1Hz CPU made in Minecraft running Minecraft at 0.1fps [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BP7DhHTU-I

by reimertz • 4 years ago

872 154 4 years ago

reimertz3• 4 years ago

This is truly amazing.

Comment from one of the creators;

This build does NOT run in real time. It runs on MCHPRS, the server developed by StackDoubleFlow, which speeds up the game roughly 10-20,000x while running redstone. That brings the framerate to a much more reasonable 0.1fps, so the long timelapses in the video only took 9 hours to record in in total.

dubiousconst281• 4 years ago

It's mind blowing how much effort they put into this, the MCHPRS server even JIT compiles redstone into native code using Cranelift: https://github.com/MCHPR/MCHPRS/blob/master/docs/Redpiler.md

It really saddens me that their post was removed from r/Minecraft, for crediting a server by including its IP address for literally one second in the video.

holoduke• 4 years ago

Reddit is very saddening on general. Best to avoid it

colpabar• 4 years ago

half a second!

Yajirobe• 4 years ago

How did they load Minecraft onto that computer?

MauranKilom3• 4 years ago

They didn't load the real Minecraft on it, but they implemented their own version. But that version still has true 3D graphics, several block types, an inventory, mining, crafting, etc.

hot_gril• 4 years ago

Also, is that redstone wiring non-vanilla, or is it just a texture pack?

bmicraft• 4 years ago

It's just a texture pack

PaulHoule5• 4 years ago

My son has gotten into designing logic circuit with Redstone. I wish I could get him to do the same with 74xx/54xx parts.

LeifCarrotson• 4 years ago

Why 74xx parts, other than nostalgia for an era that was over decades before he was born?

If it's about building physical things rather than virtual things, consider Lego Mindstorms controllers; you can build digital logic in them using Scratch...and graduate to Python when he gets frustrated with the limitations. And there's tons of Minecraft-themed Lego contraptions, he could theoretically use Mindstorms logic, lights, and actuators to build Redstone logic!

speed_spread2• 4 years ago

Talk about gatekeeping...

PaulHoule5• 4 years ago

74xx parts are real physical objects you can handle in your hands. You don't need to use a computer at all with them (though I often use an Arduino together with them)

I'm kinda clumsy but I get a lot of pleasure out of breadboarding with 74xx parts.

naikrovek• 4 years ago

74xx parts are still made and used in new designs today...

taneq2• 4 years ago

If logic ICs don’t appeal, maybe he’d be interested in relay logic? There’s something super satisfying about a totally electromechanical contraption clunking away and ‘thinking’.

PaulHoule5• 4 years ago

It might be fun to get a big box of relays.

Sometimes I think I want to make a frame buffer out of 74xx parts and some SRAM.

dlivingston• 4 years ago

If his hobby turns into a passion, he'll be itching to move beyond Redstone. Don't fret. :)

imtringued3• 4 years ago

I don't know why people have this nostalgia, my first PCB was basically nothing but SMT components with just a handful of through hole components for things like connectors.

kleer001• 4 years ago

Did you mean to link to the video?

reimertz3• 4 years ago

Derp: here is the video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BP7DhHTU-I

@dang can you update this post to link to the video?

dang• 4 years ago

Fixed now.

inetknght• 4 years ago

Cool! Now build it in Turing Complete and export it to an FPGA

deelowe• 4 years ago

For those wondering: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/

westurner2• 4 years ago

From KiCad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KiCad :

KiCad is a free software suite for electronic design automation (EDA). It facilitates the design and simulation of electronic hardware. It features an integrated environment for schematic capture, PCB layout, manufacturing file viewing, SPICE simulation, and engineering calculation. Tools exist within the package to create bill of materials, artwork, Gerber files, and 3D models of the PCB and its components.

https://www.kicad.org/discover/spice/ :

KiCad integrates the open source spice simulator ngspice to provide simulation capability in graphical form through integration with the Schematic Editor.

