Minecraft is a game about exploring procedurally generated worlds. Each world is generated from a particular “seed” value, and sharing this seed value allows others to generate the same world at their own game. Recently, the Minecraft @ Home Distributed Computing project set out to try to find the world’s seed value displayed on the Minecraft title screen, and it has achieved its goal.
The amount of work required to complete this task should not be underestimated. 137 users contributed 181 hosts with 231 GPUs to the effort, finding a solution in less than 24 hours. The list of contributors to the project is long. It seems that the method of finding the seed involves comparing screenshots of various seed worlds with the original image. This required a lot of reverse engineering to calculate camera FOV and other settings from the original capture, so that the results could be compared accurately. Interestingly, the group found two seeds that can generate the required world, suggesting that the world generator code has some collisions between the seed values.
We’re not sure what is most surprising, the amount of work that went into the project or that there is a distributed computing project that addresses advanced Minecraft research. Either way, we are no stranger to the Minecraft cheats in these parts. Video after the break.
