Fully Functional 1KB Hard Drive in Vanilla Minecraft

by jonbaer • 12 years ago

831 109 12 years ago

wiml• 12 years ago

Interesting, maybe a bit more like bubble memory than a hard drive.

atanasb• 12 years ago

This is really cool. I really like Minecraft computer components, but I could never help to think that if the guys who build them, started playing with something practical, the results might be more tangible.

gokhan• 12 years ago

This is a great learning experience for anybody, young or old. Maybe the builder in the screenshots is a carpenter and just trying to learn how hard drives work. Maybe he's a kid who will build the next gen drive in 20 years based on his ideas seeded here. How do you know?

CompuHacker• 12 years ago

Because if he's lucky, he'll be weaving magnetic core memory in 20 years.

dkhar2• 12 years ago

I have a friend who used to keep excitedly showing me his crazy, impressive redstone ALU/CPU designs. I kept trying to get him to buy an FPGA and build out something with real hardware, but he maintained that a big part of why it was fun was because of the environment and community that came with Minecraft. That might go some way toward providing an explanation.

unwind• 12 years ago

So, did anyone do a Minecraft-to-VHDL transpiler yet? :) Sneak up on them and convert their in-game creations to something that can be synthesized into actual hardware.

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

Or not. I think that the medium plays a very big part here. It's the essence of hacking, twisting something like Minecraft engine to run processors, and hard drives, and stuff. Doing the same on VHDL? Boring.

patio11• 12 years ago

Think of it more like a better UI on top of EE307 or whatever your local equivalent is for low-level hardware design. I had to scratchbuild a functional CPU using nothing but NAND gates to pass mine. I got through it, somehow, producing a CPU which would run minimal assembly-esque programs but which existed on no physical hardware and wouldn't be for for any purpose if it did. If you can do it with red stone I think any rational person would say you have all the knowledge my class tried to impart.

marktangotango• 12 years ago

It's the old Church-Turing thesis in a way; instead of using logic gates implemented with silicon transisters, they're using physical blocks and switches in minecraft. The principals are the same, just a different 'substrate'. DNA can be used as a computing substrate[1], and at a more macro level, the structure of cells[2]. The minecraft guys have a lot more in common with the early computer engineers who used relay switches and diodes on rotating drums.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_system

VLM2• 12 years ago

"playing" "practical" "results" "tangible"

The relationships between those not-necessarily related words would need considerable detail for the claim to mean anything.

Play doesn't require results, a virtual world in a computer will never be tangible and is likely used by people uninterested in being tangible, practical things usually aren't involved in playing, it goes on and on.

NotAtWork3• 12 years ago

I've worked in hardware, and think this kind of play is meaningful.

You confront many of the engineering challenges you'd face (in terms of line routing, timing challenges, design concerns, modularity, etc), but they have simpler and more straightforward constraints because of the different medium.

You're also really unlikely to get results using exactly this same skill set when trying to work with real hardware. The immediate need for programming and complicated tools becomes apparent when you try to grapple with the complexity of modern ICs.

If you're just going to have them blink LEDs using logic gates, I fail to see what you think you're getting from hiding all the logic circuitry in little black boxes and making the parts harder to work with. I've encountered all the engineering concepts (minus some physics concerns) I learned in several quarters of circuit design as an undergrad.

The reality is that Minecraft actually is a very good tool for introducing hardware concepts, because it removes the dependence on understanding software to do something.

(Really, the tooling around hardware needs to be better, particularly for things like FPGAs. Raspberry Pis and Arduinos are making good inroads.)

asiekierka• 12 years ago

I'm a Minecraft modder and while mods are really exciting, sometimes the vanilla stuff is where it's at.

Awesome job.

indigane• 12 years ago

Command blocks also bring a whole new level to that.

There is vanilla and then there is vanilla with command blocks.

They are getting closer and closer to modding and are almost like an in-game programming language.

