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Minecraft@Home
- siraben 6y agoOne recent notable achievement by Minecraft@Home was the discovery[0] of the start screen panorama seed which was seen from Beta 1.8 up to 1.12. Reverse engineering Minecraft seeds is an impressive feat given that the search space is so large. The finding of Pewdiepie's survival Minecraft world seed was achieved (without Minecraft@Home) despite him revealing his coordinates via F3 only twice in the entire series[1][2][3]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/hthrmk/big_news_we_have_found_the_seed_of_minecrafts/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/hthrmk/big_news_... [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=LE8ml2hZVZM https://youtube.com/watch?v=LE8ml2hZVZM [2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=MbAymA6OAa4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=MbAymA6OAa4 [3] https://youtube.com/watch?v=qWnTRNw4mDY https://youtube.com/watch?v=qWnTRNw4mDY
- siraben 6y agoI should also follow up with a technique that might be of interest to programmers. Some Minecraft blocks have textures that appear rotated in one of four ways. Turns out this rotation is pseudorandom, the rotation number is a result of seeding Java's rand.nextLong() with the (x,y,z) coordinate of that block.[0] This has been used for "malicious" purposes such as finding the location of a base from a single screenshot, which can lead to its destruction on anarchy servers. The author of the linked video used a CUDA search to find the location of a wall of netherrack. [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=6__hO4cc1pA https://youtube.com/watch?v=6__hO4cc1pA
- Balgair 6y agoAside: 2b2t is the most notable of MC anarchy servers. Whenever I read about it, I'm amazed at the machinations of the people that play there. It's kinda like reading Eve Online after action reports of their big battles. I've no inclination to play on 2b2t, but it's great reading all the same.
- Nannooskeeska 6y agoI have the same feeling about Dwarf Fortress. I absolutely love reading DF stories (see [0]), but the couple times I tried to play I just couldn't get into it. [0] https://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/ https://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/
- kiaulen 6y agoI'm with you. Also hopeful that the DF steam release comes with a slightly easier to use UI. If you want similarly hilarious stories, try rimworld.
- sorahn 6y agoI'm curious about what the implications of some of these projects will be for 2b2t. Given that the seed is known, couldn't people start finding bases from screenshots using some of these clusters of 'rotations of textures 'tricks?
- siraben 6y agoYes, these techniques have been used to find bases and destroy them. Along with the texture rotation trick, there's also the position of bedrock whose distribution is fixed in every Minecraft world, so if you show exposed bedrock during a base tour you are at risk of leaking coordinates. Natural terrain is also another factor, so share enough images of the area surrounding the base and it can be leaked similarly. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7Jz9RMybfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7Jz9RMybfM
- hinkley 6y agoShouldn't... I know that Minecraft lazily generates the world, so the RNG for an arbitrary location has to be deterministic otherwise you get a mess. Why isn't the RNG for tiles based on the world seed and the location? That's at least a billion times more search space, still deterministic.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoI never thought about cracking seeds but apparrently based on location and details of the terrain its not impossible: https://gitlab.com/taleden/MCeed-A https://gitlab.com/taleden/MCeed-A
- Qub3d 6y agoThere is a really interesting ongoing project to find the seed used for the default world and server icons: Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbR8ZY1Nsm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbR8ZY1Nsm8 Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7f9tMslVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7f9tMslVE Part 2 covers most of the efforts to reverse-engineer the seed.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoThis is quite fascinating, I hope they find it, I'm surprised they havent just emailed Mojang about it.
- johanj 6y agoPart 2 of the videos mentions that Notch replied, saying that he doesn’t remember where the image is from, and that it’s likely coming from a world generated with a random seed.
- sorahn 6y agoDinnerbone has also commented on reddit threads saying they support the project, but they don't think there's anything else mojang can do to help.
- gruez 6y ago>One recent notable achievement by Minecraft@Home was the discovery[0] of the start screen panorama seed which was seen from Beta 1.8 up to 1.12. Can't this be done by reverse engineering the .jar files? You'd think that the start screen would be procedually generated from a seed (eg. rather than load_world_from_file("start_screen.map"), you'd do generate_world_from_seed("my seed"), because that's way easier than hard coding in the generated world.
- 7786655 6y agoThe start screen is just an image with some distortion.
- trollied 6y agoA TL;DR for people: 'This project attempts to find the world seed of the iconic panorama image which appeared in the background of the main menu of Minecraft between 2011 and 2018.' Essentially it's Folding@Home but for finding a specific Minecraft world seed.
- I_Byte 6y agoThey actually already found the panorama world seed [1]! Currently they are working on figuring out what the tallest naturally generated cactus in Minecraft is and so far they found a world seed with a cactus that is 22 blocks tall [2]. This project however is just a filler until they get some more work done trying to figure out how to best brute force the world seed of the iconic pack.png image [3]. [1] - https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/forum_thread.php?id=42#288 https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/forum_thread.php?i... [2] - https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/forum_thread.php?id=14#116 https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/forum_thread.php?i... [3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7f9tMslVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7f9tMslVE (Interesting bit is around 7:50)
- ScannerSparkly 6y agoInteresting project!
- arnaudsm 6y agoThis is basically virtual archeology, nice work !
- yreg 6y ago>For the third time in 1 week, Minecraft@Home has broken the tallest cactus height record in normal terrain generation. I present, a 22 block tall cactus. This is so neat!
- solarkraft 6y agoHow is this related to pack.png (https://packpng.com/ https://packpng.com/)? Same community, some overlap, no overlap?
- qqii 6y agoEssentially the same people figureheads leading the project.
- gambiting 6y agoI mean, it's cool, but somehow it really rubs me the wrong way. Obviously, I'm not going to tell anyone how to use their computing power, but I'm personally contributing to Folding@Home instead.
