Working 8-bit CPU in Minecraft

Lazcraft has completed his continued work on his Minecraft CPU project (not to be confused with theInternetFTW's remarkable 8-bit Minecraft computer project). He now has a full, working 8-bit computer made of Minecraft blocks and other gubbins, "with 8 bytes of RAM, an output register, a code-loader and the ability to branch conditionally and unconditionally."

You can't see the code loader as it's on the other side and is shorter than everything else. The clock is the shorter thing at the bottom right of screen. ALU on the left, memory at the top right, and the rest is registers for the accumulator, program counter, code and addresses.
This is the list of op codes:
0 NOT
1 - memory
2 + memory
3 OR memory
4 WRITE memory
5 BRANCH if Accumulator = 0
6 AND memory
7 LOAD memory
8 NOT
9 - constant
10 + constant
11 OR constant
12 WRITE out
13 BRANCH unconditionally
14 AND constant
15 LOAD constant

Working CPU with RAM, branching, etc... (video added) (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: computation • minecraft • Technology

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Anonymous

TheInternetFTW is a completely different person, who is building a completely different CPU. His is 16 bit, and spread out horizontally. This is 8 bit, and spread out vertically.

See: http://www.youtube.com/user/theinternetftw
Anonymous

Yes, but can is run Crysis?
Ba, boom, tish.
Gtmac

There will never be a need for more than 6 Minecraft computers in World 1.

I’m sure he has more basic binary computing steps he’ll be tackling next, but I hope he has plans for a redstone 7 or 15 segment display.

…on his way to the eventual redstone torch-as-pixel monochrome jumbotron.
warreno

Okay, so how long before someone writes a virus with it?
Anonymous

now code minecraft for it. owait…
JonStewartMill

Wow. I’ve been playing Minecraft for a week and still haven’t figured out how to create an iron ingot.
JayConverse

My friends and family all call me a computer geek. Nuh-uh, I am but a pale imitation. LazCraft is a true geek.
bcsizemo

It’s impressive, but once I saw the Enterprise model and learned there was a world builder type of program that could take images and create layers….well it kind of took the awesomesauce out of it for me.
dunnright

I saw this last week, and I still don’t understand it!

Oh well…

BTW, JonStewartMill, you have to craft a furnace and smelt the ore.
Anonymous

Extremely impressive and utterly pointless. I’m not sure whether to bow or shake my head.
AnthonyC

Reminds of that BB article from a few months (seasons?) back, about the turing-complete dwarf fortress computer.

Really awesome!
Richard Wymarc

Yawn… 8-bit is so over…

Call me when he has a 32-bit machine that will run minecraft recursively. 8->

Not that he hasn’t thought of that. You know he has.
- JonStewartMill
  
  I’ve tried that, but it won’t smelt. Maybe what I had wasn’t really iron ore. It’s hard to tell the blocks apart sometimes.
  - PlutoniumX
    
    Make sure you put the ore in the top left box, and your fuel source in the bottom left box. Smelted item will be in the far right box.
- Anonymous
  
  Have you considered how big the 512,000,000 bytes of ram would be in Minecraft?
  1 bit of ram is roughly 5,3,7, minimum infinitely stack-able size,
  if you stack 40 in every stack, then you would need 100 million stacks, since they must not touch, that is 910,000*120*930,000 MINIMUM(you need 86 blocks thick of squished access wires and air space on average) for ram alone.
  
  Even if you can find a way to load this 56,875 chunk wide, 58,125 chunk long square from bedrock to sky, say on a multi-player server by having 12,915,315 people (more than there are MC buyers) stand on pillars in just the right spots, there are other problems.
  You must consider that the maximum rate redstone can function at is about 2 hertz without burning out, or 8 hertz burning out repeatedly, limiting the processing speed to 2 hertz.
  
  the longest distance repeaters can be placed at is is 16 blocks, this means that there will be a delay of up to 90 minutes for editing most of the ram, and another of up to 90 minutes to get it back.
  
  The block information is stored in 16 bit short variables per block, at roughly 108.3 trillion blocks it would require that the server running it have almost 217 terabytes of RAM to open the world, 170 times the human brain’s effective physical memory, more than half the size of the entire internet archive, enough to store and simultaneously load 72,000 full human genomes, or 8,000 windows vistas running at once, or 3,600 e8 theory 254 dimensional lattices, or a run-on single-spaced sentence 200 billion pages long, enough to encircle the globe in 12 pt font nearly 19,000 times. that said, there is only one computer i know of with that much ram, the IBM Sequoia, 1.6 PB of RAM, 20 Peta-FLOPS maximum multi-core speed spread across 1.6 million cores. that said, it isn’t done being built yet, so…
  I am pretty darn sure Java would get out of memory errors without some serious rethinking, forget trying java -xmx1024M, no, how about java -xmx256,000,000M, rest assured that it was never designed to do that.
  
  making a sufficiently large piston-based color display would require 2560×1600 blocks, meaning it must face up, and have people underneath, the wiring needs to be about 800 blocks thick, or at least 200, maybe even 400 if it went in all directions, that said, nobody will ever make that display, NOBODY, the world is too short, you could make a 25% scaled display, that would decrease the size, only 640x(50-200)x400 blocks, but it still needs 2 people inside, loading the world around them.
  
  making a 32 bit x86 would be a breeze compared to everything else discussed above, but would have 10second ops
- billstewart
  
  Hey, Richard, you’re behind the times in hobby computing – once he gets it to be Arduino compatible he’ll get all kinds of blog cred :-)
  
  (Wow, it’s an amazing project…)
SimplyAaron

Reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s “Diamond Age” with the whole creating a Turing machine inside of a 3D world with a castle like object.

Cool!
Lobster

Would’ve been great if he hadn’t recorded it at night.

“This area of complete darkness is the RAM…”
Anonymous

I don’t think this guy is the same person as Theinternetftw.

Theinternetftw is doing a 16bit cpu, not an 8 bit one.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sybOqi_dgX0
Anonymous

Just wanted to point out that TheInternetFTW and Lazcraft are two different people, working on two different projects.

The video in the story is Lazcraft, aka the1laz. Awesome project.

You can see TheInternetFTW’s latest work on his own project at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sNge0Ywz-M