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:16-year-old kids have too much free time

[hairyfeet]

No crap but I bet he is bored to tears in class every damned day! I absolutely HATED public school because it was strictly lowest common denominator, I even had a teacher accuse me of cheating simply because I was better at basic math than he was without having to go through all those stupid steps. the best thing that ever happened to me was a damned dog getting into the spokes of my motorbike at 60MPH because it got me home tutors through the junior HS years because the tutor took one look at the books I was reading like the wonderful "Best sci/fi and horror writers of the year" series and instead of the stupid crap they were teaching in school Ms Edwards had me discussing the pros and cons of grandfather paradoxes and skipped the whole stupid "show your work" crap which just slowed me down.

Sadly some administrator decided 'its not good for him to be isolated like that" and forced me to go to HS. What happened? the first day i got sent to detention because some jarheaded teacher said "Anybody not will to run 10 laps just get out of my class' so myself followed by half the class promptly left, and the football coach took one look at the books I was reading in his detention and for the next 4 years i was given all As even though I never actually attended any classes, how did I do that? simple the coach took me to each class and said "He is in your class, mark him as present and give him an A on all work as he'll be on "special assignment"" which turned out to be running my own class for 4 years teaching jocks how to pass the minimums required to play ball. Turns out over the years I've met several from neighboring "football schools' that had the same "special assignment" as me and all were very bright students that the schools basically didn't know what to do with. I figure I learned more teaching those jocks than the dumbed down classes they taught anyway.

So while this kid will probably have a kick ass career I do NOT envy him ATM, his life is probably equal parts boredom and frustration if he is in the public school system. I ended up giving my two boys home schooling after seeing that public schools had gotten even worse than when I was there, there was bigotry, indifference, and even religious whackos, and we are talking about the teachers. Frankly I wouldn't wish the US public school system on my worst enemy as if you are not lucky enough to be in one of the few upper class ritzy neighborhoods frankly the schools just suck. Good luck kid, just keep your head down and remember that college is just around the corner where the smart CAN get ahead.