16-Year-Old Creates Scientific/Graphing Calculator In Minecraft

New submitter petval tips another amazing Minecraft project: a functioning scientific/graphing calculator. "On a virtual scale, the functional device is enormous — enough so that anyone in the real world would become a red blot of meat and bone staining the road if they fell from the very top. Honestly, his virtual machine looks more like a giant cargo ship ripped from a sci-fi movie than a working calculator. Yet type your problem out on the keypad, and the answer appears on a large white display mounted on the side of the monstrous brick structure." The creator says it can do "6-digit addition and subtraction, 3-digit multiplication, division and trigonometric/scientific functions ... Graphing y=mx+c functions, quadratic functions, and equation solving of the form mx+c=0." We've previously discussed the creation of a 16-bit ALU in Minecraft.

Comments

Re:For those of us who don't know...

[ocdude]

Minecraft is a sandbox type game where you can build stuff out of the environment. It has no scripting or math functions built in, nor does it really have any sort of logic gates built in. However, it does something called "redstone dust" which you can use as wires. The wiki explains more, but you can hand-craft logic gates out of it: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Redstone_Dust

Re:Transcendental functions

[MickLinux]

For logs, it is easier and faster to [1] convert the number to binary (2^x) (1.yyyy). Save the power x for later. For the other number 1.yyyy, break the number down to [binary] (1+0.a)(1+0.0b)(1+0.00c)... Where a, b, and c are binary digits. There is an algorithm like a single binar divide that will generate a,b,c all at once . Then for every nonzero a, b, and c... you look up the log-base 2 and sum those together. That will give you the binary digits to the right of the decimal. The number to the left is the power of 2 from the first conversion.