For example, here [1] is a command block command that procedurally generates giant oak trees [2].

[1] http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=QzS0M4Vn

[2] https://youtu.be/6cJL4lM7KR4

readerrrr3• 12 years ago

Game of life simulating itself.

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

http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel

Minecraft in Minecraft

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

Xenmen• 12 years ago

Thank-you so much for sharing Life in Life!

It's the perfect way to convey how complicated transistor-level emulation is to design...

tim333• 12 years ago

Yeah pretty cool, apart maybe from the soundtrack

boyaka• 12 years ago

Computers in UNIX

http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/pipelogic/index.php

fhnjh• 12 years ago

The game of life simulation is definitely ready for another layer of meta, GOL simulating GOL simulating GOL...

michaelmior• 12 years ago

Once you know how to simulate GOL within GOL, you can go as deep as you want.

readerrrr3• 12 years ago

A period of a single cell would take 35328^2 periods and (2048*2048)^2 cells of the most underlying game of life simulation.

Houshalter4• 12 years ago

It's turtles all the way down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6aP9S9rEQk

rednukleus• 12 years ago

Even if this has no practical reason to exist, it makes me happy to know that it does. The world is a better place for it.

Rikstam• 12 years ago

Cool, makes me want to start tinkering with Minecraft, but can't really afford anymore time sinks in my life. Still its amazing what people can do with it.

zbowling• 12 years ago

Someone needs to make a FUSE driver that patches into this with a mod for Minecraft.

nkerkin• 12 years ago

Reminds me of this 8-bit CPU[0] built in minecraft

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxAmphwLPDY

qwerta• 12 years ago

Hm, add CPU and we can play chess :-)

dkhar2• 12 years ago

This is a good opportunity to plug ORE, a Minecraft community specifically for this kind of thing:

http://openredstone.org/

That video on their main page is mind-boggling to me.

I have a friend who's a regular on that server, and he would occasionally explain to me things like how they take advantage of how Minecraft's redstone handling works to shave precious ticks off the latest ALU design's return time, or how they created a fully vanilla-compatible "internet," to pass data through wires between different people's machines.

They've got mods set up to copy and paste blocks, so you can build modular systems out of components and avoid repetitive block-placing, but AFAIK, everything else is vanilla. It's incredible.

mdellabitta• 12 years ago

I have to ask: Has anybody managed to mine Bitcoin in Minecraft yet?

viraptor• 12 years ago

Provided you set the input block, the implementation shouldn't be too hard. You need an incrementing counter included in the input, some feedback that will stop it and a huge field implementing the hashing. Likely much less complicated than the drive presented here... but much larger.

kordless• 12 years ago

Interesting fact: If ENIAC was tasked with calculating the current Bitcoin hashrate, it would have to mass as much as the world's oceans and would require an earth's surface worth of solar panels to power it.

linker3000• 12 years ago

If he can shorten the duration of the redstone signals to be very small pulses, he'd have a 'flash' drive!

/Working with PCIe flash memory products, so getting a kick..etc..

//Sorry

userbinator• 12 years ago

This concept is known as a delay line memory, although this particular implementation doesn't need any refresh, like a chain of shift registers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory

wubbfindel• 12 years ago

Reminds me of when someone built a scientific calculator in minecraft:

http://kotaku.com/5895191/someone-built-a-working-scientific...

jeremycole2• 12 years ago

This is clearly a memory, not a hard drive. Kind of expect better from HN...

marvin• 12 years ago

It's persistent storage; your data will still be there if you power down Minecraft and start it up again later ;)

lordbusiness2• 12 years ago

It's a hard drive. The storage is persistent. Assuming your argument is that the world the device is constructed in isn't guaranteed to be persistent, then that renders physical hard drives in our physical world as non-persistent; let's see how persistent our data is when Sol goes red giant... ;-)

jeremycole2• 12 years ago

What does persistency have to do with whether it's a memory or a hard drive? There are plenty of persistent memories.