PySpice > Examples: https://pyspice.fabrice-salvaire.fr/releases/v1.6/examples/i... :

+ Diode, Rectifier (AC to DC), Filter, Capacitor, Power Supply, Transformer, [Physical Relay Switche (Open/Closed) -> Vacuum Tube Transistor -> Solid-state [MOSFET,]] Transistor,

From the Ngspice User's Manual https://ngspice.sourceforge.io/docs/ngspice-37-manual.pdf :

Ngspice is a general-purpose circuit simulation program for nonlinear and linear analyses.*
Circuits may contain resistors, capacitors, inductors, mutual inductors, independent or dependent voltage and current sources, loss-less and lossy transmission lines, switches, uniform distributed RC lines, and the five most common semiconductor devices: diodes, BJTs, JFETs, MESFETs, and MOSFETs.
[...] Ngspice has built-in models for the semiconductor devices, and the user need specify only the pertinent model parameter values. [...] New devices can be added to ngspice by several means: behavioral B-, E- or G-sources, the XSPICE code-model interface for C-like device coding, and the ADMS interface based on Verilog-A and XML.

Turing completeness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness :

In colloquial usage, the terms "Turing-complete" and "Turing-equivalent" are used to mean that any real-world general-purpose computer or computer language can approximately simulate the computational aspects of any other real-world general-purpose computer or computer language. In real life this leads to the practical concepts of computing virtualization and emulation. [citation needed]
Real computers constructed so far can be functionally analyzed like a single-tape Turing machine (the "tape" corresponding to their memory); thus the associated mathematics can apply by abstracting their operation far enough. However, real computers have limited physical resources, so they are only linear bounded automaton complete. In contrast, a universal computer is defined as a device with a Turing-complete instruction set, infinite memory, and infinite available time.

Church–Turing thesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis ... Lamda calculus (Church): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus

HDL: Hardware Description Language > Examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_description_language#...

HVL: Hardware Verification Language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_verification_language

awesome-electronics > Free EDA Packages: https://github.com/kitspace/awesome-electronics#free-eda-pac...

https://github.com/TM90/awesome-hwd-tools

EDA: Electronic Design Automation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_design_automation

westurner2• 4 years ago

More notes for #Q12:

Quantum complexity theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_complexity_theory#Back... :

A complexity class is a collection of computational problems that can be solved by a computational model under certain resource constraints. For instance, the complexity class P is defined as the set of problems solvable by a Turing machine in polynomial time. Similarly, quantum complexity classes may be defined using quantum models of computation, such as the quantum circuit model or the equivalent quantum Turing machine. One of the main aims of quantum complexity theory is to find out how these classes relate to classical complexity classes such as P, NP, BPP, and PSPACE.
One of the reasons quantum complexity theory is studied are the implications of quantum computing for the modern Church-Turing thesis. In short the modern Church-Turing thesis states that any computational model can be simulated in polynomial time with a probabilistic Turing machine. [1][2] However, questions around the Church-Turing thesis arise in the context of quantum computing. It is unclear whether the Church-Turing thesis holds for the quantum computation model. There is much evidence that the thesis does not hold. It may not be possible for a probabilistic Turing machine to simulate quantum computation models in polynomial time. [1]
Both quantum computational complexity of functions and classical computational complexity of functions are often expressed with asymptotic notation. Some common forms of asymptotic notion of functions are \Omega(T(n)) and \Theta(T(n)).
\Theta(T(n)) expresses that something is bounded above by cT(n) where c is a constant such that c>0 and T(n) is a function of n, \Omega(T(n)) expresses that something is bounded below by cT(n) where c is a constant such that c>0 and T(n) is a function of n, and \Theta(T(n)) expresses both O(T(n)) and \Omega(T(n)). [3] These notations also their own names. O(T(n)) is called Big O notation, \Omega(T(n)) is called Big Omega notation, and \Theta(T(n)) is called Big Theta notation.

Quantum complexity theory > Simulation of quantum circuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_complexity_theory#Simu... :

There is no known way to efficiently simulate a quantum computational model with a classical computer. This means that a classical computer cannot simulate a quantum computational model in polynomial time [P]. However, a quantum circuit of S(n) qubits with T(n) quantum gates can be simulated by a classical circuit with O(2^{S(n)}T(n)^{3}) classical gates. [3] This number of classical gates is obtained by determining how many bit operations are necessary to simulate the quantum circuit. In order to do this, first the amplitudes associated with the S(n) qubits must be accounted for. Each of the states of the S(n) qubits can be described by a two-dimensional complex vector, or a state vector. These state vectors can also be described a linear combination of its component vectors with coefficients called amplitudes. These amplitudes are complex numbers which are normalized to one, meaning the sum of the squares of the absolute values of the amplitudes must be one. [3] The entries of the state vector are these amplitudes.

