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 okay 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.