Can a 'minecrafter' explain a little more please?
I know you get 1x1 blocks of wood/stone/etc. How do the pieces move? Are there simple on/off switches? Gunpowder + fire for wires?
16-year-old Makes Working Scientific Calculator in Minecraft
21–30 of 80 posts
Re: 16-year-old Makes Working Scientific Calculator in Minecraft
#22I am really afraid that although this 16-year old (I don't like the patronizing kid word) has made something of immense creativity and of intrinsic value, he'll face such a drastic world that limits a lot of creative potential by the idiosyncrasies of mature reality.
I really hope talented people like this guy be given full-throttle. They are the real capital, not the tools.
Re: 16-year-old Makes Working Scientific Calculator in Minecraft
#23Can a 'minecrafter' explain a little more please? I know you get 1x1 blocks of wood/stone/etc. How do the pieces move? Are there simple on/off switches? Gunpowder + fire for wires?
There are a variety of switches and buttons, wire, NOR gates, and a small handful of mechanical devices, the most important of which are pistons that allow you to move blocks around.
Re: 16-year-old Makes Working Scientific Calculator in Minecraft
#24Can a 'minecrafter' explain a little more please? I know you get 1x1 blocks of wood/stone/etc. How do the pieces move? Are there simple on/off switches? Gunpowder + fire for wires?
In the game there is a resource known as redstone. It can be acquired underground when mining in the game or made available in the game's creative mode. With it you can build various kinds of circuits. The game also includes various input and output blocks, such as buttons, switches, lights, and pistons. Put together, the player can do anything from as simple as a button opening a door to as complex as the article describes.
Re: 16-year-old Makes Working Scientific Calculator in Minecraft
#25This is very very impressive, though I hope the kid's next project is some creative and useful applications rather than another Minecraft undertaking.
This is today's version of building your own computer on wire wrap in your garage. I don't think you'd go back in time and tell Woz/Jobs that the Home Computing Club or the Apple 1 weren't useful. If a 16 year old understands in detail how a graphing calculator works from a raw bit-logic level, then I think it speaks that they'll have a much more interesting career in store for them than 99.99% of 16 year olds.
This. This is what people who critique the kid fail to understand. He built a processor, from scratch, with a solid understanding of binary math, at age 16.
I'd knock him too.. if I were intimidated as opposed to impressed.
Re: 16-year-old Makes Working Scientific Calculator in Minecraft
#26Can a 'minecrafter' explain a little more please? I know you get 1x1 blocks of wood/stone/etc. How do the pieces move? Are there simple on/off switches? Gunpowder + fire for wires?
There’s a redstone resource, which you can lay down as wires. These behave like electronic circuits. There are some special blocks like redstone torches and repeaters.
Some other blocks can be powered or triggered by redstone, for example pistons that push blocks, doors and item dispensers.
Re: 16-year-old Makes Working Scientific Calculator in Minecraft
#27Could Minecraft be that little thing that teaches kids about logic? Maybe Jeb and co. should consider adding even simpler logic based building blocks, more akin to Lego's Mindstorm as an alternative to relays and switches. I find it fascinating to think in 10-20 years many will be looking back fondly on how they learned to hack with an unassuming little game: Minecraft.
That's where mods like Redpower comes in.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/365357-123-eloraams-mods...
The mods are really what set Minecraft apart.
Re: 16-year-old Makes Working Scientific Calculator in Minecraft
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minecraft is awesome because it provides a convenient and ready simulator for this kind of work. It gets people interested and involved. It just seems much more accessible than downloading a "real" simulator somewhere online. I think MC provides a great mechanism for exploration in electronics/circuitry and something like this proves it. What do you want this person to do instead?
> What do you want this person to do instead? I get that Minecraft is fun , but wouldn't it have been more practical , in the long run, to have built something equally cool in a real CAD/HDL/etc. software? It'd be really cool if someone could build a CAD/HDL/programming "IDE" that was as "fun" to "play" as Minecraft, but still as "useful" as something used in "the real world." But I suppose this is the same desire th…
true story. when I was 16 ( way back in the early 90s), my parents enrolled me in niit.com (presently a billion USD company that was at the time a tiny 3-room outfit ). niit taught cobol. I hated everything about cobol. I thought it was a shit language and the people who taught me cobol were shit. We were supposed to build an inventory control module in cobol. I didn't know what an inventory was, so they gave me an econ book about manufacturing & inventory. I thought it was absolutely dumb to keep track of nuts & bolts & accounting & money & suchlike. So I wrote a cobol program to calculate the fourier coefficients of complex exponentials, since that's what I was studying at school. So my cobol program would painstakingly calculate the first five fourier coefficients of sawtooth waves & square waves & then using the partial sum, it would reconstruct the expansion by printing out the series on a dot matrix printer. All of this was running on some processor called intel 80286 xt and it would take 10 full minutes to just compile the code. One day I was standing by the dot matrix when the instructor walked in. He thought I was some precocious kid who had coded up a whizbang inventory module for acme corportation, so he expected nice tables with rows & columns of data on optimal number of nuts & bolts. But when he saw the printer slowly rolling out sawtooth waves and square waves of various frequencies, he completely lost it & yelled at me for wasting the precious resources of the dot matrix printer to do frivolous nonsense. I got a F on cobol.
Re: 16-year-old Makes Working Scientific Calculator in Minecraft
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minecraft is awesome because it provides a convenient and ready simulator for this kind of work. It gets people interested and involved. It just seems much more accessible than downloading a "real" simulator somewhere online. I think MC provides a great mechanism for exploration in electronics/circuitry and something like this proves it. What do you want this person to do instead?
> What do you want this person to do instead? I get that Minecraft is fun , but wouldn't it have been more practical , in the long run, to have built something equally cool in a real CAD/HDL/etc. software? It'd be really cool if someone could build a CAD/HDL/programming "IDE" that was as "fun" to "play" as Minecraft, but still as "useful" as something used in "the real world." But I suppose this is the same desire th…
CAD is expensive, or confusing, or both. It's not much fun. The kit needed to play with HDL is expensive.
Really, this guy just needs a bit of sponsorship and guidance. Some tech company should send him "stuff"[1] and they'd earn some nice publicity.
[1] Development kits or test equipment or robots or whatever. And good books for it all. And maybe a gentle syllabus.
Re: 16-year-old Makes Working Scientific Calculator in Minecraft
#30This is very very impressive, though I hope the kid's next project is some creative and useful applications rather than another Minecraft undertaking.
This is today's version of building your own computer on wire wrap in your garage. I don't think you'd go back in time and tell Woz/Jobs that the Home Computing Club or the Apple 1 weren't useful. If a 16 year old understands in detail how a graphing calculator works from a raw bit-logic level, then I think it speaks that they'll have a much more interesting career in store for them than 99.99% of 16 year olds.
+1
I don't think HardyLeung understand that this kid had to handle every bit. Had to build his own integrated memory. This young man obviously has an incredible understanding of binary math. Beyond all this He had to deal with the weird physics, and rules of circuits in Minecraft.
If I was this kids parents, I would let him play Minecraft all he wants. In fact, don't stop playing Minecraft.