Lagged2Death• 12 years ago

It's a sign of the times. "Hard drive" has come to mean simply "nonvolatile local storage." Some people who know better even talk about "SSD hard drives" without snark or irony.

It wasn't that long ago that "hard disk" meant "3.5 inch floppy disk" to many people. Pedantically speaking, they were wrong, too, but the little floppies were hard to the touch and they did store files. It made sense.

It's a triumph, in a sense, that so many people are at least able to grasp the function of this invisible machine (the hard drive) even if they aren't using the term in an engineer's excruciatingly precise and correct way.

agumonkey• 12 years ago

At what point will Minecraft come out of the closet and proudly claim to be the largest computing principles MOOC ?

TheLoneWolfling4• 12 years ago

In recent versions of MC, you can do a much better delay line memory with comparators. You can actually end up being able to store 2b / block (2 and not 4 because comparators have to be placed on something not a comparator.) - it would be half that but there's a trick you can play to avoid requiring redstone dust between comparators.

The delay is faster too - 1 redstone tick / 4 bits, or 40 bits/sec per line, as opposed to this implementation's 1 bit / 8 redstone ticks / line, or 1.25 bits / sec / line. (Note that this implementation of piston tape is decidedly suboptimal: the maximum is actually 3 bits / 4 redstone ticks / line = 7.5 bits/sec/line, as you can actually check for 8 different block types (glass / solid / sticky/non-sticky piston facing 3 directions) and you can make a faster-resetting piston loop.)

The biggest issue with comparator delay-line memory is that there's no way of pausing it.

There's also a way of storing arbitrary amounts of data per block, and that's to use the fact that items with NBT data will stack only when their NBT data is identical. The easiest way to see this is to try to stack renamed items, but there are others. You can make a hopper or dropper chain and encode data in which line which enchanted item is in.

I have yet to see a practical implementation of the above, though.

lockes5hadow• 12 years ago

Gosh your demanding. :-p

skykooler• 12 years ago

A comparator memory isn't really a hard drive, because it loses its data if turned off.

TheLoneWolfling4• 12 years ago

Define "turned off". A comparator loop persists just fine without any input, just like a piston loop.

It's non-volatile sequential access memory - which, in my opinion, is the same category a hard drive falls under.

NotAtWork3• 12 years ago

How do you read off the state of the NBT data?

Can command blocks match items on NBT data or chests on their data?

TheLoneWolfling4• 12 years ago

You can do it without command blocks.

Use an item sorter.

An item will stack with another item if they are identical, which includes NBT data. Using an item sorter you can detect this.

infogulch• 12 years ago

As parent said, items with the same name stack together, items with different names don't. There are item testers in minecraft based on whether the item will stack.

avn2109• 12 years ago

> "I have yet to see a practical implementation of the above, though."

"Practical" is of course used here in the loosest possible sense :)

awiesenhofer• 12 years ago

Reminds me of http://xkcd.com/505/ "A Bunch Of Rocks"

Although: no need for someone immortal with infinite time and energy to run the simulation, rather lots of people each devoting a small amount of both to it...

rmc• 12 years ago

For people interested in how computers work, I recommend the book/course "From NAND to Tetris - Building a Modern Computer From First Principles"[1]. It starts of with boolean logic and NAND gates, and it steps you through making a computer that can play tetris.

[1] http://www.nand2tetris.org/

akmiller• 12 years ago

I haven't read that one, but I'll definitely check it out. I'd also recommend Charles Petzold's book called "Code". One of the best technical books I've ever read!

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...

drivers99• 12 years ago

Besides "Code," I highly recommend "The Pattern on the Stone" by Danny Hillis, who also happens to be the designer of Thinking Machines' massively parallel supercomputer, the Connection Machine. It covers more material than Code in a lot less time.

