementation of the Hack ALU, which is magnificent all by itself.

Hack is a virtual fully working computer that students build completely from the NAND up during a semester: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/video-lecture-from-nand-to-tetr...

Are you listening, pig?

For a second there I thought he was talking to me.

The pigs made me laugh. I don't know much about minecraft, but I wonder if the pigs can foul up the circuitry. You don't get the right answer so you have to go clear the pigs out of the pathways. It's like the original legend about how software "bugs" are named so because a bug crawled into the circuitry and fried it out. In Minecraft computers, the bugs are called "pigs".

The pigs can't hurt it. But there are animals called 'creepers' that could mess it up quite badly. Only if you're close, though.

SSSSSSSssssssssssss

Given a complex enough sandbox game and enough time, could one build a computer and version of the game which runs inside the game?

Yes, but it will be slow as hell.

It's amazing. LOL when I saw the pigs jumping!

while your comment is probably not appropriately worded for this community here, I have to agree: The pigs jumping around in the machine gave the video a new surreal dimension.

Consider all the work that went into this creation.

Finally - after everything is finished and everything works, the author takes his time to show us around. He's showing all the little details. All the ingenuity in the various components.

And then, in the middle of the tour, you see pigs jumping around.

I don't know. Maybe I have a simple mind, but I was highly amused - especially knowing what a piece of art the creator of the video was showing us.

Also, in the video-game LittleBigPlanet someone made a functional calculator: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiRgYBHoAoU

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