Minecraft is a game about building things that runs on your computer. One man is building a working computer inside the game that runs on his computer. At this point it’s OK if your head explodes.
YouTube user TheInternetFTW is well on his way to creating a gigantic working 16-bit computer inside the confines of the popular sandbox game Minecraft. In this video he demonstrates a city-sized, fully functional arithmetic logic unit, or ALU. The ALU is one of the fundamental building blocks of a central processing unit (CPU), responsible for performing arithmetic and logical operations.
Now that the ALU is complete, the creator plans to continue building the rest of the computer, starting with the memory. Once it’s done he hopes to make the computer will run code based on the “Hack” machine described in the book The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles.
Just in case you aren’t clear here, the man is building a working computer inside a computer game using a textbook as his guide.
Maybe he can eventually get that computer powerful enough to run Minecraft. Then the universe will blink out of existence.
Thanks to Blake and Marius for pointing us towards this video.



















Korwin
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 9:32 AMSkynet became self-aware at 2:14am EDT September 29, 2010
PiMan
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 9:58 AMThis guy could run into the limitations of the game very soon if he’s not careful. Minecraft doesn’t pay attention to anything more than 300 blocks away. For this reason, I recommend any future constructions to be above or below his ALU, rather than next to.
Jimu_Hsien
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 10:02 AMGREAT SCOTT!!!!
The Cracks
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 11:33 AMThat’s heavy…
Taylor
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 1:01 PMWeight has nothing to do with it.
Daniel Tyler
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 10:21 AMYou know somewhere a vulcan’s head just exploded trying to understand this
SargeAG
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 11:58 AMYO DAWG, I HEARD YOU LIKE COMPUTERS….
CrowdedTrousers
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 1:08 PMLove the wildlife casually roaming throughout his ALU as he explains it.
And that cow over there, I call her EDX. Let’s eat her!
z
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 1:24 PMI’ll only be impressed if he builds an emulator capable of running other games, inside minecraft.
(like a Gameboy emulator…)
Matthew
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 1:49 PMI haven’t ‘played’ Minecraft since, oh.. right after Notch implemented multiplayer. At that stage, building/destroying was a tedious process, and had to be done block-by-block. Has that since been ‘improved’ (copy and paste groups of blocks, for instance), or has the narrator of this video (..I really hate to say this..) got a lot of time on his hands?
Doug Sherry
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 5:50 PMThis is the second time I’ve heard of Minecraft…