In "Code," Petzold makes sure to cover the material exteremely slowly so that you won't miss any details, so it may get boring for some, but I would also read Code if you have the time and interest.

mario54• 12 years ago

There is also "But How Do It Know?" by J Clark Scott. It's good for beginners.

http://www.amazon.com/But-How-Know-Principles-Computers/dp/0...

waterfowl• 12 years ago

it's free online and great, but I also enjoy my hard copy(it was like $20, so so so cheap for what it is)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Elements-Computing-Systems-Princip...

edit: $30 I guess, still worth it.

Alupis• 12 years ago

Good free ebook for learning how a computer does what it does:

"Programming From The Ground Up"

http://download-mirror.savannah.gnu.org/releases//pgubook/Pr...

TylerJay• 12 years ago

I remember hearing that the nand2tetris people were going to do an edX course on it in the fall. Does anyone know anything about that?

ThomPete• 12 years ago

Thank you so much. I have been looking for something that explains these principles to a non developer but technically interested designer this looks like it will do the trick.

erichocean• 12 years ago

This is also quite good, especially for children: http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...

snake_plissken• 12 years ago

I always wonder when I see these things, are players placing each block individually? Or are they mapped out in some file and fed to the server to render?

DanBC• 12 years ago

I imagine they use programs like MCEdit.

You'd create parts of the hardware in Minecraft, then use MCEdit to copy and paste those parts.

http://www.mcedit.net/

xenophonf• 12 years ago

In addition to MCEdit, which reads and writes Minecraft worlds offline, there is WorldEdit, which can be used in-game (whether via a client-side mod such as Single Player Commands or via the official server-side plugin). If I recall correctly, with CraftScript installed one can also automate block placement. With the right config you can make this all work in SSP or SMP - WorldEdit will use blocks from one's inventory instead of creating them ex nihilo.

Houshalter4• 12 years ago

In classic minecraft there used to be a convenient command where you could type /cuboid or /z and then place or destroy two blocks, and it would fill the area in between. There were countless more server-side commands and mods that let you build large scale structures. Copy and pasting sections, building spheres or cylinders, making shapes hollow, etc. Flying was much easier and faster too, although it did required a mod.

Minecraft now has so many more features and block types. But I miss some of those features, and building large scale structures is much more difficult.

jafaku• 12 years ago

Can someone tell me what's more difficult to create? This hard drive or the scientific calculator that someone else also created in minecraft?

thejj5• 12 years ago

This will not work as described. I think his design is a good idea, but still does not work.

I build a better harddrive (with 4 kb storage!) over a year ago, imgur link will follow.

Now to the design problem in this HDD: see that all the blocks are blue in the platter? No way to swap each of the bits without magically creating new green blocks. My hdd solves that problem by having BOTH block types available on the platter. But see for yourself:

http://imgur.com/a/8ESMW

thejj5• 12 years ago

-> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8202255

Kiro• 12 years ago

What won't work?

philh• 12 years ago

How confident are you?

I know very little about Minecraft, but if this doesn't work, it pretty much has to be trolling. (No way you build something like this and not notice that it doesn't work.) And then I wouldn't expect them to offer a link to download the map, and I wouldn't expect someone else to say they've got it working: http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/2e0ghk/fully_func...

thejj5• 12 years ago

Imagine a write process: You'd need to somehow replace the visible blue blocks with a green block. But where does the green block come from?

thejj5• 12 years ago

ok, it does work. i totally forgot about the command blocks. he's using them to change the block type.

Sami_Lehtinen• 12 years ago

If you like to play with logic stuff, this is something to try out: http://www.neuroproductions.be/logic-lab/ It's simple, but does it job pretty visually.

Gravityloss• 12 years ago

That's awesome! The making of layout is quite effortless.

leni536• 12 years ago

Really nice, however I there is some buggy behavior in this logic simulation: It can end up in an inconsistent state:

I have a little Robot Odyssey experience where it would loop forever between inconsistent states. However that design is not perfect either, it's still much better than this in my opinion.

