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Text Editor Created In Minecraft
jones_supa writes: The redstone mechanics in Minecraft can be pushed surprisingly far to create rather advanced digital circuits. Thanks to a user nicknamed Koala_Steamed, there now exists a text editor inside the game (YouTube demonstration). It comes with a 5 x 10 character matrix in which each character uses a starburst (16-segment) display. There are 7.357 x 10^92 different combinations the screen can show, all of which can be controlled from a single line. The scale of the workings used to make this piece of logic, using only redstone, is dauntingly huge.
Why is this surprising? It's a simple mechanic to understand, what limitations did you think you were going to run into?
I know it may not be the most efficient thing in the world, but its entirely possibly to write your term papers in Minecraft over the span of about 6 months to a year if you stick to harvesting wool to create a "paper" substrate and creating coal blocks for pixels. Presuming you make it long enough to avoid any creepers, the paper can be read from an enormous glass skybridge you construct over the next 2 weeks, and should only take 4 weeks to completely read, give or take a few days to a week if you fall from it a few times or if endermen start stealing text.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Obviously a talented individual, think of that useful software could have been written with the same amount of time and effort.
does it support vi or emacs commands?
Seeing an 8-bit binary executing in simulated 3D brings to mind the experience of being jacked into William Gibson's idea of cyberspace.
Forget the iPhone 6, I have an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7.
Bravo!
...use your powers for GOOD.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
Next thing you know, Minecraft will be self-hosting. Lord help us, the singularity awakes!
I need my Word macros!
Actually if you think about it, Minecraft is the perfect environment to test artificial chemistry and automata.
This is obviously not pure minecraft. Look at the connection between the input pad and the processor. It's a single line of blocks.
This would be very impressive if they could have done this without mods. Look at the size of the compiler/interpreter that someone made. It's as big as a city. This is less impressive because it's using essentially cheats to do it.
Enderman only steal a limited amount of block types. Coal, ores and paper are not amongst those.
Or so I guess. ;)
When will it run Linux?
The really important question is whether or not at the Planck scale one finds that we are all one really, really big version of Minecraft, being played by beings that look strangely like turtles. All the way down.
Another really important question is just how much of the world's creative potential is devoted to creating meta-inventions on top of rulesets intended for something else entirely rather than, say, bringing about world peace, curing cancer, feeding the hungry, or just plain moving out of your mom's basement. Not that I am entirely without sin in this regard myself, but it is a sad commentary on the state of the world (virtual or not) that we appear to live in when solving vast and pointless artificial problems in a virtual reality is more appealing than tackling the real and serious problems that surround us.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Can Minecraft make a good annoying VI beep? If so you could simulate the two to four VI using jerks in the computer lab. Beep Boop... Beep Boob....
Emacs will always be my favorite operating system.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Just gime dimon amor!
Oh, sure, but he did it in creative mode.
(This was a purely sarcastic comment, that thing is pretty impressive. I especially like the serial bus he uses from the 'keyboard' to encode the characters. I can't help but think that parallel would have been easier, but just not nearly as cool (plus I can see de-syncing occurring as in real parallel ports.)
Don't be jealous because you never did anything noteworthy in your life.
Another really important question is just how much of the world's creative potential is devoted to creating meta-inventions on top of rulesets intended for something else entirely rather than, say, bringing about world peace, curing cancer, feeding the hungry, or just plain moving out of your mom's basement.
rgb
The same could be said about JavaScript... ;^)
Bit of a potty mouth for a 13-year-old.
They steal gold though, and it seems like gold on black clay would give the best contrast at the game resolution.
Oh no random user doesn't care about cool nerdy stuff. Now please hand in your nerd card at the door on the way out.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The important thing about tackling real problems is that it requires considerable real investment in equipment and facilities. Especially curing cancer.
Minecraft allows people to exercise their creativity without investment or consequences. No wonder it's appealing.
Another really important question is just how much of the world's creative potential is devoted to creating meta-inventions on top of rulesets intended for something else entirely
Or post on Slashdot. Umm... So let's go about changing this right now. To solve the world's problems, we need to find their roots.
rather than, say, bringing about world peace
So long as people speak different languages, worship the creator in different ways, and faraway governments attempt to impose laws that end up creating an environment hostile to a particular group's way of life, there will always be war. How should that be changed?
curing cancer
You can reduce the incidence of Cancer by forbidding penetrative sexual contact during Libra, but I don't see how people will accept that. Besides, two-thirds of malignant tumors are unavoidable. How should that be changed?
feeding the hungry
Long-term food insecurity is a distribution problem, especially when countries use hunger as a weapon against their own people. How should that be changed?
or just plain moving out of your mom's basement.
