Sure he built a computer inside a game, but the fact that said computer will be able to understand a programming language makes this even more awesome.

Godspeed smart person.

Impressive, and although this one is not as powerful, I give it bonus points for having a proper display.

Someone show that guy the sun, I doubt hes seen it for years.

This reminds of the guy who made a computer in Dwarf Fortress. This is, however, a little more impressive, as it seems to run a bit better.

Although the former is still very, very cool, as he did make a computer in a fantasy game.

I knew someone would do this eventually.

Uber Waddles:
First real step towards making a virtual reality.

A computer within a computer sounds like a VERY interesting premise.

... so, that being said, WHAT THE HELL IS MINECRAFT AND WHY IS IT SO POPULAR LATELY?

Pretty much this.

Oh God! It's the computer evolution all over again! But in Minecraft!
Still, this is quite away from becoming an actual computer. The title is quite misleading concerning that.

He has no life. And although it's probably fun to build a computer in a game (maybe one dat it can play minecraft) I don't think it has much usage. I mean, everyone knows that 2+1=3 right?

[Sev] people who put that much effort into something as meaningless as this
[Sev] are really wasting their talent
<OhJohnNo> would you rather they blow the world up and crash the server with dynamite?
[Sev] YES.

(an IRC channel I visit)

We were referring to this:

This game looks cool, but I know I wouldn't be able to do anything in it due to massive creativity deficit when it comes to physically building stuff. I'll just satify myself with watching everyone else's magnificent creations.

icyneesan:
Yo dawg I heard you like computers so we put a computer in your computer so you can play minecraft while you play minecraft!!

That's something they're actually working on: MetaMinecraft.

That's pretty damn awesome, but I bet he wishes he'd stuck with a 4-bit one like everyone else. Also, was it built by hand, or with a map editor?

Sticking to 4-bit logic, and the intent to make something that can run standard code... how about a virtual intel 4004? About the most basic microprocessor ever... add in the companion 4001 thru 4003 chips (I think they were RAM, ROM and clock gen?) and you could probably implement some kind of enormous desk calculator or the like, including pressure plates for the number and operator keys, and a simplistic 7seg-like output, rather than having to flip endless switches and read binary off torches. Plus the speed would be more suitable.
(However, was there ever an "actual" computer made with the 4004? Anything that could run a recognisable game, for instance? Even tic-tac-toe?)

It's always the problem with these things that it's quite easy to emulate a very simplistic system - such as building, or even prototyping something on a 4004 level with breadboards and transistors - but going anything higher than that would be backbreaking at best, more likely impossible, and stress the simulation environment's physics and render engine (or indeed, be so large IRL that signal propagation time and strength actually does become an issue) so much that it'd be heinously slow.

Make it RISC and low-bit, in the name of speed. It's not like making a 16 bit one will confer much advantage :) I mean, just imagine trying to make a virtual 68000 to take advantage of it. A Z80, 8008/8080 or 6502/6800 level cpu would be hard enough to simulate (8 bit internal, 16 bit external).
(hey, why not 6-bit? there were enough 60s/70s era minicomputers built on 12, 18, etc bit width technology. there's no rule saying you have to stick to powers of 2. 64 addresses of 6 bits each gives you the equivalent of 48 bytes to play with, vs 8 for a 4-bit or 256 for 8-bit addressing, and plenty enough opcodes, display capability, etc without being as exponentially massive. Go up to 12 bit multiplexing I/O if you need to - a good 3kbyte's worth of memory space)

The metaminecraft thing... I can't see it working. You're going to have to simulate something of the level of an atari VCS at the very least, which would push the very boundaries of the 4/6 bit systems posited above, and require several days to grind through the same number of clock cycles as even that would manage in one second (it ran at a few hundred khz). For something more like what the thread OP actually envisages, you'd need a Commodore PET, Sinclair ZX81, etc... 8-bit with the equivalent of 64x48 pixel displays and at least 1kbyte RAM (preferably 4, 8, 16k), and 0.75 to 4mhz processing speed. If the example circuits are chugging through about three cycles per second on a decent machine (30fps) and according to the official literature can go up to maybe 6 (16? i forget. still not many) cycles/sec on a fast one (100+ fps), even 750khz (zx81 slow mode, as used for drawing the scene on, e.g., 3D monster maze) will take a scale speed of ~46000 seconds per game-second. Or in other words, 13 hours. If we're cramming 4mhz into 3 cycles/sec, well, that's 15 days... 3DMM needed about a half second to draw each update (and several seconds in "fast" (3mhz) to generate the game world with no display)... are you willing to wait a month for the game field to be generated each time you want to play, and a week for each move to take place? It'd be like playing chess by mail. Tedious and impossible to debug.