The interface is quite nice though.

munimkazia• 12 years ago

What minecraft needs is a way to speed up the game. There have been quite a few people who have made calculators and "electronic" components, which would be a lot more cooler if they could work faster.

peterwwillis• 12 years ago

And people say video games are a waste of time.

sebastianavina• 12 years ago

for god sake, get a job people

Fando2• 12 years ago

What type of circuits are technically possible to build in Minecraft? Could one build a basic CPU with RAM, HDD, and BUS? What is the limit of what one could build?

znt• 12 years ago

Here is a 16-bit ALU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGkkyKZVzug

Fando2• 12 years ago

Wow impressive. Looking at that I found this video which shows a full computer implementation in Minecraft, capable of 32bit graphics and has a basic instruction set and could be programmed with a high level language. WTF!? Is it real? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go5qdMKZs-M here's more info about it. http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-discussion/re...

birk5437• 12 years ago

The control room actually kind of reminds me of the control rooms for old computers in the 1950's.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Eniac.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

dangayle• 12 years ago

My nephew and his friends are 8-9 years old, and they're masters at building this stuff. The redstone, the logic, the machines, all of it. It's all they think about, all the time. Imagine what potential this early compsci education is fostering?

We just have to remind them when they're older and are running things and building amazing stuff that it's NOT OK to blow up other people's stuff with tnt.

DanFeldman• 12 years ago

When I was taking a digital electronics course in high school, Minecraft was getting huge. We would spend hours playing and usually try to build the stuff we learned about in class. It was an incredible teaching tool, tbh.

shawn-butler2• 12 years ago

Pretty much none.

I've never understood why people think gaming or play ever forms the justification or basis for learning. Decade of nonsensical "gamification" studies has had zero effect no matter what Jane McGonigal says.

Might get an interest or passion going but it has near-zero lasting educational value.

ANTSANTS• 12 years ago

There's zero educational value in designing and building digital circuits by hand? What?

Sukotto• 12 years ago

I hope it's enough. It's not like young hackers can easily disassemble/reassemble stuff in the real world like we older guys did.

And yes, you can take apart a cell phone or a tv or whatever. But the risk:cost ratio isn't nearly as favorable as it was for the previous few generations. The chance of irreversibly breaking it is far higher, and the chance you'll learn very much by just looking are much lower. Likewise, nobody's stopping you from wrapping wire around magnets to make your own memory... but it's not like that's a "thing" kids get exposed to now. But it's all there in minecraft.

(It's also seriously hard to find children's science kits worth buying as the culture of extreme protection of children have turned them into junk. This is one of the only frontiers I'm aware of that's open to children (without the guiding hand of a science-mentor) to learn and play and create in this way)

halfcat• 12 years ago

It's not like young hackers can easily disassemble/reassemble stuff in the real world like we older guys did.

Now it's all digital. Everyone is buying their 7-year-old a copy of IDA Pro these days.

IgorPartola• 12 years ago

What Minecraft could really use would be a scripting capability of some sort. Basically, once you've figured out how to do something, you should be able to build a machine that does it for you. That would be a pretty sweet game.

NAFV_P• 12 years ago

What Minecraft could really use would be a scripting capability of some sort.

Minetest [0] has some scripting ability, utilising Lua.

[0] http://minetest.net/

Houshalter4• 12 years ago

ComputerCraft has programmable robots that are pretty cheap to make. There are many other mods that add varying degrees of automation, like redpower.

jedicoffee• 12 years ago

www.westeroscraft.com

dbbolton• 12 years ago

I hope the author joins forces with the guy who built a programmable computer in MC.

prawn• 12 years ago

You might also like this clock built in Minecraft to (theoretically) outlast the heat-death of the universe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7221931

Eiriksmal• 12 years ago

It hit me on a walk last night: What this needs to be truly complete, more than more KBs or other computer components (like the competing HN article), is the click-of-death when it dies of old age!

Fully Functional 1KB Hard Drive in Vanilla Minecraft

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