Why is living with parents considered shameful, especially in an era of telecommuting?
http://torrenthub.ml/torrent/647/call-of-duty-advanced-warfare-torrent-indir.html
given that you can already play Tetris in Emacs
How long will M-x tetris last given the ruling in Tetris v. Xio and Mr. Pajitnov's admitted belief that free software deserves not to exist?
ROTFL. Ah, shades of mongo.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Some people write useless books, some people make useless gizmos on Minecraft. Who are you to decide?
I agree entirely with the sentiment, but there is a massive psychological difference between virtual problems and real ones.
With virtual problems, the rules are known and consistent, and the only potential barrier to success is the limitations of the user's abilities. If the user can accurately assess their own skill level, they can know if the problem is solvable, and possibly the time frame in which this can be done.
Big, real problems are awash in variables far beyond the control of any one person. They may not be solvable given current restraints. Many of the "best" governments in the world, led by the most educated and intelligent people, and backed with enormous budgets are undercut by the chaos of global economics, damaged by misinformation and false intelligence, aggravated by the stupidity of other actors, and in turn conduct their own activities that damage the prospects of peace, or health and security for all.
I might commit my life to a cure for cancer or world peace, and thus squander the next 60 years away because the world, as a majority, is not ready for those things. The Sudoku puzzle, on the other hand, I can solve before I finish breakfast.
With apologies to Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) this is a perfect example of people being "...so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should. "
I'm all for geeky, harmless, just-because-I-can projects for entertainment but... wow.
And even more important question is how much creative potential is devoted to criticizing people for doing inspiring and creative things.
He could have just inspired the next Einstein for all you know, visualizing computers and software in Minecraft is useful if nothing else from a teaching perspective.
I hardly feel guilty for wasting my time playing Minecraft all week, I pay taxes, I'm a contributing part of society, I give to the poor, I help little old ladies across the street and get my sick neighbors mail but that doesn't mean I still don't have time to play with things like Minecraft.
Such things are not useful, but using our brain to do complex things is a source of pleasure for human beings, and arguably what pushed us to the current level of our civilization.
I've always found stuff like this interesting but I never thought of actually playing Minecraft until my kid did and now I'm a bit addicted to adventure mode. He's building things like cruise ships and I'm playing the actual game getting creeped out by the zombies and darkness.
Devoted kids WILL sooner or later cure cancer. With redstone. In minecraft.
You get that Minecraft is a game, right?
The really important question is whether or not at the Planck scale one finds that we are all one really, really big version of Minecraft, being played by beings that look strangely like turtles. All the way down.
Another really important question is just how much of the world's creative potential is devoted to creating meta-inventions on top of rulesets intended for something else entirely rather than, say, bringing about world peace, curing cancer, feeding the hungry, or just plain moving out of your mom's basement. Not that I am entirely without sin in this regard myself, but it is a sad commentary on the state of the world (virtual or not) that we appear to live in when solving vast and pointless artificial problems in a virtual reality is more appealing than tackling the real and serious problems that surround us.
rgb
The problem with things like feeding the hungry is all of the political opposition you would run into. Since the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s we've had the capability of feeding, clothing, sheltering, and educating the entire world's population several times over. What we don't have is the political will to do it. Too many ruling elite would have to give up power for it to actually happen. That's the real obstacle.
Most armed conflict is also to the benefit of this ruling elite, who use such phrases as "ordo ab chao" (order out of chaos) to describe their interest in it. Wars are very profitable if you're a well-positioned sociopath, and playing two sides against each other is a great way to increase your power over each. It's the same military-industrial-complex that Eisenhower tried to warn us about, not that we listened.
The financial incentive related to cancer is that sick people are much more profitable than healthy people. A cheap, easy, one-time cancer cure (if there were such a thing) would absolutely devastate the multibillion dollar "cancer industry". The companies profiting from that would be just as eager to embrace such a cure as the RIAA/MPAA middlemen have been eager to adapt to an Information Age where the cost of copying and distributing a work is nearly zero.
Getting out of Mom's basement was easier in the past when good jobs that led to good careers with good pensions were available to anyone willing to work hard, which was when the USA valued and protected its manufacturing base, recognizing it as the real wealth and independence from foreign nations that it was. Additionally, it's not generally young women who are staying at home with Mama. They're showing the drive and ingenuity that young men used to also have. I'd recommend reading Boys Adrift by Dr. Leonard Sax for an in-depth explanation as to why this is happening, from grade schools that try to force boys into developmentally inappropriate roles (and then brand them ADHD when it fails), to chemicals in the food supply that have a feminizing effect on animals and humans, to reduced testosterone levels and sperm counts, etc.
