It's Minecraft all the way down.
May 6, 2012 12:05 AM   Subscribe

 
Ok, so I think I have a vague idea what is going on here, but could someone who has actually played Minecraft enlighten me a little?
posted by brennen at 12:09 AM on May 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


Good lord. Stuff like this really just rubs in the fact that I'm only playing a small part of the game. I just don't have the mind for math and programming; the stuff people do with Minecraft's redstone circuitry is consistently mind-blowing. The MeFi-related Aporkalypse Minecraft server has some players who are pretty brilliant with this stuff. When I'm able to spend some more time there again I'll need to coax one of them into making my builds extra cool.
posted by Hoopo at 12:15 AM on May 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


They're using the "Map" functions as a display. At the end of the video you can see the physical part of the display near the white platform that holds the control buttons. That physical grid appears to be moving real Minecraft blocks around so they appear on the handheld "map" display.

The huge red repetitive grid-like structure underneath is the redstone computer making it all go. They've basically built a small computer out of redstone or CPU to drive the display.
posted by loquacious at 12:19 AM on May 6, 2012 [3 favorites]


To iterate is human; to recurse, divine.
posted by Grimgrin at 12:23 AM on May 6, 2012 [34 favorites]


Yo dawg…
posted by WaylandSmith at 12:27 AM on May 6, 2012 [9 favorites]


Wow. That processor! That display!
I'm guessing they don't do all this building programming a block at a time in the regular game interface?
Is there something like a compiler?
posted by TheKM at 12:55 AM on May 6, 2012


Now someone needs to build Minecraft in Minecraft in Minecraft.
posted by dickasso at 1:03 AM on May 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


There are various world editors or add-on patches, but I don't think there's anything like a high level programming language compiler that compiles to redstone "machine code" - so, yeah, they're not just programming in assembly or something, they're actually building their own hardware logic in redstone from scratch.

There are known elements like accumulators, registers, bit-shifters and of course basic Boolean logic elements, so you can probably copy/paste/spam those, and once you have larger blocks of useful logic for a project you can copy/paste those, too.

But then again hardware designers have been doing that since they used to cut chip etching masks by hand.
posted by loquacious at 1:04 AM on May 6, 2012 [2 favorites]


I heard you like...
posted by special-k at 1:11 AM on May 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


Wheels within wheels, man.
posted by bardic at 1:12 AM on May 6, 2012


Minecraft is clearly turing complete.
posted by DreamerFi at 1:16 AM on May 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


The only thing that would have made that better would've been an accompanying BRRRRRRRRM soundtrack.
posted by zennish at 1:18 AM on May 6, 2012 [6 favorites]




Welp, I guess our purpose in the universe is done. Wrap it up, people.


Hm, I wonder if one could make a VHDL/Verilog compiler that targets Minecraft.
posted by hattifattener at 1:44 AM on May 6, 2012


Now someone needs to build Minecraft in Minecraft in Minecraft.

Actually, thanks to the magic of induction, it's already done (to as many levels deep as you'd like to go).
posted by knave at 2:51 AM on May 6, 2012


@TheKM

There are tools like MCEdit which allow you to save sections of maps as 'schematics', which can then be saved and pasted into other maps. So you just build a working redstone NAND gate or whatever, save it off, then paste loads of them together, and so on.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 3:03 AM on May 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


Related: Conway's game of life created within game of life
posted by egor83 at 4:30 AM on May 6, 2012 [27 favorites]


Two minutes after this was finished, a player who'd paid 1 iron bar to play mineception bitched that water didn't work right.
posted by fleacircus at 5:03 AM on May 6, 2012 [6 favorites]


It would be so cool if every 16 months Notch released a patch that reduced the block size in half.
posted by jenkinsEar at 5:20 AM on May 6, 2012 [14 favorites]


Now someone needs to build Minecraft in Minecraft in Minecraft.

