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8-bit Turing complete computer that I made in Factorio (2019)

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Re: 8-bit Turing complete computer that I made in Factorio (2019)

#41

Post by sterlind »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #21
linkdd wrote: post #5

Neat! Reminds me of: - Pacman in Factorio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VR_b9YwqH8 - Raycasting 3D engine in Factorio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28UzqVz1r24 My main questions are: - how long does it take? - how does Factorio compare to VS Code as an IDE?

The video is in real-time, and calculating Fibbonacci is probably 4 instructions in the CPU, so you can get an idea of how fast it is.

way faster than Minecraft though! it can take a minute per instruction in the redstone videos I've seen. probably because Minecraft works on ticks affecting adjacent voxels and Factorio is more like labview (not to mention its seemingly excellent engine perf.)

Re: 8-bit Turing complete computer that I made in Factorio (2019)

#43

Post by arc-in-space »

optimalsolver wrote: post #25

I often wonder if these types of games are sapping away the intellectual potential of humanity. They're explicitly geared to lure in the kind of obsessive tinkerer types who've historically driven scientific and engineering progress. Only now, there's little to no payoff for the rest of humanity if they spend thousands of hours consumed by one of these games. What's Newton's modern equivalent doing right now? Probabl…

I'd think that far more productive time of brilliant people is lost in wasteful business data shovelling jobs.

Re: 8-bit Turing complete computer that I made in Factorio (2019)

#44

Post by elihu »

optimalsolver wrote: post #25

I often wonder if these types of games are sapping away the intellectual potential of humanity. They're explicitly geared to lure in the kind of obsessive tinkerer types who've historically driven scientific and engineering progress. Only now, there's little to no payoff for the rest of humanity if they spend thousands of hours consumed by one of these games. What's Newton's modern equivalent doing right now? Probabl…

The payoff for humanity right now is that it gives people something to do while they're bored and socially isolated.

My favorite unrealistic and whimsical solution to the pandemic is for the government to buy everyone a copy of Factorio (maybe a laptop too if they don't have one) and have vaccine eligibility order determined by how fast you launch a rocket. The entire country has a momentary national obsession with non-deadlocking rail systems, and in a couple weeks the pandemic is over because no one has left their house in that time.

I do think Factorio is a good tool for understanding and appreciating supply chains and logistics. It's amazing to me that there are real-world factories producing real-world complex products like cars, and the whole process is far more complex than some optimized rocket control module production setup in Factorio. It's something most people just don't interact with, except as a consumer of the final product or maybe they have a job contributing to some tiny part of the entire production system.

Re: 8-bit Turing complete computer that I made in Factorio (2019)

#45

Post by CGamesPlay »

sterlind wrote: post #41
CGamesPlay wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video is in real-time, and calculating Fibbonacci is probably 4 instructions in the CPU, so you can get an idea of how fast it is.

way faster than Minecraft though! it can take a minute per instruction in the redstone videos I've seen. probably because Minecraft works on ticks affecting adjacent voxels and Factorio is more like labview (not to mention its seemingly excellent engine perf.)

It's probably more related to the fact that the basic building blocks in Factorio are much higher level than in Minecraft. You create these out of wires (adders), arithmetic combinators (any other arithmetic operator), and decider combinators (comparisons). Additionally, you have 2 "channels" for data (red and green wires), and "data" is actually a vector of numbers (since each wire carries a "count" for each "item type").

Re: 8-bit Turing complete computer that I made in Factorio (2019)

#46

Post by reportgunner »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #4

I started playing Factorio and fell in love. Then I started to watch tutorials on how to make better iron smelters and the guy said he has 1000 hours of Factorio gameplay. I quit Factorio right there. I decided to spend my time learning something IRL and started learning how to make DAPPs.

What DAPPs have you made since ?

Re: 8-bit Turing complete computer that I made in Factorio (2019)

#47

Post by Scarblac »

stcredzero wrote: post #14
Natsu wrote: post #6

It always amazes me when people make things like this. It feels like there's something special about games that can be programmed within the game, because some of the best games all have that feature: Minecraft, Terraria, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, etc. Though it's hard to even specify that because there are some where it's not really part of the game per se (e.g. arbitrary code execution in Super Mario World) though…

It always amazes me when people make things like this. It's even been done with Conway's Life. https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Turing_machine It's too bad Notch never finished that space-themed game he was once planning. I remember when HN went crazy with implementations of his spec for a simple, memory-mapped 8-bit computer that was going to be central to that game. I'm planning to introduce scripting into my proced…

> It's even been done with Conway's Life.

Well that was the whole point, he was looking for the simplest possible cellular automaton that was complete. It wasn't necessarily the original point of Dwarf Fortress.

Re: 8-bit Turing complete computer that I made in Factorio (2019)

#48

Post by Scarblac »

thewakalix wrote: post #20
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Not everybody needs to build stuff or achieve things IRL. And that's perfectly fine." Probably the answer to the Fermi Paradox.

I disagree. There's an asymmetry -- you only need one expansionist civilization to disturb the pristine universe that we observe, no matter how many civilizations are content with staying home and remaining quiet. (Relevant: the unilateralist's curse, https://nickbostrom.com/papers/unilateralist.pdf .)

First, expansionism needs to be possible. Chemical rockets combined with large biological life forms seem to rule out interstellar colonization.

Re: 8-bit Turing complete computer that I made in Factorio (2019)

#49

Post by nmeofthestate »

Funny that it's 8-bit when every Factorio 'wire' can transmit dozens of 32-bit signed ints simultaneously. Presumably it's just emulating a binary style computer rather than some novel architecture tailored to the capabilities of the Factorio circuit network.

Re: 8-bit Turing complete computer that I made in Factorio (2019)

#50

Post by pjc50 »

Factorio is interesting because the circuit system is pretty much designed for doing computation in. For a while I wondered whether it would be possible to build a computer in Factorio without using the facilities intended for it and instead Heath-Robinsoning it together out of other things. Trains, for example; an empty train is a set of "holes" that could be used to make a trainsistor?

Unfortunately there aren't a lot of reversible transformations in Factorio, or mechanisms for one thing to influence another without being consumed.

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