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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.
This is a really fantastic accomplishment. More than I've ever done in Minecraft.
Well, if these games can get younger people interested in the concepts of programming, I'm all for it. I'm not a fan of most online games, but I have to say this is really cool. I think more games should provide an environment to explore programming (optionally of course)
Now we know what the /. editors did during high school english class.
...what Minecraft is, can someone explain why that calc is an accomplishment?
What's the difficulty of doing something like that? What elements do you have available? Do you have logic-gates, math functions, full-blown scripting, or what?
I don't think a kid who has the ability to create this in Minecraft will be having too much trouble with their SATs...
Anyone know how he did functions like logarithms, trig, etc.? I didn't watch the whole video.
...I created games on my TI-82 graphing calculator, so I guess turnabout is fair play...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
There are lots of addons that help with redstone wiring. The premiere one is probably RedPower2. In addition to giving unit-sized gates, latches, and flip-flops, it also gives buses, which can carry 8 bits of data along a single line.
I just can't believe that this is all done without addons. Even building a BDD (Binary to Decimal Decoder) is difficult in Minecraft, and translating that to display the correct digits is complex. I don't mean "complex so that a child couldn't understand it", but complex as in taking a lot of clock cycles. There are only 20 ticks per second in Minecraft, so all these operations quickly add up to a lot of time.
In addition to binary/decimal conversions, and the logic for doing complex operations (dividing is very hard), this calculator even has typesetting. When you have a power, it places the the displayed value as a superscript! Radicals are drawn over values for the SQRT operations!
In essence, I'm a bit skeptical about this. I believed it when I first saw it a few days ago, but the more I think about it, I think it's all staged. I'm curious to see what others think.
As far as my own redstone experience: I've done far more than the average minecraft player, including building adders and counters, but haven't ever attempted any mega projects.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
Lesson two: implement this: http://xkcd.com/505/
Really. That is one smart kid with a lot of time, talent, willpower and attention for detail. Kudos to the guy/gal that accomplished it.
NO SIG
Is there a level editor for Minecraft or did this guy just waste a few years of his life? Also, this is not really different from other CA circuits of which there are far more awesome.
Calculating something that said '5318008' would have been so much cooled. sigh.
Seriously, this is simply freakin' awesome! Nice job, MaxSGB.
It's impressive in the sense that this guy created a fairly simple "computer", using a limited game environment (Minecraft), running on a virtual machine (Java), running on a physical machine (PC/Mac). In other words, he's spending a million CPU cycles to simulate a single gate in the most roundabout way possible.
I'm impressed that someone with that much patience and functional intellect is wasting so much time in Minecraft, when they could be learning actual chip design. I'm impressed that bragging rights in a game are more important than actual worthwhile accomplishments. I'm impressed that Soulskill wasted so many more of our CPU and brain cycles sharing this pointless feat.
Get. Off. My. Fucking. Lawn. Bitches.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
"Turing", as in Alan Turing, British Mathematician, not "touring", as in a sedan.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
And your lame nerd bashing AC post is yet more proof that /. is becoming a mere shadow of its former self.
Well, not the math part anyhow. That english stuff..man, he's fsck'ed!
As per a YouTube Comment:
Autismï is a hell of a drug.
I remember when Linux was good... too...
Kind of cool, but can you do it in survival mode?
I'm kind of disappointed. When I started watching the video, I thought someone had built this with moving parts in Minecraft But it's just a big collection of wired logic. It's not like you can see the parts move.
So hook up a VHDL compiler to the Redstone 2 Minecraft compiler. There are CPU designs available in VHDL. Generate a real CPU in Minecraft.
The cool CPU I'm waiting for is Babbage's Analytical Engine. The guy who says he's building a replica hasn't made much progress yet. Babbage's design had about a dozen instructions. But it was designed with 50-digit arithmetic (unclear why) and 100 memory locations (reasonable). The memory part would have been bulky, but the CPU is comparable to a mechanical desk calculator. It will be expensive to build, but as a CAD modeling job, not so bad, because it's mostly repeated instances of the same components.
Not really... Just a kid with a TON of time on his hands. To be honest I could probably make something SORTOF like this (ie, basic calculator) in redstone if I had the time. It's just circuits. The higher math is impressive though, but again, just takes a basic understanding of circuits, how math works, and a lot of time. Hardly autism.
