16-year-old Makes Working Scientific Calculator in Minecraft

News
By
published

It's a working graphing calculator inside Minecraft. Doh.

To be honest, some of us barely have enough time to build a pyramid or towering 8-bit video game character in Minecraft much less a gigantic, functional machine that can be used here in the real world. Yet it's amazing to see these massive projects show up in video demonstrations where players build virtual machines brick by brick, especially from those who can't even legally vote.

Case in point: 16-year-old "MaxSGB" has created a working scientific/graphic calculator inside Minecraft. On a virtual scale, the functional device is enormous -- enough so that anyone in the real world would become a red blot of meat and bone staining the road if they fell from the very top. Honestly, his virtual machine looks more like a giant cargo ship ripped from a sci-fi movie than a working calculator. Yet type your problem out on the keypad, and the answer appears on a large white display mounted on the side of the monstrous brick structure. No spaceship can do that... can it?

"The screen and keypad were always meant to be the main feature of this machine," he writes on YouTube. "The main display boasts 25 digits. Square root signs are displayed and can change to accommodate any number of digits. Square root signs, add, minus, multiply and divide signs are displayed at appropriate times, and there is a full fraction display. The 7-segments for the fractions are the smallest possible, being only 3 wide, and stackable vertically and horizontally."

The video itself explains that its overall size is more than 5 million cubic meters -- just over 250 x 250 x 100 blocks. It provides 14 functions, BCD input, 2 BCD-to-binary decoders, 3 binary-to-BCD decoders, and 6 rapid BCD adders and subtractors. It also contains floor after floor of live decoders for quick conversions, a 20 bit (output) multiplier, 10 bit divider, a memory bank and additional circuitry for the graphing function.

To see the virtual calculator in action, check out the video below:

Kevin Parrish
43 Comments Comment from the forums
  • hunshiki
    Fixme, but that's a generated "map", isn't it? (E.g. it is made with an external application.) I don't know. You can already see GPUs and other hardcore stuff. All of them are generated in the same principle, and it doesn't take too much work to do something like these.

    But a Minecraft addict may be able to give more info on this. (And these generated stuff.)
    Reply
  • hunshiki
    (Oh, mcedit it is. Sorry. I bought the game, back in the alpha. Managed to play about 3-5 hours. =D)
    Reply
  • alidan
    and to think, for the last 3 weeks i have done very little but watch my little pony.... hate how they make me feel like i'm wasting my life.
    Reply
  • nikorr
    Cool!
    Reply
  • kooldj
    back to the age of designing ur grand grand grand pa's underwear using ropes xD
    Reply
  • builder4
    Cool stuff. I once made a house out of dirt.
    Reply
  • rothmal
    but can it divide by zero
    Reply
  • devBunny
    rothmalbut can it divide by zero
    ... and what frame rate does it get in Crysis 2?
    Reply
  • jaquith
    This 16 year old is astonishingly brilliant, for his application to MIT all he needs to do is email a YouTube link. It's simply unbelievable that's all I can say.
    Reply
  • danwat1234
    Is there a "Building a CPU in Minecraft" for dummies book? This stuff is interesting. It's like some really weird kind of ladder logic or something, stone & lava logic?
    Reply