Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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Spot on. I agree completely.

I was going to add something to my original comment, but I can't get the wording right, so I'll just express my feelings about the article.

When I read the article, I was amazed! What a huge undertaking! And so much detail! But then, as he walked around showing everything, it hit me how much mundane and tiny little bits of work had to go into doing this. That's fine, but interesting that it has so much detail. Then it occurred to me that this kid actually knew how to build a real logic circuit -- a physical thing with value. The time he spent doing this he could have taken a FPGA and made the next super-bang-whizmo. That no matter how much work he put into his minecraft modeling, one day ten years from now they're going to turn off the game and he's got, well, nothing. Except memories and a story. Whereas he could have spent that same talent, knowledge, and hard work and at least have something you could touch. And here we are lauding him like he built the next lunar lander.

And even that was okay -- nothing wrong with modeling out things you are learning as a way to reinforce your knowledge. I think this guy is smart as hell and is going to go far. But then I thought about all the other video-game creations that we've praised. I started wondering if for every one of these guys there aren't a thousand other guys doing the same thing. Guys building things with no real-world correlation or value. Not a happy thought.

I'm sure it's just my contrarianism, but it bugged me. Enough to comment.

You do realize everything you said applies to how we learn things in courses, right? It was a learning exercise. I don't understand the fetish people have to make sure every activity people engage in has a tangible result of value. It's rare that someone can learn something while simultaneously produce something of value.

If he did this for a course, he would have just used a logic simulator (example: http://www.kolls.net/gatesim/), like I did for my intro to computer engineering course. I don't still have those designs, either, but I still have the knowledge. His simulator just happened to be Minecraft.

If the guy had implemented his ALU in LogicWorks, gatesim or in VHDL/Verilog on an FPGA it would not have received the same amount of attention it has.

The fact that Minecraft provides the basic required building blocks to make the various different logic gates, to allow an ALU to be built in the first place is amazing. The fact that someone took the time to sit down and calculate out how to use the building blocks and how to arrange them is novel.

I agree with that. I think it takes a special eye to look at a system and figure out how to get it to do something it wasn't designed for. Some people refer to this practice as hacking. I was not trying to lessen what he did, but explain why it's not a waste of time.

When I was in College I took a course that introduced me to logic gates and how they worked.

Using the basic logic gates in LogicWorks we built a fully functional 8 bit micro controller, including op-codes that could be used to execute certain functionality. It was slow, but from the ground up I KNOW how to build a micro-controller, I know what goes into it.

That doesn't mean that what this guy did is any less valuable. I might not have built my micro within a computer game, ultimately my LogicWorks project was just as valuable as this simulation in game.

Could the time have been spent on implementing the ALU on a FPGA? Absolutely, but it would have been like any other ALU, nothing really special. It wouldn't have been the next super-bang-whizmo. The ALU's in modern processors are much better designed, much faster, and running an ALU on an FPGA doesn't suddenly make it special. People seem to assume that FPGA's are magical. That is not the case. Could he use his talent to build specific VHDL or Verilog to run on an FPGA that is specialised for certain projects, absolutely. But yet another ALU is nothing special.

This project would not have received the same attention it has because implementing ALU's on FPGA's is something that is done in curricula around the world. I've implemented a full micro on an FPGA (as a follow-up to the previous class mentioned) the novelty is in the fact that the building blocks exist within Minecraft to simulate an ALU. THAT is something to get excited over, it means that technically Minecraft possesses the building blocks to create a fully complete turing machine. That is absolutely amazing.

The time he spent doing this he could have taken a FPGA and made the next super-bang-whizmo.

This is a bad leap of logic right here. He simulated a very simple and well-understood piece of circuitry in a novel environment.This doesn't necessarily translate to being able to come up with something completely new and revolutionary.

No doubt, this kid is incredibly smart though. Probably some day he will be able to come up with the next super-bang-whizmo. To do that he'll need a deep understanding of the fundamentals of his field. He'll need to know it so inside out that he could build a computer out of the most unlikely materials, like say a video game. I don't think this was a lost opportunity cost. The world is not poorer by one gadget because he spent time modeling an ALU in Minecraft instead of on an FPGA. The world is now richer by one engineering student who knows his field a better than he did before.Probably better than he would have by doing it in a more conventional fashion.

Doing the same thing on an FPGA would not have been noteworthy. It's been done probably thousands of times before, and is likely included as sample code when you buy the FPGA kit.

I really liked the part of Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age that had the main character, as an exercise, go through learning how to program all kinds of low-level parts via physical analogs (gears and water sluices and so on) in her illustrated primer’s story, and then realize at the end that she understood how real computers work.

By the way, you saw in the reddit thread that some guy offered the kid a job, right?

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dk1au/hey_rgaming_i_...

Just saying.

There's also the fact that he made have simply gotten more enjoyment from doing this in Minecraft. Perhaps he would have spent some of his leisure time enjoying and playing the game anyway. Maybe he would have made a sweet castle instead. However, he spent his free time enjoying the game and learned something valuable in the process. There is nothing wrong with taking some time in life to have fun.

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