151–160 of 162 posts
My son has gotten into designing logic circuit with Redstone. I wish I could get him to do the same with 74xx/54xx parts.
You’re all going to hate on me for this, so first let me say that this is amazing. I’m awed by it. Truly. And I am very familiar with minecraft and even have been known to do a bit of redstone hacking myself I love seeing the cool things some folks do with it. (I’ve some redstone sorting algorithms and I’m esp fond of redstone Turing machines!) But this! This is like sending a person to mars! And I have the same ques…
Because in the real world there are people in power who do not want those things to happen, unless it disproportionately benefits them at the expense of the people actually doing the work.
In Minecraft there are no busy bodies, gate keepers, monopolists, financial institutions or regulations preventing people from doing peaceful intellectual activities. The certification necessary to become a computer scientist takes 16 years, in Minecraft you don't need any certification you can just do it on day one.
The other reason is that building a computer in redstone isn't that impressive, it is like building your own computer in a CS course which has been done over and over again by many students.
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Think of it as art rather than science. Do we question why someone created a piece of art, or whether they could have spent their time better by creating a different piece of art?
Hmmm. Okay. Fair point. Although it actually is science. And these folks could be doing real science.
Pretty cool. The program itself was written in an existing intermediate language called URCL, which was then compiled to CHUNGUS2 assembly. CHUNGUS2 is the processor made with Minecraft's redstone mechanics. The processor was emulated for development, but the demo is running on MCHPRS, a Minecraft server that uses Wasmtime's Cranelift to JIT the redstone operations, which are represented as a weighted directed graph.…
> Before MCHPRS optimizing redstone performance using compiler techniques was not thought to be possible. They created a virtual machine with a custom instruction set. Why wouldn't an optimized JIT work?
Cool! Now build it in Turing Complete and export it to an FPGA
From KiCad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KiCad : > KiCad is a free software suite for electronic design automation (EDA). It facilitates the design and simulation of electronic hardware. It features an integrated environment for schematic capture, PCB layout, manufacturing file viewing, SPICE simulation, and engineering calculation. Tools exist within the package to create bill of materials, artwork, Gerber files, an…
Quantum complexity theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_complexity_theory#Back... :
> A complexity class is a collection of computational problems that can be solved by a computational model under certain resource constraints. For instance, the complexity class P is defined as the set of problems solvable by a Turing machine in polynomial time. Similarly, quantum complexity classes may be defined using quantum models of computation, such as the quantum circuit model or the equivalent quantum Turing machine. One of the main aims of quantum complexity theory is to find out how these classes relate to classical complexity classes such as P, NP, BPP, and PSPACE.
> One of the reasons quantum complexity theory is studied are the implications of quantum computing for the modern Church-Turing thesis. In short the modern Church-Turing thesis states that any computational model can be simulated in polynomial time with a probabilistic Turing machine. [1][2] However, questions around the Church-Turing thesis arise in the context of quantum computing. It is unclear whether the Church-Turing thesis holds for the quantum computation model. There is much evidence that the thesis does not hold. It may not be possible for a probabilistic Turing machine to simulate quantum computation models in polynomial time. [1]
> Both quantum computational complexity of functions and classical computational complexity of functions are often expressed with asymptotic notation. Some common forms of asymptotic notion of functions are \Omega(T(n)) and \Theta(T(n)).
> \Theta(T(n)) expresses that something is bounded above by cT(n) where c is a constant such that c>0 and T(n) is a function of n, \Omega(T(n)) expresses that something is bounded below by cT(n) where c is a constant such that c>0 and T(n) is a function of n, and \Theta(T(n)) expresses both O(T(n)) and \Omega(T(n)). [3] These notations also their own names. O(T(n)) is called Big O notation, \Omega(T(n)) is called Big Omega notation, and \Theta(T(n)) is called Big Theta notation.
Quantum complexity theory > Simulation of quantum circuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_complexity_theory#Simu... :
> There is no known way to efficiently simulate a quantum computational model with a classical computer. This means that a classical computer cannot simulate a quantum computational model in polynomial time [P]. However, a quantum circuit of S(n) qubits with T(n) quantum gates can be simulated by a classical circuit with O(2^{S(n)}T(n)^{3}) classical gates. [3] This number of classical gates is obtained by determining how many bit operations are necessary to simulate the quantum circuit. In order to do this, first the amplitudes associated with the S(n) qubits must be accounted for. Each of the states of the S(n) qubits can be described by a two-dimensional complex vector, or a state vector. These state vectors can also be described a linear combination of its component vectors with coefficients called amplitudes. These amplitudes are complex numbers which are normalized to one, meaning the sum of the squares of the absolute values of the amplitudes must be one. [3] The entries of the state vector are these amplitudes.
Quantum Turing machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Turing_machine
Quantum circuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_circuit
Church-Turing-Deutsch principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing%E2%80%93...
Computational complexity > Quantum computing, Distributed computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity#Quant...
If you like to ponder physiological implications and deeper themes of such worlds in worlds and what it can mean, in a fun way, I recommend the (sci-fi) book Permutation City (Greg Egan), from 1994. It also contains an artificial world, called the Autoverse that felt to me like Minecraft when I read the story. But it is taken a lot further...
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this may be a stupid question: is it CPU or GPU dependent, Can it be "sharded" and run on multiple machines in cloud?
There are no stupid questions ;) To my understanding, this is almost a pure CPU task, like how normal minecraft currently works. Which would actually make sharding a little easier if they implemented it (sounds like they haven't). The GPU is an interesting point though. There's probably a ton of simple matrix multiplying in the machine's design that could benefit from a GPU.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
this may be a stupid question: is it CPU or GPU dependent, Can it be "sharded" and run on multiple machines in cloud?
There are no stupid questions ;) To my understanding, this is almost a pure CPU task, like how normal minecraft currently works. Which would actually make sharding a little easier if they implemented it (sounds like they haven't). The GPU is an interesting point though. There's probably a ton of simple matrix multiplying in the machine's design that could benefit from a GPU.
How would someone get into designing/simulating CPUs and computers other than Minecraft? Is there any software for learning and implementing "simple" logic circuits, memory, etc?
There is a good https://nandgame.com/
You may want to use some simulating software like a verilog interpreters or logic simulators. I do not know a good one, I'm not a specialist it that stuff.
And... If you have a couple of months to waste... You can try Factorio.