I'd be happy with Mattel's LED Football 2.
posted by drezdn at 5:32 AM on May 6, 2012


TIL about the Droste effect
posted by lalochezia at 6:41 AM on May 6, 2012


Has anyone told Stephen Wolfram he was right yet?
posted by localroger at 6:46 AM on May 6, 2012


This is fantastic. Particularly like the map-as-display and the clean button UI, complete with a picture of your little avatar. I'd love to learn more about how they build this; even with a world editor it seems impractical to assemble this by hand out of little modules. Here's all I could find about the group CodeCrafted: Planet Minecraft page, Youtube channel, Twitter, Reddit. But none of those pages answer the question of who these people are and how they work.
posted by Nelson at 7:11 AM on May 6, 2012


How long til someone builds SkyNet in Minecraft?
posted by Peevish at 7:17 AM on May 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


Love that the picture of the little guy on the wall is Prince Graham from King's Quest I.
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 7:22 AM on May 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


I'm sorry, I meant KNIGHT Graham. And that pic was from KQII. But more importantly, when are we getting Sierra Games in Minecraft?
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 7:33 AM on May 6, 2012


How long til someone builds SkyNet in Minecraft?

The dark truth about what went wrong in the Terminator universe is the human engineers were trying to build Minecraft in SkyNet.
posted by cortex at 8:13 AM on May 6, 2012


Has anyone told Stephen Wolfram he was right yet?

I think we can all agree it would be for the best if we just avoid that on principle.
posted by brennen at 8:47 AM on May 6, 2012 [4 favorites]


A thought inspired by The Matrix springs to mind. It seems that in order to simulate a world the original first order world has to adapt a form that is entirely reduced to functionality so as to facilitate the mechanisms needed to simulate the second order world.
posted by quoquo at 8:48 AM on May 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


How long til someone builds SkyNet in Minecraft?

Why didn't SkyNet built a SkyNet in SkyNet? Or did they? Was that what the autonomous Terminators were? Skynet-in-Skynets? Why didn't they try to make a Terminator in their Terminator, or did they? Is that what the liquid metal Terminators were the product of?
posted by TwelveTwo at 8:56 AM on May 6, 2012


It seems that in order to simulate a world the original first order world has to adapt a form that is entirely reduced to functionality so as to facilitate the mechanisms needed to simulate the second order world.

Unless you define those higher order functions as epiphenomenal.
posted by R. Schlock at 9:14 AM on May 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


Has anyone told Stephen Wolfram he was right yet?

I think we can all agree it would be for the best if we just avoid that on principle.


Yeah, let's not do that. His head is already approaching the boundaries of a Schwarzschild radius, which is dangerous because he's still on our planet's surface and within several AU of our sun.

There are currently plans to put him into deep extra-solar space and far outside of Sol's gravity well, but if you've been paying attention we're a little behind schedule developing and deploying the technologies required.
posted by loquacious at 10:51 AM on May 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


Has anyone told Stephen Wolfram he was right yet?
Right about what? This thing isn't based on cellular automata, although I suppose it could be implemented based on it. There isn't really anything Wolfram said though that anyone else hasn't said either. One of the biggest "discoveries" in "A new kind of science" was some CA Turing machine, but that happened to have been discovered by an employee who couldn't talk about it due to an IP agreement.
posted by delmoi at 11:46 AM on May 6, 2012


Actually, speaking of CA, you know what would be an awesome addition to minecraft? If you could have blocks that didn't just send signals to each other (like redstone) but could actually generate blocks next to them, or something. Like if block A and block B are next to each other they could turn into block C, or A could disappear or whatever. Because the minecraft world is 3D, much more complex shapes could be built. You could have objects move around in space... it could be pretty sweet.
posted by delmoi at 11:50 AM on May 6, 2012


Yes! Minecraft Grey Goo!
posted by XMLicious at 11:59 AM on May 6, 2012


> Related: Conway's game of life created within game of life

My jaw authentically dropped at that.
posted by benito.strauss at 12:06 PM on May 6, 2012 [4 favorites]


Getting closer...
posted by gwint at 5:37 AM on May 7, 2012


@delmoi, those concepts of CA are already present in Minecraft. For example, when running lava touches running water, a cobblestone block is formed. When a water block touches a lava block, the lava is turned into an obsidian block, etc.
posted by hellphish at 2:24 PM on May 7, 2012


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