A working digital hard drive?

[Rory]

Minecraft Hard Drive

They have made a working 1KB hard drive inside of the game "Minecraft". The biggest to date. This just blows my mind.

[Rory]

The comments section is even more mind blowing as the article itself.

Here is one of em.


Captain Starbuck wrote:

For those who don’t “get it”, I’m an avid Minecraft player so perhaps I can explain. This is a game where you walk around and gather resources like most games. It goes further to allow the player to use those resources and change the environment – which is not like other games where the buildings and everything else are hard-coded and cannot be changed by players.

In addition, some of the resources can be used to create simple machines – as the article says, like setting down a door and adding a switch to open it. These machines can include basic logic, in computer science these are called Gates. The AND gate checks to see if two bits are both True, and if so it passes True to the rest of the circuit. An OR gate will pass True if either of two inputs are true.

A hard drive saves a stream of True and False bits. The logic required to locate and modify that data is complex. Going from a single switch that opens a door to complex logic to save and recall a volume of data – that’s huge. This isn’t about new technology or a better way to save data. It’s about using basic tools in a game which exposes nothing but simple Boolean True/False results, to model an extremely complex real-world machine. It’s as much art as science. But art often leads to science. If we take this to the next logical level, kids now have the ability to dissect models like this to see how they work, and to improve on them. This can help to encourage creativity which translates to advances in technology in the real world. Where people don’t have access to hardware required to create real hard-drives or other machines, they do have access to this game. What’s fun for some nerdy game players can easily be used by the average person for re-thinking technology we use every day, in ways that none of us can yet imagine.

That’s why this is both nerdy-cool as well as an awesome and impressive achievement. And the neat thing is that people playing this game are doing stuff like this all the time.

[John]

I have to admit, that is absolutely amazing to the point that I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around it. A hard drive built from within a game? Again ... amazing. Obviously it's a very small thing (capable of holding just 1 KB), yet I imagine this sends a signal that more possibilities for creation from a creation exist than we might have imagined.

[Evas]

That is a really impressive feat.

I have played lot's of MineCraft with friends and family. We've had multiple servers where things were started from scratch. Lot's of building and some simple mechanisms, but nothing like that.

The amount of design, not to mention time, that is must have taken is huge. Really cool stuff.

[Alleghenies]

Hah, and I was impressed with the dumb little castle I built.