We have found the seed of Minecraft's title-screen background panorama

Summary from the reddit post (written by reddit user Tomlacko):

Minecraft@Home is a volunteer distributed computing project powered by BOINC allowing users to volunteer their idle computers to help advance Minecraft-related research, one of which was this panorama project. In less than 24 hours after launching the panorama application; a volunteer host on Minecraft@Home found this seed. This was approximately 93 days of processing time at a total of 54.5 exaFLOPs compressed into 24 hours. Another ongoing project is search for the tallest cactus (currently we have found a 22 block high one!).

Github: https://github.com/minecrafthome/b1.7_seedfinder

Same team is also working on a much harder problem which is determining the seed of a screenshot included with the Minecraft distribution. There is a nice video about current progress here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7f9tMslVE There are so many reverse engineering tricks done to reduce the 2^64 possible seeds, such as training a neural network with the specific job of upscaling minecraft screenshots.