Quantum Turing machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Turing_machine

Quantum circuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_circuit

Church-Turing-Deutsch principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing%E2%80%93...

Computational complexity > Quantum computing, Distributed computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity#Quant...

boredpudding• 4 years ago

I wonder if it's possible to run this outside of Minecraft in some way. I assume the developers weren't debugging the program in Minecraft itself.

miohtama• 4 years ago

They cannot naturally run real Minecraft on their CPU. Instead, they have handcoded Minecraft like game for their custom CPU, so the title is a bit misleading. For this CPU/language you will find an emulator.

You can find more information in the explainer video https://youtu.be/xIMkqHb2-KM

ravi-delia• 4 years ago

It's definitely a little misleading, but idea of running the entire JVM with graphics stack included is so insane that I'm willing to call this "minecraft in minecraft"

ok_dad• 4 years ago

I like that part about the bees at the beginning. Also, the CPU definitely did blow my mind. Amazing work by the builder!

whatisthiseven• 4 years ago

I worked on a CPU in Minecraft years ago and designed it to be a 7-bit CPU. I chose that number because it gave me the an appreciable number of operations plus space for arguments. I had only 6 bytes of RAM and about 32bytes of ROM. The ROM was just a circle of transparent blocks (zero) and solid blocks (one) pushed around by pistons.

The whole thing was real slow, but it was so much fun trying to design something that would perform interesting calculations. I stopped working on it as at the time Minecraft had some odd bugs with pistons that would cause non-deterministic behavior.

I think the most challenging aspect wasn't the programming or circuits, which were well understood and mapped out, but trying to create modules I could copy-paste inside a special Minecraft save editor to make the machine quickly, then manually dragging out data/command lines to hook the modules together.

MauranKilom3• 4 years ago

Brings me back to when I first worked on an ALU in Minecraft. At least at the time, it had really annoying bugs with repeaters though, where it would occasionally mess up a signal, which frustrated me enough to give up on it.

felipelalli• 4 years ago

Now it's time for the next step: build another CPU inside that one.

ranger47• 4 years ago

You remind me of someone... a man I met in a half-remembered dream. He was possessed of some radical notions.

Bolkan• 4 years ago

https://youtu.be/8LiVGDq01FU

dapozza• 4 years ago

Xzibit

squarefoot• 4 years ago

Or better, moving the main Minecraft into the hosted CPU emulated into the emulated Minecraft, so that a singularity would open and suck the entire Universe into Minecraft.

dexwiz• 4 years ago

Do people use circuit simulators and compile to blocks, or copy/paste units from previous projects? Seems like such a massive undertaking where a single misplaced item ruins everything.

brap2• 4 years ago

What's with the code?

I don't know much about Minecraft, but I assumed the CPU would be built purely from blocks which act like transistors. Yet there's a part of the video where the show code written in-game(?). What's up with that? Isn't it cheating?

shagie2• 4 years ago

A glance at the code, it appears to be the code for generating the world.

Placing all those blocks by hand would be tedious.

I believe you are seeing a complier of code -> red stone, not code embedded into Minecraft.

(late edit: The file name is src/redpiler/mod.rs - a search brings up https://www.reddit.com/r/redstone/comments/md1xwy/redpiler_t... which is posted by the same author as the video creator... and that appears to be an optimized Redstone interpreter (terms get confusing here if you try to say that this is a that)...

MCHPRS is an open source project with the goal of allowing high speed redstone execution. This speed was achieved by generating a graph structure of all redstone links. MCHPRS can compile redstone into a graph and execute based on it.
This is what the generated graph looks like: https://imgur.com/a/J51nJvV
Redpiler is just a proof of concept and I expect to be able to get much faster speeds in the future :D

/edit)

brap2• 4 years ago

Ah makes sense, thanks!

ZeKK14• 4 years ago

As explained in the description of the video, this is not running on a vanilla Minecraft server, but on their own implementation optimized to run redstone circuits.

