9 ms·
8-bit Turing complete computer that I made in Factorio (2019)
- mywittyname 6y agoI just started another playthrough of Factorio and I'm impressed just how well it manages to incorporate so many fundamental concepts in CS/CE. It's an incredibly useful tool for refreshing your memory of all that stuff you learned in college, but never applied in the real-world. I built an S-R Latch for turning on steam power to my base iff battery capacity falls below 10% and remain on until capacity is above 50%. That, and figuring out how to distribute goods evenly across n belts when you can only divide in half is pretty fun to figure out.
- menage 6y agoIn my experience it's better (in terms of using solar vs steam) to turn it off much sooner than that (maybe 15% or 20%) so that you're minimizing the amount of wasted solar energy later in the day when the accumulators are full and the base isn't consuming all the solar output. You might end up with the steam turning on and off a couple of times over the course of a night, but it'll still be a shorter total time than if you wait until 50% to turn off.
- natas 6y agocan it play crysis?
- herodoturtle 6y agoHah! You reminded me of the Half Life 2 Tech Demo at E3 2003. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ddJ1OKV63Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ddJ1OKV63Q The legendary moment starting at 3:14 :-)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- iamtedd 6y agoTop comment on Imgur in 2019..
- fasteddie31003 6y agoI started playing Factorio and fell in love. Then I started to watch tutorials on how to make better iron smelters and the guy said he has 1000 hours of Factorio gameplay. I quit Factorio right there. I decided to spend my time learning something IRL and started learning how to make DAPPs.
- codezero 6y agoIt's funny because to a lot of people making DAPPs is as pointless as Factorio (though I think I may just be putting Ethereum poo-poo out there in general). That said, I've been feeling similarly - playing on Steam and seeing folks w/ massive play times thinking, I should go do something productive. Where did you start off for learning DAPPs? Do you have any goals in mind?
- fasteddie31003 6y agoThis guy is pretty good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3681ZYbDSSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3681ZYbDSSk . I'm just working on a test Ethereum lottery http://defi-raffle.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ http://defi-raffle.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ to understand the basic concepts.
- codezero 6y agoCool! Thanks for sharing this I’ll check it out :)
- candiddevmike 6y agoI can't tell if this is sarcasm or not
- gccs 6y agoIts funny because 1000 hours isn't even that much in the video game world. I have over 10,000 hours in team fortress 2 from back when I was in high school.
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- linkdd 6y agoNeat! Reminds me of: - Pacman in Factorio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VR_b9YwqH8 - Raycasting 3D engine in Factorio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28UzqVz1r24 My main questions are: - how long does it take? - how does Factorio compare to VS Code as an IDE?
- CGamesPlay 6y agoThe video is in real-time, and calculating Fibbonacci is probably 4 instructions in the CPU, so you can get an idea of how fast it is.
- sterlind 6y agoway faster than Minecraft though! it can take a minute per instruction in the redstone videos I've seen. probably because Minecraft works on ticks affecting adjacent voxels and Factorio is more like labview (not to mention its seemingly excellent engine perf.)
- CGamesPlay 6y agoIt's probably more related to the fact that the basic building blocks in Factorio are much higher level than in Minecraft. You create these out of wires (adders), arithmetic combinators (any other arithmetic operator), and decider combinators (comparisons). Additionally, you have 2 "channels" for data (red and green wires), and "data" is actually a vector of numbers (since each wire carries a "count" for each "item type").
- b0afc375b5 6y agoAdditionally, Darude: https://youtu.be/mgfwwqwxdxY https://youtu.be/mgfwwqwxdxY
- Natsu 6y agoIt always amazes me when people make things like this. It feels like there's something special about games that can be programmed within the game, because some of the best games all have that feature: Minecraft, Terraria, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, etc. Though it's hard to even specify that because there are some where it's not really part of the game per se (e.g. arbitrary code execution in Super Mario World) though that was a great game too, it's not quite the same feeling. I think my favorite is still the Dwarven Calculator, just because overflow errors caused actual magma to overflow, which is just so very Dwarven: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=54046.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=54046.0 It's too bad Notch never finished that space-themed game he was once planning. I remember when HN went crazy with implementations of his spec for a simple, memory-mapped 8-bit computer that was going to be central to that game.
