
Minecraft@Home - networked
https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/
======
siraben
One recent notable achievement by Minecraft@Home was the discovery[0] of the
start screen panorama seed which was seen from Beta 1.8 up to 1.12. Reverse
engineering Minecraft seeds is an impressive feat given that the search space
is so large. The finding of Pewdiepie's survival Minecraft world seed was
achieved (without Minecraft@Home) despite him revealing his coordinates via F3
only twice in the entire series[1][2][3].

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/hthrmk/big_news_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/hthrmk/big_news_we_have_found_the_seed_of_minecrafts/)

[1]
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=LE8ml2hZVZM](https://youtube.com/watch?v=LE8ml2hZVZM)

[2]
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=MbAymA6OAa4](https://youtube.com/watch?v=MbAymA6OAa4)

[3]
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=qWnTRNw4mDY](https://youtube.com/watch?v=qWnTRNw4mDY)

~~~
siraben
I should also follow up with a technique that might be of interest to
programmers. Some Minecraft blocks have textures that appear rotated in one of
four ways. Turns out this rotation is pseudorandom, the rotation number is a
result of seeding Java's rand.nextLong() with the (x,y,z) coordinate of that
block.[0] This has been used for "malicious" purposes such as finding the
location of a base from a single screenshot, which can lead to its destruction
on anarchy servers. The author of the linked video used a CUDA search to find
the location of a wall of netherrack.

[0]
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=6__hO4cc1pA](https://youtube.com/watch?v=6__hO4cc1pA)

~~~
Balgair
Aside: 2b2t is the most notable of MC anarchy servers. Whenever I read about
it, I'm amazed at the machinations of the people that play there. It's kinda
like reading Eve Online after action reports of their big battles. I've no
inclination to play on 2b2t, but it's great reading all the same.

~~~
Nannooskeeska
I have the same feeling about Dwarf Fortress. I absolutely love reading DF
stories (see [0]), but the couple times I tried to play I just couldn't get
into it.

[0] [https://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-
Boatmurdered/](https://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/)

~~~
kiaulen
I'm with you. Also hopeful that the DF steam release comes with a slightly
easier to use UI.

If you want similarly hilarious stories, try rimworld.

------
varbhat
I appreciate Minecraft as a game.

But,instead of donating/contributing to it(because it is closed source and is
paid software), i would instead donate/contribute/play
[https://www.minetest.net](https://www.minetest.net) which is opensource/free
alternative to Minecraft ,and minetest has better modding capabilities too.

~~~
johnghanks
> because it is closed source and is paid software

Is this supposed to be a negative? Should I not play my favorite games because
I have to buy them?

~~~
dlhavema
I think the post is more about not contributing more to a closed source system
like this. Play the game all you want. They are suggesting supporting an open
source project instead of well funded commercial software...

~~~
solipsism
An open source project that's blatantly stealing an idea and a look.
Interesting that it's considered ethical to steal someone's hard work as long
as you're giving it away for free.

------
The_Double
I sometimes wonder if these @Home projects are actually a net good. Due to the
lower energy efficiency of old hardware, or just the higher overhead from
running multiple less power full machines, it might be a lot cheaper and more
environmentally friendly if these users would directly donate the money that
they are spending on their electricity bill.

~~~
Rexxar
It's probably financially ok if you run it in winter when you have to heat
your home.

~~~
Nextgrid
If you're heating using electricity then it's financially equivalent. It's
actually beneficial to be able to use that energy for an additional purpose
(mine crypto or this) than to just burn it.

~~~
lgessler
That depends on what you mean by electricity--heat pumps can achieve >100%
efficiency since they move around heat instead of creating it.

~~~
saalweachter
I believe with heat pumps (at least ground sourced heat pumps) you can get
something like 3-5 units of heat per unit of electricity. (Compared to 11-15
EERs for cooling.)

~~~
osamagirl69
Efficiency of heat pumps are roughly the same for heating and cooling (the
only difference is which side you measure from -- the hot side gets the
electrical power input counted in its power). The reason EER is so high is
that they used absurd units for the heat flow (BTU/h = 0.3W) so you need to
divide EER by 3.4 to get the actual efficiency in unit per unit.

------
yreg
>For the third time in 1 week, Minecraft@Home has broken the tallest cactus
height record in normal terrain generation. I present, a 22 block tall cactus.

This is so neat!

------
FrankSansC
Methodology used for pack.png :
[https://packpng.com/method/](https://packpng.com/method/) Don't know if it's
the same here but it definitely worth a read.

