[HN Gopher] I built ChatGPT with Minecraft redstone [video]
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I built ChatGPT with Minecraft redstone [video]
Author : ghuntley
Score : 404 points
Date : 2025-09-29 03:22 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| sim7c00 wrote:
| tbh great vid also funny editing for some reason it looked so
| satisfying..the leap onto the enter key etc. besides well done on
| the project, presentation is classy :D looks a lot of fun!
| aubanel wrote:
| That title looked like clickbait until... Oh well they did
| actually did it
| dude250711 wrote:
| It was probably done by an individual.
| zooi wrote:
| "They" can also refer to an individual
| Jotalea wrote:
| wait what?
| npteljes wrote:
| It's called "singular they". It's used like: "We have a
| new joiner in our team! They became the talk of the town
| very fast". I love this feature of the English language,
| while a bit confusing at first, I think it works much
| better than "he/she" or "s/he" when talking about someone
| with an unspecified, unknown or unrelated gender.
| PanoptesYC wrote:
| Interesting read about the topic:
| https://www.oed.com/discover/a-brief-history-of-singular-
| the...
| burkaman wrote:
| "Someone is at the door asking for you."
|
| "What do they want?"
|
| This is the standard way to refer to an unknown person in
| English, anything else sounds awkward. "What does the
| person want", "what does he or she want", "what does this
| 'someone' want", none of these will sound natural to a
| native speaker.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| This really shouldn't be some surprise. You probably do
| it on a regular basis without noticing. Shakespeare uses
| it in Hamlet:
|
| There's not a man I meet but doth salute me As if I were
| their well-acquainted friend
|
| English has always used the singular they, especially
| (but not always) when the gender of the target of the
| pronoun is unknown.
| tempaccountabcd wrote:
| wrong. "they" is northmannisc. It sculd be he, fordat he
| and heo wuld'fe melded into he, and fordat Englisc is an
| Indo-Europisc tung, were werelie is de first kin.
| dude250711 wrote:
| If they did refer to an individual Minecraft expert for an
| advice, then it counts as a team effort.
| Byamarro wrote:
| It is a bit of a clickbait since they used commandblocks, not
| just redstone. But it's still impressive
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| From the video description: "I built a small language model
| in Minecraft using no command blocks or datapacks!"
| utf_8x wrote:
| From the video description: I built a small
| language model in Minecraft using no command blocks or
| datapacks!
| nomilk wrote:
| Can you explain the difference (for non-minecrafters)
| thrance wrote:
| Command blocks can only be obtained by cheating in normal
| gameplay, they are used to execute server commands
| automatically. Using them to build a computer in the game
| kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise, since instead
| of using the game's physics to build your device, you're
| now mostly doing scripting with minecraft commands. The
| author explicitly said they didn't use any in their build.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| The confusion might come from the author using commands /
| external software to generate and assemble parts of the
| redstone machine. The final machine doesn't use any
| command blocks as part of it's operation, but the
| description is a bit ambiguous here
| fuzzy_biscuit wrote:
| I think you missed the 'no' in there. They did not use
| command blocks.
| NSPG911 wrote:
| there were no clickbaits there at all. no command blocks were
| used at all. if you were so certain, why dont you download
| the world and try it yourself?
| jweather wrote:
| Well, TinyChat. Still mind-boggling. From the video description:
| I built a small language model in Minecraft using no command
| blocks or datapacks! The model has 5,087,280
| parameters, trained in Python on the TinyChat dataset of basic
| English conversations. It has an embedding dimension of 240,
| vocabulary of 1920 tokens, and consists of 6 layers. The context
| window size is 64 tokens, which is enough for (very) short
| conversations. Most weights were quantized to 8 bits, although
| the embedding and LayerNorm weights are stored at 18 and 24 bits
| respectively. The quantized weights are linked below; they are
| split into hundreds of files corresponding to the separate
| sections of ROM in the build. The build occupies a
| volume of 1020x260x1656 blocks. Due to its immense size, the
| Distant Horizons mod was used to capture footage of the whole
| build; this results in distant redstone components looking
| strange as they are being rendered at a lower level of detail.
| It can produce a response in about 2 hours when the tick rate is
| increased using MCHPRS (Minecraft High Performance Redstone
| Server) to about 40,000x speed.
| jweather wrote:
| It would take just over 9 years for a response at the normal
| redstone tick rate... sounds about right.
| throwup238 wrote:
| The Minecraft AI Challenge: can your LLM company reach
| profitability before Minecraft can predict a token?
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| This can be achieved today.
|
| Microsoft owns Minecraft; so they'll just swirl the numbers
| together with Minecraft sales to show their AI is already
| profitable.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > no command blocks
|
| Oh. I thought this would be some cheesy command block curl to
| Chat GPT.
| lhamil64 wrote:
| As far as I'm aware there's no way to do an HTTP request via
| command blocks, at least in vanilla.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Through Lua, all things are possible
| charcircuit wrote:
| The scripting language for Minecraft is Typescript. Lua
| would require a 3rd party mod.
