Seed of Minecraft’s classic title screen discovered
Minecraft worlds are procedurally generated from numbers and words known as seeds. A seed defines everything from the nearest blade of grass to the farthest mountain, and the most interesting seeds become challenges in themselves, shared by players and even aquiring fandoms of their own. The most intriguing seed in Minecraft, though, has only just been uncovered: the one that generated the backdrop to the game’s title screen until 2018.
The methodology is mindblowing. They manually reconstructed as much of the map as could be seen from the title screen screenshots, then used a variety of methods to prune out seeds that couldn’t possibly match up. Then they brute-forced the remaining millions of seeds until finding one with the same 3D data.
The research itself took about a month. It started on 14th June 2020, when I researched as much as I could about the panorama and it’s world (the version, world axis and the exact Z coordinate using clouds) and shared my findings on SalC1’s Discord server, where a similar project was currently taking place (finding the seed of the pack.png image). Then, a part of a new Minecraft-research-oriented Discord server [email protected] was dedicated to this project and work quickly started to be done. It would never have been possible without them.
[email protected] is a volunteer distributed computing project powered by BOINC allowing users to volunteer their idle computers to help advance Minecraft-related research, one of which was this panorama project. In less than 24 hours after launching the panorama application; a volunteer host on [email protected] found this seed. This was approximately 93 days of processing time at a total of 54.5 exaFLOPs compressed into 24 hours. Another ongoing project is search for the tallest cactus (currently we have found a 22 block high one!).
A video explaining all this has already racked up nearly 4m views:
The strange world of spherical geometry
This video illustrates “spherical geometry”, the peculiar phenomena observed when you simulate a world by raycasting within a spherical manifold instead of Euclidean space. Beyond a certain distance from the viewer, things start to appear larger the further away they are. A quick look at spherical geometry in 2 and 3 dimensions and why it […]
READ THE REST
The new, GPT-3-powered version of AI Dungeon is scarily good
I installed the GPT-2 language model 0n my laptop last year and I’ve been fascinated by the text it produces from a prompt. Here’s an example. I entered the following as prompt: Pennsylvania is sometimes referred to as “East Utah” in regards to its legendarily restrictive alcohol laws. Where else in the United States were […]
READ THE REST
From tree tents to headlamps, these 10 camping essentials will improve your summer
It’s summer. And this year, Europe and Disney World just aren’t really all that feasible as part of your travel plans. Yet especially with the last few months we’ve all endured, the need to get away and experience something new is like a raging fire in many of us. So if you can’t be around […]
READ THE REST
The SkyTote Battery Sleeve for your Amazon Echo sets Alexa free
Where would we be without Alexa? Without Amazon’s virtual assistant, who would we ask to play back our favorite songs or tell us the weather or beatbox? No, seriously…ask Alexa to beatbox. Of course, Alexa does have her limitations. The biggest one being that she’s tethered to an electrical outlet. For the vastness of her […]
READ THE REST
FunEasyLearn can help you learn your favorite foreign language your way
Learning a new language is like stepping up to the base of Mount Everest. You know you’ve got one heck of a climb ahead of you. But while the sheer magnitude of the task ahead scares away many climbers, the real trick is finding the path up that best fits with your skills and capabilities. […]
READ THE REST
CBD Oil, My Life, My Job, My Career: How 9 Simple Cannabinoid Helped Me Succeed
Find out more