- nuccy 6y agoGenerally I agree, I also contributed to SETI@Home and Folding@Home. The aim is somewhat "strange", but the whole value of all this may actually be not in the aim itself, but in the activity to reach it, particularly algorithms and techniques, which are developed (e.g. see @siraben comment in this thread with YouTube links to PewDiePie Minecraft seed reverse engineering) and in getting young people's interest in computer science (or STEM in general). Then in this regard the aim of this is not less valuable than looking for million-digits prime number or smallest number of moves to do a check-mate from arbitrary game position in chess, etc.
- TomMarius 6y agoYes, a lot of kids have learned programming becausw they wanted to develop Minecraft mods and Craftbukkit plugins. I had many colleagues doing enterprise Java that said their start was Minecraft.
- notamy 6y ago+1, this was exactly how I got my professional programming career kicked off -- learning programming from Minecraft modding and networking from there.
- whywhywhywhy 6y agoIf kids have a tangible goal of what they want to accomplish with coding, basically the barrier to entry no longer matters they'll figure it out. This is why things like Minecraft and Flash were great, there is a part to the experience anyone can enjoy and accomplish but also the potential for huge depth through learning.
- spacephysics 6y ago
- tomerbd 6y agowhat is this?
- FrankSansC 6y agoMethodology used for pack.png : https://packpng.com/method/ https://packpng.com/method/ Don't know if it's the same here but it definitely worth a read.
- The_Double 6y agoI sometimes wonder if these @Home projects are actually a net good. Due to the lower energy efficiency of old hardware, or just the higher overhead from running multiple less power full machines, it might be a lot cheaper and more environmentally friendly if these users would directly donate the money that they are spending on their electricity bill.
- Rexxar 6y agoIt's probably financially ok if you run it in winter when you have to heat your home.
- Nextgrid 6y agoIf you're heating using electricity then it's financially equivalent. It's actually beneficial to be able to use that energy for an additional purpose (mine crypto or this) than to just burn it.
- lgessler 6y agoThat depends on what you mean by electricity--heat pumps can achieve >100% efficiency since they move around heat instead of creating it.
- saalweachter 6y agoI believe with heat pumps (at least ground sourced heat pumps) you can get something like 3-5 units of heat per unit of electricity. (Compared to 11-15 EERs for cooling.)
- osamagirl69 6y agoEfficiency of heat pumps are roughly the same for heating and cooling (the only difference is which side you measure from -- the hot side gets the electrical power input counted in its power). The reason EER is so high is that they used absurd units for the heat flow (BTU/h = 0.3W) so you need to divide EER by 3.4 to get the actual efficiency in unit per unit.
- varbhat 6y agoI appreciate Minecraft as a game. But,instead of donating/contributing to it(because it is closed source and is paid software), i would instead donate/contribute/play https://www.minetest.net https://www.minetest.net which is opensource/free alternative to Minecraft ,and minetest has better modding capabilities too.
- dmm 6y agoI would link to https://www.minetest.net https://www.minetest.net. The certificate on that site doesn't include the bare domain without www.
- shifto 6y agoUse https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/ because for some reason the SSL cert only covers the www subdomain.
- jpkeisala 6y agoThanks! This looks like amazing project. I just installed Minetest and learning it. :)
- varbhat 6y agohttps://pandorabox.io/ https://pandorabox.io/ is good server if you want to begin with.
- johnghanks 6y ago> because it is closed source and is paid software Is this supposed to be a negative? Should I not play my favorite games because I have to buy them?
- dlhavema 6y agoI think the post is more about not contributing more to a closed source system like this. Play the game all you want. They are suggesting supporting an open source project instead of well funded commercial software...
- qqii 6y agoSeed finding takes quite a lot of number theory, and the following video is a good introduction: https://youtu.be/XVrR1WImOh8 https://youtu.be/XVrR1WImOh8 Seed finding was originally important to find witch hut structures that are generated close by in order to make efficient farms. Soon speedrunners saw the utility of finding a good seed for their uses, and with the rise of pewdiepie's let's play many begun trying to figure out the seed for his world. Eventually this lead to the current project and packpng.com
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoAny ideas how top explain this to a 9 year old minecraft player to interest him in computing?
- DanBC 6y agoI guess start with hashing. You can use Minecraft (at least, the Java version) to demonstrate "hash collisions". https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/3229wu/these_2_different_seeds_generate_identical_worlds/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/3229wu/these_2_d...
- johnghanks 6y agoPerhaps you could use something like http://www.computercraft.info/ http://www.computercraft.info/ ?
- Jowsey 6y agoYou might be interested in the OpenComputers mod
- foreigner 6y agoI don't know anything about Minecraft's internals. Why are there two seeds that produce the same result?
- yreg 6y agoYour comment sparked my curiosity. Java Random[0] which is used for terraine generation uses only 48 out of the 64 bits of the seed, so there are 2^16 seeds for each possible world.[1] Apparently only the land/ocean biome generation stage utilises the full seed. [0] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Random.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Random.h... [1] https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/seeds/2229720-can-two-different-seeds-produce-identical-worlds https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition...
- MasterScrat 6y agoSee also: MineRL, a machine learning competition in which agents compete to learn how to play https://minerl.io/ https://minerl.io/
- SubiculumCode 6y agoThe geek in me thinks this is a totally rad project, but..I'm not one to tell people how to use their computers, but building virtual worlds using computers burning actual worlds just strikes me wrong, I guess. I recognize that my use of computers for entertainment increases my carbon footprint dramatically, but recruiting cycles across the globe to inefficiently construct objects in Minecraft. idk