The code displayed at the beginning seems to come from that: https://github.com/MCHPR/MCHPRS/blob/master/crates/core/src/...

martin-adams• 4 years ago

I suspect that code is so they can duplicate the blocks and not have to build everything by hand. I don't think the code is used to execute minecraft.

spullara• 4 years ago

The code generates the computer I think.

MauranKilom3• 4 years ago

Briefly put: The code shown was used to make the redstone (i.e. Minecraft logic circuit) behavior run at 10000x speed on the server. It's still the same game logic, but recording the video only took 9 hours instead of a decade.

kibwen4• 4 years ago

As mentioned by others the Rust code shown in the video is for the Minecraft server implementation. But the game itself running on the in-game CHUNGUS 2 was written in another language, and then they have a custom assembler that translates that code into Minecraft blocks to be loaded as the 8kb ROM.

sadjad• 4 years ago

Will it run Doom?

xerox13ster• 4 years ago

They said in the video they are going to run Doom on it at some point.

dylan604• 4 years ago

I don't know if I'm more impressed that a coffee maker can run Doom, that another game can run Doom from inside it like this, or that Doom is just this portable

taneq2• 4 years ago

I think my favourite was the recent “Doom can run Doom”.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

Also... will it run Docker?

cprecioso• 4 years ago

Any guesses on when we will get Factorio running on Factorio?

curious_tenet• 4 years ago

meta game of life lol

nomel• 4 years ago

So, you're saying Tetris can be implemented [1]?

1. https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/142673

pleb_nz• 4 years ago

Ha... It's not even a color display /s

system2• 4 years ago

I wish to have the patience and excitement about something to build like this. I admire people like this youtuber.

Comevius• 4 years ago

Pretty cool.

The program itself was written in an existing intermediate language called URCL, which was then compiled to CHUNGUS2 assembly. CHUNGUS2 is the processor made with Minecraft's redstone mechanics. The processor was emulated for development, but the demo is running on MCHPRS, a Minecraft server that uses Wasmtime's Cranelift to JIT the redstone operations, which are represented as a weighted directed graph. Before MCHPRS, optimizing redstone performance using compiler techniques was not thought to be possible. With MCHPRS the demo takes 9 hours to run, it would take decades using Minecraft.

https://github.com/sammyuri/minecraft

https://github.com/MCHPR/MCHPRS

As for CHUNGUS2 itself, it's a proper RISC processor, it has a 4-stage instruction pipeline, 64 byte 8-way associative data cache, even branch prediction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDiapbD0Xfg

acchow• 4 years ago

Before MCHPRS optimizing redstone performance using compiler techniques was not thought to be possible.

They created a virtual machine with a custom instruction set. Why wouldn't an optimized JIT work?

lifthrasiir• 4 years ago

To my knowledge, MCHPRS is not a full Minecraft server implementation; it only contains just enough subset of the game to run redstone circuits. The upside is that this subset can be run a lot faster than the full game server.

circuit10• 4 years ago

Because they're simulating redstone circuits and logic gates, not the instruction set itself (the point is that they built a CPU with redstone circuits)

causality0• 4 years ago

With MCHPRS the demo takes 9 hours to run, it would take decades using Minecraft.

Ok, to clarify, is MCHPRS a functioning Minecraft Server that can support a player logging in and mining? This story is seeming a lot more like "A 1Hz CPU made on something that has mechanical similarities to Minecraft".

__alexs• 4 years ago

Yes it is a real Minecraft server implementation you can connect a standard client to but it is not a vanilla survival implementation. It's a redstone sandbox.

spicybright2• 4 years ago

Seems like splitting hairs. The redstone mechanics needed to run the computer are implemented exactly the same as the real game. The computer can be loaded into real minecraft and runs as expected.

MCHPRS just takes out what the computer doesn't use and optimizes the simulation of it.

I would call that a computer running in minecraft, but you could argue either way.

