Working computer made out of Minecraft blocks

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/28/working-computer-mad.html

by chanux • 16 years ago

119 60 16 years ago

boingboing.net

mulander• 16 years ago

Simply amazing.

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

tomjen3• 16 years ago

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

tlrobinson• 16 years ago

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

DrStalker• 16 years ago

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 :-)

ivank• 16 years ago

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

guywithabike• 16 years ago

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

swah• 16 years ago

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

peteforde• 16 years ago

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.

carlos• 16 years ago

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

pilif• 16 years ago

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.

plinkplonk• 16 years ago

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

DanielBMarkham3• 16 years ago

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.

kiba2• 16 years ago

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.

randallsquared4• 16 years ago

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.

qntm• 16 years ago

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

Volscio2• 16 years ago

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

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

hugh32• 16 years ago

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.

duck2• 16 years ago

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.

DanielBMarkham3• 16 years ago

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.

lotharbot• 16 years ago

> "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

patio11• 16 years ago

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.

DanielBMarkham3• 16 years ago

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.

noodle• 16 years ago

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.

awakeasleep4• 16 years ago

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

What's wrong with taking pleasure from life?

makalu• 16 years ago

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.

Homunculiheaded• 16 years ago

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.

joshu2• 16 years ago

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.

vault_• 16 years ago

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

powrtoch• 16 years ago

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

Deestan• 16 years ago

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...

dstein• 16 years ago

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.

lotusleaf1987• 16 years ago

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

dzuc• 16 years ago

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

kurokikaze• 16 years ago

Yes, but it will be slow as hell.

nphase• 16 years ago

Are you listening, pig?

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

aero142• 16 years ago

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".

Dove• 16 years ago

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.

joshu2• 16 years ago

SSSSSSSssssssssssss

Working computer made out of Minecraft blocks

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