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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.
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.
Why not? Sometimes the best creations are not because of someone thinking a piece of software is useful, but to scratch an itch.
does it support vi or emacs commands?
Everyone needs a hobby.
The argument that anyone should be doing something better with their time is imo terrible, because if widely applied we would all be working towards cancer research or whatever thing society decided was most important. How can you just sit here reading slashdot when you could be out saving lives!
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.
Next thing you know, Minecraft will be self-hosting. Lord help us, the singularity awakes!
Maybe it will inspire a gifted youngster to learn digital electronics. Innovation often comes from playtime.
Think of what you could have done instead of reading slashdot. You could have arm-chair criticized someone else, for instance.
He serializes the data and sends it over a single redstone line... just like you would do in a real computer.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Enderman only steal a limited amount of block types. Coal, ores and paper are not amongst those.
Or so I guess. ;)
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
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... ;^)
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.
He serializes the data and sends it over a single redstone line... just like you would do in a real computer.
It's actually rather interesting. I think firstly the keyboard generates serial pulses directly, with the pulses encoded with redstone repeaters. This is a very nice solution to keyboard decoding. Secondly, minecraft is a lot slower than the real world so high speed problems crop up early. Routing 8 parallel wires would be a real pain and you'd start to get clock skew problems if you weren't really careful about keeping the path lengths the same.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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?
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?
Obviously a talented individual, think of that useful software could have been written with the same amount of time and effort.
I've been asked this question all my life.
When I decided I'd like to fly to the moon everyone asked why. "You could have spent your time and effort making a ship to fly to Australia," they said.
The time that I decided I'd like to write a series of novels that spanned generations of characters and several hundred years they said asked why as well. "Your time is better spent writing non-fiction and and historic account of something that really happened."
I remember one time when I decided to ride my bike to the other side of town. My grandfather said "Why? The bus is faster and you'll be less tired."
Sometimes I take a break from work. My co-workers ask me why when work is so rewarding anyway.
The other day I spent a crazy amount of money buying ingredients to make a very tasty meal (well, I thought it was). I was asked why. It provided my body the same energy as something I could have made using much cheaper ingredients.
Related to the above item, many of my friends ask me why I cook my own meals at all. If you look hard enough you can get someone else to cook something kind of similar for about the same cost.
I once decided to make my own analogue clock. I made all the gears and built it from scratch. Took ages. Cost a lot more than an analogue clock I could have purchased (and certainly a lot more than a digital clock).
Sometimes I do crosswords or solve other puzzles.
Even more occasionally I listen to music.
I go bushwalking (I am not sure of the American term -- walking in National Parks along trails?) and camping.
I could go on forever and for ever.
I don't need to do any of these things. I enjoy doing these things. I want to do these things. Most of them serve no practical purpose at all, apart from making me happy. That's not entirely true, though. If I set myself a goal that has no practical or useful purpose and achieve it I do get a reward. I even get a reward if I fail.
There is no purpose to life apart from being happy (IMO). And if doing something meaningless makes you happy then... then, well it's not meaningless is it?
ROTFL. Ah, shades of mongo.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
I meant to add...
When I am laying on my death bed and someone says "you did all these useless things -- you could have directed your talent towards really useful stuff and made lots of money", I will honestly be able to say "They were not useless; they made me happy. And that is what gave my life meaning."
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
When I am laying on my death bed and someone says "you did all these useless things -- you could have directed your talent towards really useful stuff and made lots of money", I will honestly be able to say "They were not useless; they made me happy. And that is what gave my life meaning."
That is indeed the most important and hope I will be able to say the same (though probalbly I'll have regrets). Everyone should do as they please, and usefullness in itself is not a good measure of activity. That being said, I somewhat understand the original poster who was modded troll: why not do something -possibly equally useless- in the real world instead of this minecraft thing? Instead of simulating the Tour de France on a home-trainer, why not go out and cycle? Both are equally useful or useless, but one has more appeal than the other.
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.
Keep doing what you like, what you are best. This is how we produce, as a species, the advances, the new insights and the culture we need to understand ourselves. I bet Picasso heard many times "if only you painted that way"... As for the work of the guy in minecraft, that is an AWESOME educational tool. Millions of kids eyes are in minecraft, we must teach them THERE, make them interact and understand devices like the word processor, gate arrays, computers. Its a MUCH better, and interactive, way of learning.
Thanks for the response. Well put. I was not meaning to belittle what was accomplished, but just as to the why. If it brings great joy to that individual, AWESOME, keep on!
He made an awesome minecraft thing instead of curing cancer likely for the same reason we are posting to slashdot instead of curing cancer :P
I just wish I possessed that same talent as to where I could use it for other purposes.
Don't we all.
I too wish I had the knowledge, talent, and energy to do something world changing and/or useful to many - but alas I am not as learned, intelligent, or capable of doing so (and at my age it's mostly all down hill from here)
And although I have the knowledge to build an ACU and simple CPU from the gate level up, as well as love minecraft as much as the next geek, I'm both not certain I could actually do it in redstone nor have the energy and time to try and find out.
Living vicariously through people such as Koala_Steamed is as close as I likely will get, but the awe and impressiveness of their effort is still great for me, likely only to be topped by trying and succeeding at the task myself.
If their creation has that much of a positive effect on me, I can hardly imagine how much of one it has on them for being among those who have actually built them. That's plenty of good reason to do so there alone.
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.
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.