NoToP3• 4 years ago

It's more like a more efficient implementation of Minecraft. It's not wrong or cheating, it's no worse than that one mod that did nothing but optimize the game engine better than the actual Devs.

peeters• 4 years ago

Just for context if you've ever logged into a hosted multiplayer server it's almost guaranteed to not be the vanilla Minecraft server. The stock server falls down pretty quickly in multiplayer. Patched servers with various optimizations (like Paper, Spigot etc) are the standard and most people still consider that to be playing vanilla Minecraft, even if some mechanics are slightly tweaked (e.g. entity collapsing).

samstave4• 4 years ago

Please ELI5 how people are able to make a CPU/anything-logic-gate etc inminecraft

nsilvestri• 4 years ago

Minecraft has a feature called redstone. It's "dust" that you can pour on blocks to create wires. These wires can be powered from in-game items. Combining two or more of these powered wires with some spatial positioning can give you an OR gate. Some of these power sources can be turned off if they receive power themselves. Those are NOT gates. With an OR and a NOT gate, the world's your oyster.

joshspankit2• 4 years ago

You might be an excellent person to ask:

How many layers of abstraction is that in total, including (probable virtualization > VM OS > JVM)?

tablespoon• 4 years ago

The video description says:

3D Minecraft in Minecraft with no command blocks, no datapacks and no mods. Features include an 8x8x8 fully 3D-rendered world with 16 different block types, 32 different items, and dozens of game mechanics including mining, crafting, smelting, building, chests, random ticks

Is "3D Minecraft" a Minecraft clone for low-powered hardware? It looks like their emulated CPU only has <10KB RAM and a 96x64 display, which screams "TI-83 program" to me.

derac• 4 years ago

They wrote a clone, yes.

jcl• 4 years ago

Yeah, they're implementing a Minecraft-like experience within Minecraft, not literally running official Minecraft code on their VM.

I think they specify "3D Minecraft" to distinguish it from earlier efforts, where people built 2D Minecraft-like experiences with redstone, like:

https://www.gamesradar.com/guy-makes-minecraft-playing-compu...

kibwen4• 4 years ago

only has <10KB RAM

It's even more impressive than that. It has 8kb of ROM, and only 512 bytes of RAM!

SCLeo• 4 years ago

I think we will see more of these amazing Minecraft technical creations as people who played Minecraft as children are now finishing up their higher educations.

NoToP3• 4 years ago

In the contrary, I think kids that self taught most of digital logic years ago are now being accredited for what the game already taught them, and are now doing it for money with silicon rather than redstone.

twostorytower• 4 years ago

Incredible. Next do Minecraft in Minecraft in Minecraft.

unethical_ban3• 4 years ago

How would someone get into designing/simulating CPUs and computers other than Minecraft? Is there any software for learning and implementing "simple" logic circuits, memory, etc?

bismuthcrystal• 4 years ago

Sorry for being this rough but, what a naive question this is. Of course there is.

unethical_ban3• 4 years ago

It's expected that there are tools, clearly, since people seem to know how to do this kind of thing. Good tools that an interested beginner can use as a lab are another thing.

If you skip back to the first question, then. It isn't naive. You chose to be short when you could have said nothing.

Twisol• 4 years ago

In natural language, asking "is there" is implicitly asking for more than just a truth value. It's expected that the response will include an example; a witness to the answer "yes". The indirection is considered polite and non-aggressive by many people. In particular, a direct question like "What software exists for this?" is sometimes met with a "Have you tried Google?", when the intent is also to get recommendations and not a pile of search results to evaluate as a newcomer.

In this case, they got a rude answer anyway. I hardly think that's their fault though.

LelouBil• 4 years ago

Look at this game : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/

Basically you go from building logic circuits to building your own CPU and writing assembly for it.

I only added it to my wishlist, didn't try it yet.

unethical_ban3• 4 years ago

It doesn't explain things too well, but it gives answers and is iterative so I'll keep at it.

Bakary• 4 years ago

https://www.nand2tetris.org/

I would also start with Code by Charles Petzold

yarolig• 4 years ago

Ben Eater have nice videos on youtube https://www.youtube.com/c/BenEater/videos

There is a good https://nandgame.com/

You may want to use some simulating software like a verilog interpreters or logic simulators. I do not know a good one, I'm not a specialist it that stuff.

And... If you have a couple of months to waste... You can try Factorio.

mesozoic• 4 years ago

Now make Minecraft in that Minecraft.

kibwen4• 4 years ago

Don't miss the other video showing the overview of the CPU, it's seriously impressive: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FDiapbD0Xfg

swayvil2• 4 years ago

The 0.1fps time scale makes no difference to people living within this minecraft universe. From their perspective a second is a second and a day is a day. Funny.