These are all problems that we could do a much better job of addressing, with some of them being completely solvable. But for that to really get started, we'd first have to stop allowing psychotic sociopaths to have power and make all of the important decisions. It wouldn't hurt to also have a mass media that didn't use so many recognizable propaganda techniques, and/or a population trained in logic, reasoning, and introspection, considering these skills as basic as literacy. Until then, every starving person on the planet is basically a monument to how psychotic and fucked-up this civilization has really become.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Deciding that something is "pointless" is generally harmful to actual important, creative work.
How much scientific research has been conducted and led to something extraordinary because they didn't worry if something is a "pointless" problem? How much of Math is solving "artifical" problems, to the point where we're using numbers that can't even be written down in decimal form in the universe?
There is nothing sad about solving fun problems while there are "real" problems in the real world. If we wait until all diseases are cured, all wars are ended, and all poverty is eliminated before we stop feeling guilty about doing creative works for the sake of creativity and self-expression, the only thing we'll do is kill creativity. We will not solve the world's problems any faster that way.
Has anyone been following this kind of thing? I keep my eye on it. I saw the first cpu which the author said he used "the elements of computing systems" http://www.nand2tetris.org/ which I quickly bought and learned a lot more than I did in computer organization 1 at college.
Then I saw people working on ram and displays...
Now this whole text editor.
From what little I know, most hardware construction is done using vhdl and verilog. Why isn't there a fully 3d graphical builder for serious design? I think being able to see the chip as you design it is pretty exciting. Perhaps a text based interface would be included... then you could write in the classic languages but see it in 3d.
And the Sudoku puzzle is good for your brain, and hence isn't all that bad for society to the extent that people with healthy logical brains are better than the alternative. Probably true of minecraft as well -- I certainly enjoyed it for a month or three, just as I enjoyed second life more briefly, World of Warcraft in its day, and am currently enjoying the rebirth of Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale on my tablet. But at some point all of these things -- even Sudoku -- become a form of e-crack, a means of withdrawal from the world, a kind of meditation that replaces the struggle with a dirty scary largely unknowable world with something clean and relaxing.
In the end, it's a matter of ethical balance. If you are working long and hard enough to support yourself, far be it from me to criticize what you do with your elective time outside of that (and vice versa) as long as it isn't things like torturing puppies or crafting kiddy porn. Also, as many have pointed out, one individual probably can't fix all of the ills of the world, and so in a sense it is wasteful of your life to devote all of your elective energy in trying at the expense of all joy and diversion. Still, I think that in between spending all of one's life in a drug or mindcraft-induced haze of complete avoidance of the real world and becoming Mother Teresa there is an ethical optimum, probably quite broad, of doing no particular harm, being as responsible for supporting your own personal life and its self-assumed obligations (like children and pets) as circumstance and ability permits, and yeah, out of sheer self-interest if nothing else spending some of your elective energy on making the world a better place for everyone because that makes it a better, safer place for you yourself. It needn't even be false or religious altruism, in other words, even if your personal ethos is a single life to live, no god, no afterlife, most of us would prefer to live in a world that minimized the personal risk of being burned alive by religious zealots, being beaten or killed by thugs and bullies, starving to death because some accident robbed us of the ability to work for and feed ourselves -- and so in a very deep sense fulfilling a "social obligation" to help others is part of an optimized selfish ethic, a way of buying "insurance" through one's actions insuring others.
So how much Sudoku, or Minecraft, or WoW/BG/IWD or Diablo II Expansion is too much, compared to doing something more constructive with some part of that time? That's the choice of each individual, but I think that it is arguable that if you get to where you are building word processors out of Minecraft you m-i-i-g-h-t be a hair over the line...;-)
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Amen. Line by line, actually. Especially your summary sentence. Although I'd take issue with "become" -- it has always been that way. It is arguably "un-becoming" fucked up, but a glacial pace compared to our capabilities and opposed by the MIC sociopaths and organized crime, who are not necessarily disparate groups.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
How long before EMACS is running on Minecraft Redstone?
'Cancer' is more than one problem, many have been solved. So is feeding the hungry, most of the hungry are caught between warlords. World peace is impossible or has been already attained depending on your perspective.
Creative play helps you solve other things later. I took up electronics to screw around and have fun. That same skillset has also fixed a water system, many cars, innumerable consumer devices etc. What is worthwhile or not may not be immediately apparent.
Also the biggest drive for change in the third world is seeing what others have. Cars MP3 players cell phones, many get jobs just to get that stuff.
I remember decades ago doing an electronics A level (this is what kids do ages ~16-18 in the UK) where I built a discrete 4 bit CPU using real hardware. And nobody cared because everyone was expected to be able to do something like that.
Now you build the same thing in cyberspace without having to do much more than wiggle a mouse a lot and people are all oooooh.
Also, once you've built hardware, there's nothing too interesting about implementing a text editor. The "problem" of building a computer in Minecraft was interesting to solve once, but has been solved enough times already. Frankly, once you know how to build logic gates and get to grips with timing, it's a matter of having A Lot Of spare time.
