4 ms·
Trying to understand the excitement around this. Is it uncommon for games to be turing complete? I imagine a lot of modern games are complex enough to pass turi
by hcnews 7y ago
Trying to understand the excitement around this. Is it uncommon for games to be turing complete? I imagine a lot of modern games are complex enough to pass turing completeness check.
- bduerst 7y agoIt's more or less an feat in problem solving. Given a specific set of limitations in simulation, can you recreate and solve this computation problem? For some games, like Minecraft (redstone) and Factorio (logic gates) it's easy, but for others it's difficult enough that you get to see some creativity. This is one of those latter instances.
- desmondw 7y agoInterestingly, Minecraft only added redstone to explicitly allow logic gates after users had found out how to create them out of flowing water and other select blocks.
- gowld 7y agoMinecraft construction is weird. Minecraft's reason for existing is that people think it's fun to make simple things mind-numbingly hard by using the crudest lowest-level building blocks, each block simualting with horridly monstrous gobs of computing powes). So it's the worst of both worlds -- an expensive simulator for tediously manipulting low-level primitives. Why not manipulate primivitives efficiently, or use high-level constructs? Then serious Minecraft constructors build mods and tools to automate the tedium back out anyway, so they design whatever nice things using high level tools, but then execute and inspect the builds on inefficient computing systems of cryptocurrency-level of wastefulness. Why not just make whatever thing you want out of good (virtual or physical) materials in the first place, and then put it under the microscope/oscilloscop/decompiler/hex-editor to marvel at its complex structure?
- empath75 7y agoMinecraft is a game about killing zombies and building forts. You just happen to also be able to compute with it.
- natpalmer1776 7y agoTo actually answer your question: Barrier of Entry.
- Kiro 7y agoPretty sure the people building calculators in Minecraft are on a CS level where the Barrier of Entry is no problem.
- Kiro 7y agoObviously you're completely missing the point and I feel sad that you're so far off that I don't even know what to say in order to explain it to you.
- billfruit 7y agoI am always on the lookout for something like Minecraft, but is geared towards construction in a large scale without the restriction of a first person view, ie having an RTS style zoomable God camera.
- skybrian 7y agoIt's not unusual, but if you know the game, it's fun to see how it's done.
- keyle 7y agoWhat's partly amusing and partly astounding is the time this person took to do it, re-do it, test it, write it and prove it. I think that's where most of the excitement comes from. We get excited by things that are theoretically possibly but no one would waste their time doing it until someone does.
- H8crilA 7y agoTwo/three counters with increment, decrement and test for zero operations is a Turing complete system: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_machine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_machine In practice it's actually hard to make something with a potentially infinite memory that is not Turing complete.