See Greg Egan's PERMUTATION CITY for more on that.

ninkendo• 4 years ago

Also, for an extreme example, https://xkcd.com/505/

swayvil2• 4 years ago

Woah!

AntonioCao• 4 years ago

My first thought exactly. This essay by Hans Moravec is also a great exposition for similar idea: https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles...

Karsteski• 4 years ago

Permutation City is one of the best Sci-Fi books I've ever read. Would definitely recommend.

oxmane• 4 years ago

Came here for the awesome project, came out with a book recommendation.

Thank you HN!

Arbortheus• 4 years ago

This is incredible!

ineedasername• 4 years ago

Pft, only monochrome? /s Pretty awesome, kudos

Cieplak• 4 years ago

Reminds me of Conway’s Game of Life, emulated inside Conway’s Game of Life:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8

imwillofficial• 4 years ago

This is how skynet really happened

skwirl• 4 years ago

This is exactly the type of content I hope to see when I check HN. Awesome.

Cyberdog• 4 years ago

Ha, that's so needlessly inefficient! Now let me get back to work with my Electron code editor while I communicate with my team in four different Electron chat apps and code a web page which requires 2.5MB of assets to load (not counting the massive autoplaying background video).

fennecfoxy• 4 years ago

I do hate Electron but a little overhead these days is what gets us all the stuff we have.

It's not so much overhead that's killing technology for me atm, it's dumb decisions/terrible technoshit.

Like Google's Nest products that randomly disconnect from wifi and refuse to reconnect. How do you fuck up connecting to wifi in 2022?

teekert• 4 years ago

If you like to ponder physiological implications and deeper themes of such worlds in worlds and what it can mean, in a fun way, I recommend the (sci-fi) book Permutation City (Greg Egan), from 1994. It also contains an artificial world, called the Autoverse that felt to me like Minecraft when I read the story. But it is taken a lot further...

antonvs• 4 years ago

I’m not sure I’d want to upload my consciousness to a Minecraft server...

Liambp• 4 years ago

Can someone explain to a clueless person (me) how a 1Hz CPU manages to achieve even 0.1fps frame rates. That is only ten clock cycles per frame. I don't know what the IPC of Chungus 2 is but that doesn't seem a lot of cycles to calculate each new frame.

Thinking about this another way. Real world CPUs have clock speeds at least 1 billion times faster than this and they only run Minecraft a few 1000 times faster than is claimed here. How do these numbers add up?

moss22• 4 years ago

The video author (Sammyuri) clarified it in a comment:

This build does NOT run in real time. It runs on MCHPRS, the server developed by StackDoubleFlow, which speeds up the game roughly 10-20,000x while running redstone. That brings the framerate to a much more reasonable 0.1fps, so the long timelapses in the video only took 9 hours to record in total.

ClassyJacket• 4 years ago

Interesting. I saw a video of this on tiktok that said "sped up 2,000,000 times" and thought it was an exaggeration, or error. Apparently not.

abrax31417• 4 years ago

You’re all going to hate on me for this, so first let me say that this is amazing. I’m awed by it. Truly. And I am very familiar with minecraft and even have been known to do a bit of redstone hacking myself I love seeing the cool things some folks do with it. (I’ve some redstone sorting algorithms and I’m esp fond of redstone Turing machines!)

But this! This is like sending a person to mars!

And I have the same question for the geniuses who did this that I have for the ones working on that:

Aren’t there cures for cancer and perovskite solar cells to discover? Why are you using your excellent minds, and apparently enormous amount of free time, building cool but very slow virtual computers out of virtual sand, when you could be proving the smoothness of the Navier–Stokes equations?

It’s one thing, to my mind, when athletes climb huge mountains because they’re there. It’s quite another, again, to me, when obvious genius goes to waste.

There. I feel better for having said it. I only wish I could say it to Elon Musk re Mars, and get my son to spend a fifth as much time on his math homework as he does playing minecraft. This incredibly cool hack is just going to exacerbate the situation! :-)

glitchc• 4 years ago

Think of it as art rather than science. Do we question why someone created a piece of art, or whether they could have spent their time better by creating a different piece of art?

abrax31417• 4 years ago

Hmmm. Okay. Fair point. Although it actually is science. And these folks could be doing real science.

b1122• 4 years ago

I am trying to follow ycomb guidelines, and assume the best intent here, but there is just so much wrong about how you view scientific research, and play, and hobby, and learning, and duty, that after rewriting my reply 3 times, I cannot imagine you're not trolling.

