This is a worthless nitpick but redstone in Minecraft was added explicitly so people could do crazy things like build calculators etc. It's still cool, but not exactly unexpected
It has been disappointing for me that lots of people who call themselves hackers (like amateur Capture-The-Flag players or security people) are doing something rather basic for Theoretical Computer Science. Go to a security conference you will find tons of them.
Real hackers are 1% of security professionals and hardcore mathematicians, writers, physicists — look at Richard Feynman. Compexity theorists, for example, literally touch the essence of what computation is.
EDIT: expanded abbreviations
doesn't it work like that with everything?
Anything that has logic gates in it can be used to build out complex programs. Since Conways Game of Life allows for logic gates, you can build anything you want, albeit with a lot more processing power needed since it's built on an abstraction. You can even build Conways Game of Life with Conways Game of Life, like a sort of fractal program / quine.