On the other hand, what if he is autistic? Clearly he's capable of doing some pretty amazing things regardless.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
A friend of mine (who's 15) and myself (I'm 28 with a CS degree) have a nearly working programmable 8-bit computer in Minecraft. ALU is done, all 256 bytes of memory are done, the instruction tape (made out of sand and glass, much like a punchcard) is done, etc. Another 20 someodd hours and we'll have all of the components connected together and the whole CPU completely done. It actually isn't as hard or take as much time as it may sound.
The most impressive thing about this video is that he did all of the math in BCD rather than just running it on a CPU. I already have multiplication (Booth's algorithm) and other operations programmed on our instruction set (we wrote an assembler and emulator outside of Minecraft to work out the kinks). I'd rather do the complex operations in software rather than laying gates and logic in the hardware.
I don't see how he has enough room for displays of that size. You'd need NxM worth of latches to sustain the pistons that drive the pixels as well as the appropriate muxers to select which pixels are turned on. Our 256 byte memory array is bigger than his entire calculator so I'm a bit skeptical that he isn't using some addons.
As is mentioned in a comment above, the creator used a custom texture pack for the input keypad. Still impressive though, I'd like to see that texture pack...
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
This is impressive. But then, there's RedGame 2.1, which was made by someone who doesn't appear to be much if any older than this kid. I'm impressed by both, but one seems far more complex and mature.
But in minecraft HE IS GOD!
skipped the whole stupid "show your work" crap which just slowed me down
You really do need to show your work. It's not an issue for 25+13, but for any real problem it is essential. Try doing vector calculus without showing any work. It doesn't make you smart if you can, it makes you stupid to try. The work is a proof that validates your answer. Not showing the work in math is like not supporting any of your conclusions with arguments in philosophy. That's why they try to train kids to do it early.
Honestly, if your tutor didn't realize that, then she was a pretty terrible teacher.
Agreed... however, it's a sad fact of life that only 16 year olds have enough free time to do stuff like this.
Next step: Minecraft fleshlight.
Lowest common denominator or greatest common divisor?
The thing to be noted from this is that Minecraft is an easier IDE to use than Eclipse.
But they usually get burned out in College. They are so used to having everything easy that when they start taking hard classes they don't know how to deal with failure.
I have a truly remarkable rebuttal to your argument that your mind is too small to contain.
I'm sure that whoever ends up supporting the systems you didn't bother to document properly because "it's obvious" will wish you eternal damnation.
PS: It'll be you, 2 or 3 years after you made the system.
unless you do it in survival mode.
will make it run linux some day
This can't compete but I thought it was incredible.
I ran a mine craft server for a few friends and used "world edit" to import others projects.
This links to a video of a house builder -three story house with floors and roof. Build by
Ltcheesecracker; someone I've never met or known. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZG4i64ruWU&
It's just the very beginning, it takes quite awhile to finish. I've watched it to completion the first run.
It creates stones from Lava and Water.
Seriously amazing the stuff you can do with Minecraft, as this and the 16 year olds calculator show.
It has logic gates, so yes.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Ouch ! That would hurt.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
A lot of people are telling me that Americans are too stupid, and lazy, for high tech.
Hard classes? Bah. It wasn't the hard classes that got me. It was the stupid and/or pointless ones. I got As in calculus and physics, and an F in music appreciation. (I learned my lesson and took a class in digital media instead - PhotoShop, Flash, and iMovie. At least then I was learning stuff that I could actually find a use for. I still tinker in GIMP quite frequently.)
The hardest classes that I had to take were the advanced circuits classes, and those were B grades in classes that most students took more than once before passing. And I blame the instructor partly; brilliant guy, but he sucked at explaining why we did things the way that we did them. I still haven't the foggiest notion of how to calculate the amplification of a MOSFET or FET amplifier stage with feedback. There were two different formulas and I never understood why either formula applied, or why they had to be different.
Part of the skill is showing significant working, or developing some acronyms to show the obvious steps you took between steps. This is the problem with 'really bright' people who are also incredibly arrogant and not willing to play the game. I probably wasn't absolutely top academically, but not far off, and I managed to not get kicked out of school by just about hanging in there with the social niceties of convincing the teachers that I didn't just copy my answers from somewhere.
I wholly agree and offer some additional examples.
As a teachers assistant in college I tried to grade papers the way I would want to have my papers graded. If students had an answer that was wrong or off by a bit I could justify giving some points if prior steps showed proper application of the techniques being taught. If very few or no steps are shown then I may have limited or no basis to award partial credit. Additionally, if a student showed their work (clearly) then I could often help identify the step where they went astray and mark it as such. Not all graders or instructors go to these lengths, but without showing work you eliminate the possibility.
