So in my college Logical Circuits class, I would sit there with Minecraft up on my laptop and build the circuits we were discussing out of redstone. There’s something about being able to flip levers and watch the outputs change that really helps you to understand
I always assumed they use some kind of tool to convert code into blocks. I refuse to believe somebody handbuilt anything bigger than a calculator in minecraft.
There are those that build entirely by hand; but the more common method is to use tools/mods like MCEdit to copy+paste whole sections of blocks. Then you can just build out one of each logic gate/larger section and copy+paste it all together into the full creation bit by bit.
In digital logic design, this is called a synthesis tool. In the design of real digital circuitry, you write a code-like hardware description using a language called an “HDL” (hardware description language) such as VHDL or SystemVerilog. Then a program called a synthesiser converts the HDL into a digital circuit.
Each module is designed this way then hooked up using busses and wires.
In real-life, you would then send the generated design to the manufacturing team
Hate to bring it up, but compared to real digital circuits Minecraft redstone is literally a child’s toy
They show how to make a NAND, NOR, and XOR gate. And all you really need for functional completeness is the NAND.
This just doesn’t have the semi-analog stuff like DRAM.
But if I had to do my digital design at the gate level for anything more than like an adder, I’d be pretty over it pretty quickly.
From what I understand, the majority of the most ridiculous minecraft feats are just… writing code to write Minecraft world data for logic circuits, not actually placing the blocks by hand. At a certain scale writing some kind of monstrous compiler to place blocks for you based on a proper circuit plan or programming language becomes easier.
If it’s still the equivalent of gate level, even if those gates are expressed with words rather than placing each block, it’s still a slog. To get beyond gate-level, I think you’d need to write your own HDL and/or synthesis tool for minecraft redstone, which seems even deeper than what most people developing real digital logic do.
Like, I just write verilog and synopsys handles it well enough for my physical design team to have a good starting point.
I must come under the Venn diagram section for people who learned logic gates from a fairly early age, but would rather stab themself in the eye than spend many hours building anything out of them.
Yeah, I can see how they’re neat and I can get some enjoyment out of reinventing the wheels that our modern structures sit on top of, but most of the time, you’ll just do the same thing as before, but this time rather than 32 NAND gates, you’ll need 128. That gets old pretty quickly…
Dont they call this being Turing complete, where the game itself is capable of doing the math to make itself
Turing-complete means it’s capable of expressing any possible program, although it only looks at the pure logic, it doesn’t look at timing constraints or resource constraints.
So, the redstone simulation would definitely be too slow to create an actually playable version of Minecraft, and there’s almost certainly other simulation limits you would hit, like e.g. the redstone not fitting into the area the game actually computes, but in principle, you could express all the same logic.