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/minecraft/creator/scriptap...
|
| >The @minecraft/server-net module contains types for
| executing HTTP-based requests. This module can only be
| used on Bedrock Dedicated Server. These APIs do not
| function within the Minecraft game client or within
| Minecraft Realms.
| ianhawes wrote:
| * In Bedrock Edition. Minecraft purists only use Java
| Edition.
| runeblaze wrote:
| Of course it seems to be the same person to have done minecraft
| inside minecraft using redstone :)). peak!! done it again
| zkmon wrote:
| This is outrageous! I see people build some basic circuits and
| logic gates using red stone, but this is unimaginable. Is
| Minecraft becoming a digital clone of the real world?
| bamboozled wrote:
| I hope there are people like this working on genetic research
| for (currently) incurable diseases because that would kick ass.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I would like to know more about how this was generated. I'm sure
| there must have been code to generate the blocks/structures.
|
| Surely this wasn't all done in a block editor by hand?
|
| There was some code shown at beginning. Was that placing the
| blocks to build each section?
|
| And, more info on the system that could run this.
| codergautam wrote:
| The code at the beginning was for training the 5M model I
| believe
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| It'd be possible to build something like this just with large-
| scale copy-paste, but there are compilers from code to
| redstone.
| laszlokorte wrote:
| Are these kind of projects actually build manually inside of
| minecraft block by block or is there some verilog/vhdl to
| minecraft-level compiler toolchains used?
| jalk wrote:
| Hoping the answer is: we used ChatGPT to create the build :)
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| It's been awhile since I've played Minecraft, but when I built
| large redstone projects before, I built out each circuit
| manually and then used mods to copy/paste it within the game.
| squigz wrote:
| And nowadays you can use Axiom, which is a much better
| experience than WorldEdit (WE still has its uses though!)
|
| https://modrinth.com/mod/axiom
| baobun wrote:
| They did not manually place hundreds of millions of blocks <:
| kqr wrote:
| There are libraries for e.g. Python to make Minecraft maps
| entirely programmatically, as well as convenient tools for
| editing maps by hand.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Is there some kind of building automation do this? Surely it
| would take forever to plan out, and actually build blocks like
| this by hand.
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| There are mods that let you copy/paste sections of blocks.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| There are libraries that let you generate minecraft structure
| files programmatically [0]. These can then be pasted into the
| world.
|
| You still need to come up with the circuitry for all the maths
| and figure out how to represent all the state with red stone,
| but once you get the little bits done it's quite a quick
| process filling in weights and duplicating logic sections
|
| [0]: E.g. https://github.com/BenBenBenB/nbt-structure-utils
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Seems to be a routing problem. If you can place a digital
| design in an fpga, you can also do it in minecraft.
|
| There are a few projects out there for vhdl and verilog to
| redstone.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Wow. Mind-blowing.
|
| Bravo to you, sir.
| tshanmu wrote:
| this reminds me of permutation city and the question of what is
| time...
| waltbosz wrote:
| It reminded me of the human computer in "Three Body Problem"
| sd9 wrote:
| I originally didn't click on this post because it was obviously
| clickbait - the title isn't possible.
|
| But no. The author actually embedded a small LLM in Minecraft
| using hundreds of millions of blocks, that generates 1 token per
| 2h at 40,000x speed.
|
| Bravo. I wouldn't have even thought to try.
| mittermayr wrote:
| Aside from the technical feat, which is amazing in and of itself,
| I was completely mesmerized by that video! So well done,
| incredibly entertaining and perfectly presented.
| igravious wrote:
| And for their next trick TemplateGPT:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/189172/c-templates-turin...
| unleaded wrote:
| Here is an earlier, longer video on someone explaining how they
| built a neural network to recognise handwritten digits in
| Minecraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ0lCm0J3PM
|
| It should answer some of the questions/clear up some of the
| confusion raised here (e.g. how they get the weights in).
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| Redstone computing theory: Everything technological breakthrough
| in computing will eventually be rebuilt in redstone
| nonethewiser wrote:
| quantum computing
| redman25 wrote:
| I guess redstone still somewhat follows the physics of
| electricity. Maybe a quantum simulator?
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| Or just use Bedrock edition.
| cosmic_quanta wrote:
| One of my fondest memories was buying the book "The Elements of
| Computing Systems" by Nisan and Schocken, and implementing a
| 4-bit CPU in Minecraft.
|
| 4-bit is small enough that you can build it manually, without the
| use of external tools (which I don't think existed at the time
| anyways).
|
| Highly recommended for children interesting in computing!
| iterance wrote:
| I'm glad I'm not the only one. Built a tape drive and
| bootloader to load programs off it & everything...
| andrehacker wrote:
| >> One of my fondest memories was buying the book "The Elements
| of Computing Systems"
|
| >> by Nisan and Schocken, and implementing a 4-bit CPU in
| Minecraft.
|
| You confused me there, the book doesn't cover Minecraft, you
| did that yourself after reading the book, got it.
|
| The book is absolutely fantastic, it is the basis for the "From
| Nand to Tetris" courses: https://www.nand2tetris.org/
|
| I haven't digested it in full and with a title like that and
| the boring cover I always have to scramble to find it when I
| got a few minutes (What is that "Nand to Tetris" book called
| again?)