One day we're going to be all, "Wow, all this shit we can simulate with computers can be done... in real life!" and get over our fad of recreating simple versions of the world. Or maybe not, because it's always easier to live in an imaginary, simpler world. IDK. I grew up during the first AI fantasy wave, and got my first job when people were starting to dream about VR. We really haven't got much further than then, except that we can draw absurdly detailed graphics to come closer and closer to what we can already experience by going outside - or even sticking a video on someone/something moving around outside.
I guess it's all a sad indictment of the American Way that so much of it is invested in allowing people to escape reality rather than invest in it.
In a perfect world everybody would be fixing the world's problems you say!!
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
So my kid can do homework on his xbox now?
Can i strap my smartphone to my wrist, and, have the LCD readout in minecraft show the time?
I thought almost all these tricks in Minecraft were done using editor mode, not game mode. Thus no creepers to worry about, no mining, etc.
now someone should implement Minecraft in Minecraft :)
...is it open source?
Everybody would at least be trying to be a net positive part of the solution instead of neutral to net negative. As I said elsewhere in the thread, the ideal is probably neither Charles Manson or Mother Teresa, it is probably more like the Boy Scouts -- do a good turn daily and try to be no worse than neutral otherwise. And don't be a butt. Very important that.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
I thought almost all these tricks in Minecraft were done using editor mode, not game mode. Thus no creepers to worry about, no mining, etc.
There is no "editor mode" in Minecraft. There is an "Adventure mode" that you can select (it is a rather new option) intended primarily for custom maps that some hardcore players can subsequently redistribute for other interested players to check out. In this mode, you are correct that mining is generally (but not always) disabled and is intended for other people to "visit" a world but not do any building or block placement. You can also set it up that by default all players logging into a Minecraft server starts out in Adventure mode too. Mobs (including creepers) can still be found in this mode though and will still kill you.
There is also a "Creative mode" that allows you access to something called a "command block" which permits some funky sorts of programming and access to very basic functions of the game... and be done within the game so it isn't really modding either (a whole other topic and can of worms to deal with). This might be what you are talking about with "editor mode", as it gives you unlimited access to everything in the game so you can quickly destroy or place literally any block in any quantity. For players that just want to build really cool structures without the hassle of digging up the resources, it is a good way to play the game. A few other blocks are also available in creative mode that generally aren't available in other modes including an invisible block that can be used to restrict players to certain paths. Mobs still are around and creepers can still explode, but generally they leave you alone.
Most players do what is called "Survival Mode" where you deal with limited resources that you need to harvest. Diamonds are the hardest material to obtain (well... beyond some special stuff found in the Nether... a version of hell in an alternate plane of existence) due to the chain of tools that are needed to get at them in the first place not to mention most blocks of diamonds are covered in magma that can kill you very easily. Still, you can make these kind of exotic logic gate computers using Redstone within the game in this mode too. Trying to protect that computer from getting taken apart or blown up by mobs is a real challenge (and liberal use of torches in the game).
Additionally, you can select the difficulty level for how aggressive the mobs are, which can be set to "peaceful" where you don't even need to deal with them at all. I usually play at "normal" difficulty... but that is a preference.
Another really important question is just how much of the world's creative potential is devoted to creating meta-inventions on top of rulesets intended for something else entirely rather than, say, bringing about world peace, curing cancer, feeding the hungry, or just plain moving out of your mom's basement. Not that I am entirely without sin in this regard myself, but it is a sad commentary on the state of the world (virtual or not) that we appear to live in when solving vast and pointless artificial problems in a virtual reality is more appealing than tackling the real and serious problems that surround us.
Personally, I find that energy devoted to task is nothing like units expended i.e. not at all a zero-sum game. For myself, I can spend a long time working on tough math problems, and indeed feel very exhausted, but then when I turn to something else, like say cleaning up the kitchen, I do very well, in fact I do a better job then I would if I had not been working hard at something else for a while. Also, developing a tolerance to working on something tough translates well into doing (possibly more important) tough things later.
This could just be me.
Creative potential? It would be intellectually trivial to build a 6502 or Z80 in Minecraft - a simple matter of translating logic to redstone. Doing so would be an enormous amount of work akin to creating such a processor out of discrete transistors, but the creativity involved would be minimal and mostly involved with problems like how to allow circuits to cross paths.
Because it is a HOBBY? Because it is an simple intellectual venue, as valid as crosswords or sudoku?
Seriously, what's wrong with you? This is like LEGO, except the blocks are free and can do much more. I find amazing what people can do there.
What are YOU doing to cure cancer or feed the hungry?
oblig xkcd
http://xkcd.com/505/
Brilliant!
The only way you'd ever know is if there is a glitch in The Matrix...
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
To make a real OS instead of the crap they call Windows.