------
qqii
Seed finding takes quite a lot of number theory, and the following video is a
good introduction:
[https://youtu.be/XVrR1WImOh8](https://youtu.be/XVrR1WImOh8)

Seed finding was originally important to find witch hut structures that are
generated close by in order to make efficient farms. Soon speedrunners saw the
utility of finding a good seed for their uses, and with the rise of
pewdiepie's let's play many begun trying to figure out the seed for his world.
Eventually this lead to the current project and packpng.com

------
TedDoesntTalk
Any ideas how top explain this to a 9 year old minecraft player to interest
him in computing?

~~~
DanBC
I guess start with hashing. You can use Minecraft (at least, the Java version)
to demonstrate "hash collisions".
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/3229wu/these_2_d...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/3229wu/these_2_different_seeds_generate_identical_worlds/)

------
arnaudsm
This is basically virtual archeology, nice work !

------
gambiting
I mean, it's cool, but somehow it really rubs me the wrong way. Obviously, I'm
not going to tell anyone how to use their computing power, but I'm personally
contributing to Folding@Home instead.

~~~
z3t4
Its not a zero sum. This will increase interest in other @Home projects. It's
really wonderful that thousands of people can work together to solve
interesting problems - all over the world.

~~~
nuccy
There seem to be a strong belief that everything what is done for scientific
purpose is "useful" automatically, though it is not always the case.
Occasionally massive amounts of resources of huge supercomputers and research
clusters are wasted for useless tests, mistakes, typos, accidentally executed
tasks, wrong input data, wrong configurations, etc, which then run for weeks
or months with zero use afterwards. So indeed if this popularizes @Home
projects for young people then it is very beneficial.

~~~
nuccy
P.S. By saying that I'm not suggesting we should decrease the amount of
resources for research, actually the opposite, since misuse is a fraction of
the whole process and some discoveries would not be possible without such
mistakes. We should increase the amount of resources and more importantly find
people who are eager to utilize them for the sake of science, research and
development.

For instance in LIGO gravitational wave detector one of PhD students
accidentally misconfigured one of the black hole-neutron star merger
simulation runs, so that it took months instead of days, but resulted in very
detailed simulation, which then was used to study fine details of the observed
signals.

------
solarkraft
How is this related to pack.png
([https://packpng.com/](https://packpng.com/))? Same community, some overlap,
no overlap?

~~~
qqii
Essentially the same people figureheads leading the project.

------
MasterScrat
See also: MineRL, a machine learning competition in which agents compete to
learn how to play

[https://minerl.io/](https://minerl.io/)

------
SubiculumCode
The geek in me thinks this is a totally rad project, but..I'm not one to tell
people how to use their computers, but building virtual worlds using computers
burning actual worlds just strikes me wrong, I guess. I recognize that my use
of computers for entertainment increases my carbon footprint dramatically, but
recruiting cycles across the globe to inefficiently construct objects in
Minecraft. idk

------
foreigner
I don't know anything about Minecraft's internals. Why are there two seeds
that produce the same result?

~~~
yreg
Your comment sparked my curiosity. Java Random[0] which is used for terraine
generation uses only 48 out of the 64 bits of the seed, so there are 2^16
seeds for each possible world.[1]

Apparently only the land/ocean biome generation stage utilises the full seed.

[0]
[https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Random.h...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Random.html)

[1] [https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-
edition...](https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-
edition/seeds/2229720-can-two-different-seeds-produce-identical-worlds)

------
trollied
A TL;DR for people:

'This project attempts to find the world seed of the iconic panorama image
which appeared in the background of the main menu of Minecraft between 2011
and 2018.'

Essentially it's Folding@Home but for finding a specific Minecraft world seed.

~~~
I_Byte
They actually already found the panorama world seed [1]! Currently they are
working on figuring out what the tallest naturally generated cactus in
Minecraft is and so far they found a world seed with a cactus that is 22
blocks tall [2]. This project however is just a filler until they get some
more work done trying to figure out how to best brute force the world seed of
the iconic pack.png image [3].

[1] -
[https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/forum_thread.php?i...](https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/forum_thread.php?id=42#288)

[2] -
[https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/forum_thread.php?i...](https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/forum_thread.php?id=14#116)

[3] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7f9tMslVE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7f9tMslVE)
(Interesting bit is around 7:50)

------
ScannerSparkly
Interesting project!

------
tomerbd
what is this?

