Minecraft is the highest grossing video game of all time with YouTube content relating to the game amassing over a trillion views and a very conservative estimate of over 114 million years watched it’s very difficult to overstate the cultural relevance of the game it has its own merch conventions entire TV Shows and movies created within the game people have made one-to-one scales of the earth as well as working computers with working displays the game is simultaneously a vessel of entertainment excitement community and Nostalgia the game was a Pioneer in many aspects the idea of an early access game communities Of players having a say in future developments and the sandbox genre of gaming as a whole all of this in mind however this is not a video about the ubiquity or success of the game but rather the genius in one specific feature of the game Redstone Redstone Carries power and acts very similarly to how one might imagine a wire acts in real life powered Redstone when connected to an object activates it it can make doors open Pistons extend and retract and can illuminate sources of light the idea of having power in the game was clearly evident from the Beginning of Minecraft’s development as early as 2010 gears were added to the game which could be placed on walls and could be chained together to transfer kinetic energy from one location to another shortly after however Minecraft’s development team realized that this idea could be expanded to make It into something much more keen one might argue that the Real Genius in Redstone is not in the Redstone itself but in Redstone torches you see Redstone torches operate from a simple set of rules when placed Redstone Dust which I will call Redstone wire from here on out Is directly adjacent to a redstone torch that wire becomes powered if however a powered Redstone wire goes into a block that is housing a redstone torch that redstone torch will turn off put simply you can control the presence of power within a redstone Circuit by applying power to this component sound familiar Subscribers of my channel already probably know what I’m alluding to it’s the transistor which is the single most important building block upon which the vast majority of modern Electronics is built upon transistors are crucial to electronics because they allow signals to control other signals they allow electricity to control itself take for Example we have this circuit where electricity goes from the positive of this battery to the LED and then connects back to ground what happens if I don’t want the LED on all the time well I could add some sort of switch to control the connection that way I can Control the light while the switch is nice because it allows me to control whether or not I want the circuit to be closed if every circuit required human intervention to operate the field of computation would not be a fraction as useful as it is now estimates say that Electricity travels anywhere from 50 to 99 of the speed of light and although this is a very wide range we can safely say that both ends of this range are comically and practically incomprehensibly faster than me transistors open and close connections based on whether a voltage is applied to Them they act like a switch but can be controlled by a signal any one transistor could also be the mechanism by which a whole network of transistors activate other signals while Redstone does not have a positive and a negative component to it the same principle still Applies in fact with only a tiny number of parts we can create a Minecraft model of a real transistor which is just as useful in the game as it is in real life herein lies the Real Genius of the implementation of redstone in Minecraft while I am well aware that plenty of Adults play Minecraft me being one of them acquaintance with the concept of redstone allows for young people to relate to electrical engineering in a much more tangible way trying to explain to a 10 year old why transistors are crucial in electronics would ordinarily be a fairly difficult task but given That most 10 year olds probably play or have played Minecraft the task is made much easier by relating it to Pistons Redstone torches and things of that nature Redstone has two states powered and unpowered this allows you to use it just like electricity is used in real Life to count in binary there are various laws that govern the behavior of redstone in different situations and it only requires a short study of redstone to realize that these laws which are of no small number were absolutely put in the game with considerations that allow the emulation of real-life electronic Components in Minecraft this is a button which is the Minecraft equivalent of a momentary switch in real life when you punch it the block that it’s attached to will act like a redstone torch and power Redstone wires near it for about a second and a half this button is Attached to a Redstone light and you can see that when I punch the button the light illuminates briefly and it subsequently turns off based on the laws that govern the in-game behavior of redstone I built this little circuit which acts like a t flip-flop does in Real life when a pulse from the button is received on the input the output of the circuit is changed and held at its new position in essence this principle turns a momentary switch into a toggle switch on many Redstone tutorial videos snarky commenters like to quip you know There’s an easier T flip flop it’s called a lever Minecraft also has toggle switches in the game the thing is though real life has levers too here’s a real life lever