Ah, now there's something that minecraft could probably handle... computer chess. 16x16 board, only 6 different kinds of piece (12 when colours taken into account - can be represented with a 2x2 torch array, for a 32x32 board) and quite simple play rules. Might not be able to have any AI, but certainly checks for illegal moves, automatic piece removal, win/lose/check/stalemate conditions etc.

Or hey ... why not some seperate redstone circuit simulation utility. You could build your circuits in it and see what they could do at much higher speed... and at least say "this COULD run in minecraft, but until we have much more powerful PCs, it's not practical".

Alternatively it'd be an interesting environment to explore the limits of what massively parallel processing can do for you. It'd be a bit like the human brain. Maybe 10 ticks per second, but each tick deals with a great many different processing tasks simultaneously... and is also somewhat asynchronous. Maybe we could simulate an ant brain.

Arrgh my head :D

It's huge! This is apparently what you'd need to do to create a working computer out of sticks and rocks, so it's fascinating from that point.

I love minecraft, but I don't have anything more impressive than a half-formed "doom tower" and subway rail. I simply don't have enough hours in the day to make something like this (even if I understood computer programing).

Actually... did he mine all that himself, or use some sort of exploit...?

As impressive as it is.. It seems a bit.. Stupid.. Its great to see that it can be done, but why? Why spend so much time of your life creating something like that in a game? In the end its about as amazing as it is dull. Is there some level of intelligence he's trying to prove? It's like geek overcompensation, congratulations, you can build a computer in a game, but will it ever really affect anything?

lacktheknack:

OhJohnNo:
[Sev] people who put that much effort into something as meaningless as this
[Sev] are really wasting their talent
<OhJohnNo> would you rather they blow the world up and crash the server with dynamite?
[Sev] YES.

(an IRC channel I visit)

We were referring to this:

This game looks cool, but I know I wouldn't be able to do anything in it due to massive creativity deficit when it comes to physically building stuff. I'll just satify myself with watching everyone else's magnificent creations.

A. Wow. I didn't know you could blow the server out of existence.

B. Build a castle in a tree, a golden temple in a mountain side, a cart bridge over two mountains, a greenhouse suspended from an overhang, and a storage block in the ocean. There, I've given you two weeks of material. People who say "I'm not creative enough" haven't tried.

As it turns out, I now have another problem. A friend of mine came round and tried to download Minecraft so he could log in and show it to me - and it turns out my comp's graphics card isn't good enough. And I can't install a better one, because my ex-server can't handle it without repeatedly crashing. The one game that works on my PC is the 11-year old game Homeworld (which is admittedly the best game ever).

Needless to say, I was rather pissed.

Kragg:
hate those guys who clearly just imported a pic but claim to have built it :(

From the youtube video description:
The design was drawn up in a program called Redstone Simulator (does what it says on the tin), which was written by Baezon on the Minecraft Forums http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtop...

MCEdit ( http://minecraftforums.net/viewtopic.... ) was used to help clear off space and import the design into minecraft. Hours of experimenting with prototypes, modifications to the design, and debugging took place in the game itself, however.

lacktheknack:

Wow. Just... buy yourself a new $300 computer.

If only it were that easy. Still living with my parents, I don't have a spare £50 lying around, let alone £300. All my comps so far have been gotten for free, which is presumably why they're so shit.

XD 'You listening Pig?' at 6:00! Classic!

This is mind-blowingly impressive stuff. And extremely meta...

How do you....

A computer out of rocks and sticks.....

Formica Archonis:

Greg Tito:
The project is far from complete as he plans to add RAM and registers to make it a legitimate computer.

And then port Minecraft to it.

But seriously, it's impressive work. I heard tell that this guy's getting job offers because of this.

LOLZ Make minecraft inside minecraft. That would be a game.

well, that completly emasculated my castle.

Nah, this is beyond any in game computer yet. Mainly the compiler.. He could theoretically implement "Brainfuck". ^ ^

I mean, computer in a game sure. But a compiler.. That's pretty cool.

"OH SHIT A CREEPER" Syndrome just got worse.

Troll Reply: now if we have a computer in a computer we can have infinite computation on a very small amount of hardware!Also all we need to do is make allot of dirt,pigs, and red stone and shove it into the console and set it up in an infinite circuit and we can have infinite power too! HOLY SHIT MINE-CRAFT IS TEH BOSS OF PHYSICS.