- Natsu 6y agoI guess it was actually a 16-bit computer in that game, I had to go look it up again because I had forgotten the name 0x10c a long time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c https://archive.org/details/0x10c https://archive.org/details/0x10c https://www.planetminecraft.com/blog/introducing-notchs-new-game-0x10c/ https://www.planetminecraft.com/blog/introducing-notchs-new-... Too bad it got cancelled, it would've been interesting.
- stcredzero 6y agoIt always amazes me when people make things like this. It's even been done with Conway's Life. https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Turing_machine https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Turing_machine It's too bad Notch never finished that space-themed game he was once planning. I remember when HN went crazy with implementations of his spec for a simple, memory-mapped 8-bit computer that was going to be central to that game. I'm planning to introduce scripting into my procedurally generated space game with over 2^100 locations. All entity AIs will be s-expressions, which implement a blackboard architecture. This can readily be mapped to both finite state machines and behavior trees. What's more, a variety of scripting language subsets could compile to the same s-expressions. I want to let players license their scripts to other players for in-game money. Players can also perhaps use "hacking" powers, where they can modify scripts of other entities or ships using regexes. (With the caveat that if they cause a syntax error, they get "feedback damage.") Also, these s-expressions can be subject to genetic algorithms, and will also "breed" in the wild. (As described by Koza in his book Genetic Programming)
- mdaniel 6y agoBefore I saw the (2019) I thought someone had been subjected to the "interview in Factorio" article that showed up a few days ago
- jaytaylor 6y agoInformative how-to YouTube videos that inspired this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kRlSFm519Bo&list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2565dvjafglHU https://youtube.com/watch?v=kRlSFm519Bo&list=PLowKtXNTBypGqI...
- optimalsolver 6y agoI often wonder if these types of games are sapping away the intellectual potential of humanity. They're explicitly geared to lure in the kind of obsessive tinkerer types who've historically driven scientific and engineering progress. Only now, there's little to no payoff for the rest of humanity if they spend thousands of hours consumed by one of these games. What's Newton's modern equivalent doing right now? Probably perfecting a build order in Stellaris.
- eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y agoAn interesting argument for it is a novel point of view! Thus please allow me to also dare an equally novel, opposite point of view: On the other hand, what does the non-tinkerer majority of humanity do to deserve the tinkerers inventing things for them instead of spending their time upon personal happiness? ;) Is it the usage of inventions to exploit, rob and kill each other which makes humanity worthy of getting more science? Certainly not :) To be more specific: I've seen the Internet before the tinkerers developed sufficient usability so the "normies" could use it. What it has become now that they're here is an abomination. HN is like a nuclear shelter, except outside its not radioactive but a giant, never-ending shitstorm. So I often wonder: Should I really try to make my software accessible to the average person? So that they can go there and use it to propagate racism and other garbage? Or rather keep it difficult to use and play Factorio or whatever instead? Tough decision to make for sure.
- mywittyname 6y ago> Only now, there's little to no payoff for the rest of humanity if they spend thousands of hours consumed by one of these games. Most people like this have jobs that they dedicate 30-60 hours a week to building things. Presumably, that's what Newton would also be doing today: working in the day and finding time to build sundials in Valheim at night. Of course, it's possible he'd end up being a Twitch streamer or something.
- Trasmatta 6y agoThe alternative hypothesis is that many great minds have been introduced to the world of programming and engineering by games like Factorio, Minecraft, and Kerbal. Maybe people who would have never explored those fields otherwise. I also don't buy into the idea that if these games didn't exist, those types of people would instead be naturally spending all their time tinkering on things that would drive scientific and engineering progress.
- system2 6y agoNo sarcasm. I wish I had the passion and patience of the maker of this factorio computer.
- sumobob2112 6y agoReminds me of the computer that they build in the three body problem: hundreds of horsemen act as the bus, and infinite amount of aliens either holding a flag up or down act as a massive computer to calculate the three body problem.
- nmeofthestate 6y agoFunny that it's 8-bit when every Factorio 'wire' can transmit dozens of 32-bit signed ints simultaneously. Presumably it's just emulating a binary style computer rather than some novel architecture tailored to the capabilities of the Factorio circuit network.
- pjc50 6y agoFactorio is interesting because the circuit system is pretty much designed for doing computation in. For a while I wondered whether it would be possible to build a computer in Factorio without using the facilities intended for it and instead Heath-Robinsoning it together out of other things. Trains, for example; an empty train is a set of "holes" that could be used to make a trainsistor? Unfortunately there aren't a lot of reversible transformations in Factorio, or mechanisms for one thing to influence another without being consumed.