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Funny, I bought that book and studied it because I heard about
| it in a Minecraft video. Was that you? Nand2tetris helped me
| land my first programming job.
| cosmic_quanta wrote:
| It was not me! Maybe we watched the same video though? I
| can't recall who or what gave me the idea
| sram1337 wrote:
| Just wanted to say I think we all watched the same video! I
| remember doing this one summer in high school
| kqr wrote:
| > (which I don't think existed at the time anyways)
|
| This surprised me at first because I remember using Python to
| create Minecraft maps early on, or at least in the beta.
|
| But it seems like redstone was added in the alpha, and the
| earliest commits of pymclevel (which I think I used) also dates
| back to the alpha. So there might indeed have been a time
| window of a few months in which redstone was available but not
| tooling for creating maps.
| cosmic_quanta wrote:
| I remember starting playing Minecraft Beta, that was around
| 2011 maybe?
|
| Even if tools to programmatically create maps were available,
| I wouldn't have known how to program. So this is more about
| my lack of knowledge of tools of the time.
| derleyici wrote:
| So, Minecraft is Turing complete?
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Yes, Notch said somewhere that was by design.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Turing completeness is actually pretty easy to implement. The
| game Baba is You is also turing complete.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Any system that can represent a NAND gate is Turing complete.
| In Minecraft, connecting two inputs to the same branch of
| redstone wire is an OR gate, and a redstone torch on a block
| acts as a NOT gate. Two inputs, both inverted, into an OR gate
| gives a NAND.
| kibwen wrote:
| It's even slightly simpler than that, NOR is also
| functionally complete, so you can just negate the OR.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| This is unbelievable
| alexc05 wrote:
| when people do these complex CPU designs in minecraft are they
| laying the blocks individually in real time and in 3d space - or
| are they scripting some sort of algorithm that instantiates the
| system in one go?
|
| It's impressive either way but the manual version seems ...
| impossible.
| jtokoph wrote:
| There are external tools which essentially let you script the
| generation of a save file of the world.
| jcmontx wrote:
| These people are insane, it has to be created programmatically,
| isn't it?
| nom wrote:
| I suspect a human life isn't long enough to place that many
| blocks.
| jerf wrote:
| "(1020 * 260 * 1656) seconds in years" [1] comes out to 14
| years. Solid, of course, no breaks or sleep, no time for
| training or planning or debugging. And one block per second
| is a pretty good clip for a technical build. It doesn't take
| many multiplicative factors before it's more than one
| lifetime.
|
| [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=%281020+*+260+*+1656%29+
| seco...
| amlib wrote:
| You would probably also need another lifetime just to fix
| all the errors once you are finished with laying out all
| the pieces...
| aeneas_ory wrote:
| Can't wait to test out the world download, this is so cool and
| also scary how much time this must have taken! Did you build it
| with some schematic editor?
| tobias3 wrote:
| What I also find amazing is the server software used to run it (
| https://github.com/MCHPR/MCHPRS ):
|
| - Re-implements parts of Minecraft
|
| - Runs 512x512 plots in different threads
|
| - _Compiles Redstone applying different kind of optimization
| passes_
| https://github.com/MCHPR/MCHPRS/blob/master/docs/Redpiler.md
|
| - It had Jit backends before, but seems they have been removed
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| If you like thinking about the possibilities of the worlds of
| Minecraft and LLMs colliding I recommend the YouTube channel
| @EmergentGarden (https://www.youtube.com/@EmergentGarden) it's
| not exclusively agents and Minecraft, but there's a fair amount
| of stuff tested over time.
|
| Most recently: Can AI (actually) beat Minecraft? -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh4abvcUj8Q
| programd wrote:
| I'll second that recommendation. One of the more interesting
| videos is AI creating utopian and dystopian worlds in Minecraft
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCnQvdypW_I
|
| Invokes shades of Iain M. Banks' "Surface Detail" Culture
| novel, where virtual Hells are a major plot point.
| 16th_hop wrote:
| Fascinating. How exactly is the model trained? I see this is an
| inference tool, is the model trained external to minecraft or in
| the game itself?
| junon wrote:
| Appears based on the video to be trained externally and then
| just the weights being added into the game.
| pcunite wrote:
| And I did it over the weekend. /s
| transformi wrote:
| Now create agents framework :)
| __fst__ wrote:
| Can't wait for an LLM implementation in the Game of Life too.
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