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This is a worthless nitpick but redstone in Minecraft was added explicitly so people could do crazy things like build calculators etc. It's still cool, but not

This is a worthless nitpick but redstone in Minecraft was added explicitly so people could do crazy things like build calculators etc. It's still cool, but not exactly unexpected

gnull 5y ago
Agreed. Also, Turing completeness and expressing computations from one domain in another are relatively basic CS concepts. In some Computability courses it would be a mere homework problem. It has been disappointing for me that lots of people who call themselves hackers (like amateur Capture-The-Flag players or security people) are doing something rather basic for Theoretical Computer Science. Go to a security conference you will find tons of them. Real hackers are 1% of security professionals and hardcore mathematicians, writers, physicists — look at Richard Feynman. Compexity theorists, for example, literally touch the essence of what computation is. EDIT: expanded abbreviations
- ffjlnvunb 5y ago
  You shouldn’t use TLAs.
- tester756 5y ago
  >Real * are (top) 1% doesn't it work like that with everything?
  - gnull 5y ago
    I was thinking of something like, "Real hackers are 1% of *". This is how Eric Raymond puts it in his How to Become a Hacker.
npteljes 5y ago
Fully agreed. More unexpected were the block update detectors, before the official Observer block of course.
tmcw 5y ago
[author] Thank you, I was winging it a bit with secondhand (YouTube video) Minecraft knowledge :)
WallyFunk 5y ago
> redstone in Minecraft was added explicitly so people could do crazy things like build calculators Anything that has logic gates in it can be used to build out complex programs. Since Conways Game of Life allows for logic gates, you can build anything you want, albeit with a lot more processing power needed since it's built on an abstraction. You can even build Conways Game of Life with Conways Game of Life, like a sort of fractal program / quine.

This is a worthless nitpick but redstone in Minecraft was added explicitly so people could do crazy things like build calculators etc. It's still cool, but not exactly unexpected

gnull 5y ago

Agreed. Also, Turing completeness and expressing computations from one domain in another are relatively basic CS concepts. In some Computability courses it would be a mere homework problem. It has been disappointing for me that lots of people who call themselves hackers (like amateur Capture-The-Flag players or security people) are doing something rather basic for Theoretical Computer Science. Go to a security conference you will find tons of them. Real hackers are 1% of security professionals and hardcore mathematicians, writers, physicists — look at Richard Feynman. Compexity theorists, for example, literally touch the essence of what computation is. EDIT: expanded abbreviations

ffjlnvunb 5y ago
You shouldn’t use TLAs.
tester756 5y ago
>Real * are (top) 1% doesn't it work like that with everything?
- gnull 5y ago
  I was thinking of something like, "Real hackers are 1% of *". This is how Eric Raymond puts it in his How to Become a Hacker.

npteljes 5y ago

Fully agreed. More unexpected were the block update detectors, before the official Observer block of course.

tmcw 5y ago

[author] Thank you, I was winging it a bit with secondhand (YouTube video) Minecraft knowledge :)

WallyFunk 5y ago

> redstone in Minecraft was added explicitly so people could do crazy things like build calculators Anything that has logic gates in it can be used to build out complex programs. Since Conways Game of Life allows for logic gates, you can build anything you want, albeit with a lot more processing power needed since it's built on an abstraction. You can even build Conways Game of Life with Conways Game of Life, like a sort of fractal program / quine.