If you're not trolling, you need to seriously step back, and think about how play=learning, how any scientific research=benefits us all.

Going to Mars is not good?! A waste?! There is so much wrong with this thought alone, so much broken logic, that it is horrifying to me.

A project such as going to Mars, will yield immense scientific research and output, benefiting humanity as a whole.

Just the r&d into material research alone, engineering, will benefit endless other disciplines.

It as if you see each thing as siloed, as if doing thing x, has zero benefit to y.

I wonder, do you employ this same logic for yourself? That is, you have no hobbies, nothing but work, and spend every moment working?

If you were a farmer, feeding thousands, would you be upset if you make bushes shapely at home, if you planted decorative plants?

I literally cannot view your comment in a positive light.

abrax31417• 4 years ago

A project such as going to Mars, will yield immense scientific research and output, benefiting humanity as a whole.

I’m not trolling. I really do disagree with this in good faith. You can get the same materials research etc benefits by doing something that directly benefits humankind. Also, I don’t think that Musk thinks that it’s the spin-off stuff that matters. He honestly and in good faith wants to expand humans to another planet. He’s said this innumerable times. I just disagree that anything anyone feels like doing is as valuable as anything else. There are value decisions involved. I’m not saying that anyone should be enjoined or forced or any such thing. But maybe enticed?

vintermann• 4 years ago

It's a reasonable thing to ask if you think intelligence is some fungible quantity that can be applied wherever you wish. But that's in "so wrong it's not even wrong" territory.

Sammyuri's interest and focus is microprocessor design. I'm sure he has a future in it (as far as I understand he's fairly young). Curing cancer isn't something he's likely to be good at, but who knows, maybe the chips he helps design will help with it one day. Doing this thing which no one has done before, has surely given him unique perspectives on a lot of things (as well as a lot of knowledge about CPU architecture most of us don't have). Maybe he will combine it with other knowledgeable people's unique perspectives and make wondrous discoveries.

Or he might do none of that, and just inspire a lot of other people to go down that path.

Don't think of intelligence as something that can exist in a vacuum. Let Sammyuri be Sammyuri.

abrax31417• 4 years ago

Time is definitely fungible, and youth is fleeting, and us old guys wish we’d spent them both differently. However, I’ve elsewhere in this thread become convinced that you and the others are right. Folks shouldn’t be criticized for following their passion. (Well, I guess I can think of rare cases where their passions may be so anomalous as to be worth criticism, but this isn’t one of those.)

rockbruno• 4 years ago

The world has 7 billion people. While I agree with the overall feeling that every single human should be dedicating themselves to the evolution of the species, it only takes about 10 seconds of reading the news to realise that humanity is complex and everyone is different. Some people just don't think like that, and there's nothing wrong with it.

imtringued3• 4 years ago

Aren’t there cures for cancer and perovskite solar cells to discover? Why are you using your excellent minds, and apparently enormous amount of free time, building cool but very slow virtual computers out of virtual sand, when you could be proving the smoothness of the Navier–Stokes equations?

Because in the real world there are people in power who do not want those things to happen, unless it disproportionately benefits them at the expense of the people actually doing the work.

In Minecraft there are no busy bodies, gate keepers, monopolists, financial institutions or regulations preventing people from doing peaceful intellectual activities. The certification necessary to become a computer scientist takes 16 years, in Minecraft you don't need any certification you can just do it on day one.

The other reason is that building a computer in redstone isn't that impressive, it is like building your own computer in a CS course which has been done over and over again by many students.

skc• 4 years ago

Nick Bostrom is silently smiling somewhere.

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

A lot you can do with NOR gates!

A fun thought experiment is whether you could ever imagine that block build growing complex enough and becoming intelligent.

If AI can become intelligent (generally, i.e. GAI), then it could be implemented with redstone. If human level intelligence requires something more, then it can not, and the search for redstone 2.0 continues…

1Hz CPU made in Minecraft running Minecraft at 0.1fps [video]

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