or a toggle switch that I use often in my projects the real usefulness Of the T flip flop be it in Minecraft or real life is not the ability to use a button as a lever but the ability to allow for a pulse from one circuit to control another you see just like the transistor it’s not about a human controlling a connection it’s about a Connection controlling a connection and all of those connections controlling two or three connections of their own and when you combine a clever interconnected mesh of these intercontrolling circuits with sensors actuators inputs and outputs you have a computer computers are not just the type you see on PC Gamers desks this tiny chip is an all-in-one computer for example so is this massive room that holds an IBM supercomputer any device that can perform computation of any scale is a computer and since computers are all built off of transistors and transistors exist in Minecraft there’s very little Imaginable limit to what circuits could not be created within the game here’s another example of a logic gate that exists in real life that can also be created in Minecraft this is the Minecraft equivalent of an and gate the output of which is only one if both the Inputs are one when you look at it in Minecraft it’s very intuitive the two inputs have Redstone torches to them which then activates a piece of redstone in the middle and that piece of redstone deactivates the torch of the output if however this was an electrical engineering class teaching you about and Gates instead of a Minecraft example there would be talk about silicon oxide semiconductive material Source gate drain collector base emitter but with Minecraft a few blocks some torches and some Redstone Dust I have often complained in my other videos that can be hard to learn things from people that Are professionally trained in that thing because their knowledge is at such a high level that it becomes difficult for them to convey that knowledge in a palatable way to the novice the most amazing thing about Redstone is that it has made two generations of young people well acquainted with the many principles Of electrical engineering without the necessity that they understand the minutia of the logistics and the principles and science behind it I started playing Minecraft when I was 12. I remember being shocked when my dad who’s an electrical engineer told me that and Gates were a real thing in real Life and I was even more shocked when I found out that they were ubiquitous in electronics and I already understood at age 12 what they were it didn’t matter if I didn’t understand the entirety of the physics and all the electrical engineering behind it but I knew from a Top-down level what it was and this connection between my game and real-life engineering created an affinity for me for the field that I don’t think would have existed otherwise as I’m sure is the case for countless others even if they don’t grow up to be electrical engineers the principles of critical Thinking problem solving and creative building are invaluable no matter what field one goes into it’s amazing that Redstone and a lot of Minecraft in general encourages young people to develop these skills in a way that they don’t view as boring schoolwork or tedious education it’s my firm belief That people in general are much more capable of what they tell themselves they are and no academic field is truly boring if you study and apply it I don’t think most young people actually hate the subjects they think they do they just had a bad experience with a Mediocre teacher and that ruined that subject for them good games however just like good teachers rekindle that Fascination for learning be it in kids or adults thank you so much for watching I hope you enjoyed this video I worked really hard on it this is my first real Video that I’ve made since becoming a YouTube partner so if you feel so inclined to send me some emeralds you should be able to do that by clicking the thanks button in the bottom right of this video for more content like this feel free to check out my channel and Even if not I hope you have a wonderful day Video Information
This video, titled ‘Why Redstone was Genius’, was uploaded by Christopher’s Factory on 2023-01-07 00:15:16. It has garnered 2251 views and 188 likes. The duration of the video is 00:07:16 or 436 seconds.
As early as 2010, Minecraft’s developers added gears to the game, indicative of the fact that engineering in some form or another was intended to be a core component of the game. Indirectly, Minecraft taught over 200 million kids (and adults) worldwide the basic principles of electrical engineering.
The Redstone Torch is like a simplified version of a transistor. It’s behavior and rules allow for complex circuits with intercontrolling networks of in-game transistors. In this video, I show how Redstone relates to real-life electrical components, like transistors, logic gates, and the T-Flip Flop. It’s quite amazing how well the game’s software developers were able to integrate features that emulate hardware components.
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Music used in this video is property of C418, AKA Daniel Rosenfeld. Daniel has given permission for his music to be used in monetized videos where Minecraft gameplay is shown, and this permission is documented on his blog at this link: https://c418.org/2017/01/26/what-am-i-allowed-to-do-with-daniels-music/ Here is Minecraft’s policy reiterating the same: https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/4408934440589
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