I didn't imply the poster questioned Minecraft, but this effort didn't come out of nothing. It came out of a community which exists in the ecosphere. The actua

I didn't imply the poster questioned Minecraft, but this effort didn't come out of nothing. It came out of a community which exists in the ecosphere. The actual computation part was the least amount of time spent on this. The bulk was trying to narrow this seemingly 2^64 seeds down to a bruteforcable amount while learning something. There is a whole community around "seedfinding" now, which has done amazing work around reverse-engineering and pseudo-random number generation. Sure the sentiment of putting resources to anything of no immediate value is questionable, but I imagine so is modern day theoretical physics and mathematics :)