As an engineer I still value when people show their work. The level of detail that should be shown will naturally vary but the burden of sifting through more detail will almost always outweigh the burden of not having enough. If a conclusion turns out to be false in a classroom you don't get credit. If a conclusion turns out to be false in the workplace you need to fix it. The amount of time it takes to troubleshoot the source of an error will generally be directly proportional to the amount of detail the engineer that came to that conclusion preserved in documentation.
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This is a 10 foot dive to retrieve a baby who's fallen into a pool. A couple bite marks is much easier to deal with than a death. With a dog trained to do this, then you can bet he/she can do much.
Pure musical notion is just another expression of mathematics while listening to music can be a wonderful way of understanding how waves interact. Just because it is considered an art doesn't mean it is somehow below the purity of math.
This is pretty much required in the Scottish Education System for all teachers and for final exams. Atleast, when I was doing Standard Grade (16) and Highers (17-18) all of a decade ago.
The standard line was "show your work, you get an extra mark for it and it's free. Everyone likes free stuff"
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
.. in the shape of a Creeper.
- d
It wasn't pure musical notation. (I was thinking along the same lines when I enrolled.) It was rote memorization of the names of dead people and the classical pieces which they had composed. I was bored, and got an F. And as I said, the art class was much more rewarding, so I'm glad I didn't just skid through with a passing grade in the class that I had hated.
This is the big one - there's no way to tell is "Oh, here's the answer" is because you're Oh So Very Smart And Intuitive or because You Stole the Answers From The Kid Next To You.
Showing your work is how you prove that yes, you're oh so very smart. (Because if you can't explain your brilliant deductions, you're not as smart as you think you are).
The steps can be in the head of the person who does the work. It's the answer that counts. The work is almost never a proof, because to be a proof even the most basic arithmetic would need to invoke all the axioms. A simple vector calculus problem done as a proof would take up a notebook, and good luck doing it by hand without using a proof assistant (say coq). There's a lot of math that is in common use but has never been presented formally enough to make it quick-and-easy in proofs. People are still working on formalizing it enough to be useful! See for example Journal of Formalized Mathematics. Whatever passes for a proof in high school and college is usually nowhere near a complete proof. Heck, many such proof are in fact incorrect -- they leave out many unspoken assumptions, and if you try to reproduce them under assumptions that look right to you, you fail. BTDT.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
But we are NOT talking about vector calc, that at least would have been interesting, no the douchebag teacher had a living shitfit because i wouldn't sit there and do the stupid 'carry the one' crap with large division and multiplication and even had the gall to accuse me of cheating because i could do it in my head faster than he could doing his little step crap!
The ONLY thing that kept me from dropping out right there, because i had told him to take back his accusation or we were gonna have to step outside, was that my home tutor was in the class next door and called the principal and walked in between us. She turned to me and said "Hand me your calc watch" and then she put two long multiplication questions on the board and said "Alright Mr Black, you get one and he gets the other...GO!" and of course i blew through it in less than 20 seconds while he was still on his first line. so did he apologize? Nope it was then "Search him, he must have a hidden calc!". By that time the principal had seen enough and said "Ms Edwards do you think he'd be better off back in home tutoring?" and signed off for me to just go back home instead of trying to do half days which with the combo of the pain from the stitches and my total boredom was for the best anyway. And as I said when they finally forced me to go to HS instead of going to class i ran my own class teaching football players so it wasn't like school was gonna teach me anything, not in a "football school".
the simple fact is this: they have NO idea what to do with extra bright kids if there isn't some sort of magnet program which there isn't in my area. the lowest IQ in my family is 130 by my late sis and the only reason she scored that low was she had been out at a party the night before and was wore out from dancing. Her two boys scored 152 and 148 and frankly we had to home school them because they were bored to tears. Public schools are only really good for those in the center of the bell curve, those on the ends are just frustrated. Honestly i wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those with high grades that are constantly in trouble simply aren't frustrated like i was, as I'd do anything to get out of class so i could get back to my programming or Asimov.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
But if that person stood in front of the board and showed you yes, they very well could do it without the steps, would you have accepted that or called him a liar and a cheat? because i got the latter and damned near got kicked out as despite being held together by stitches me and the math teacher nearly came to blows. And please remember this was a "football school' so we aren't talking calc or trig here, we are talking bog simple 3 and 4 number division and multiplication.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
From an educational perspective, I would argue that showing steps should be directly related to the technique being taught. So for long division there should be a line showing each partial division step (or whatever you call it). For problems that utilize division, but where division isn't being taught, the steps might not be needed but it really comes down to the particular instructors teaching style.
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