Why Minecraft Players Built a Real Life Supercomputer

What's the best way to find a cactus in Minecraft? If you answered "Build a supercomputer and check every single seed in existence on a supercomputer running a program that takes over 1 year to finish" then you'd be correct!

CHAPTERS
0:00 - Seed Cracking 101
3:33 - Seed Finding 101
5:10 - Tall Cacti
10:52 - The Search Begins
11:55 - VERY Tall Cacti
15:06 - The Supercomputer
21:02 - The Future

MUSIC (In order of appearance)
C418 - Chirp
C418 - Wait
C418 - Divide by Four Add Seven
HOME - The Moment Before
HOME - Hold
Home - 9
Foewi - Negative Gravity
DMDOKURO - Theme of the Sunken Sea
Home - Tides

BOINC PROJECTS (TO GIVE PROCESSING POWER!)

EXTRA CREDITS / SOURCES
HyenaDae, CactusDuper, Matthew Bolan, KaptainWutax, Cortex, BoySanic, Dutchen18, Matt (2869), NeilSeed, Tomlacko, vcokltfre - Helping me research this video and for checking my script
Boysanic - Didn't talk about his part too much in the video but he played a large part in modifying BOINC to work better with GPUs

Use code : "Hellcastle" in the hypixel store when checking out to support the channel :)

CORRECTION
I don't know how I missed this, but the naive approach definitely wouldn't require 200,000 seeds per second, I meant 200,000 seeds per day. Not really a big issue but a couple people pointed it out.

Follow us on twitter so we can see some meaningless numbers increase :
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[toblobs]

life goals:
1. find largest cactus in block game
2. solve world hunger
3. defeat cancer

[towers]

Its really sad that computational power is being wasted fighting disease when it could be used to find a taller cactus

[YABOI_-kwnv]

So y’all basically surpassed the strongest super computer in America just to find tall cactus in block game? Crazy

[labbit]

Welcome to Minecraft, we got people who built a one to one replica of a city, someone who built a actual functioning Minecraft computer with the processing power of the computer memory cap that took people to the moon, and a bunch of people that made a collaborative effort and ended up with a central processing power that would place it at 33rd in the global supercomputer ranking, above America’s strongest supercomputer, just for the sole reason of finding cactus.
I’m also adding a group of people trying to build a 1:1 replica of the world or something like that

[participatoroftomfoolery]

istg if the minecraft community found interstallar travel sufficiently humorous they could do it in a weekend

[krolkokos]

Cactus is not the only one to have beef with government💀

[CraftingCat_IX]

This shows how much determination nerds have when they get fixated on something.

[georgeofhamilton]

“Some call it a waste of time; others, an incredible waste of time.”

[CarlosPlaysGame]

the Minecraft community just needs to recruit rainbolt.

[Tomori]

2b2t players : i recognize that grass pattern

[TheDendran]

"Sir, our intelligence has stated that one of our supercomputers at the Pentagon has been seized by unknown individuals and is currently in use!"
"What are they doing with it?"
"Uuh.... it appears... they are... ....playing Minecraft with it?"

[TheStarshipGarage]

NASA: *spends billions of dollars on plans to get to the moon, but is still 2 years away from a manned lunar landing*
Minecraft community: "we want tall cactus, we will get tall cactus"

[GwnTim]

0:19 the version in the top-left corner probably saved this hunt, imagine if the seed hunters had to track every version as well, cuz terrain generation changed quite a bit over the years

[hyenadae]

HyenaDae / Hypps here, thanks for the recap video! We're all glad with the results and solving many of the lost seeds over those two years of work. There's still lots of cool things for individuals to find on their own, in both new and old minecraft versions. New challenges or speedruns brings new computations potentially needed.

I believe the tallest Non-Natural cactus was 24 tall, but *only* on a superflat with modified sand base layer pre-1.16 :)

[-libertyprimev-]

-Average theorist, thinking how Thomas Edison would react to a Modern Flatscreen TV.
-Minecraft theorist, wondering how 2000's Notch would react to his little block simulator leading to a Gov Rivaling Super Computer on the search for One Tall Spikey Boi.

[francenkovcan]

technically a 40 tall cactus is possible, since at an intersection of 4 chunks all of them can have conditions that would make all 10 of their cactus blocks to spawn in the exact same block, it is basically as likely as all energy in the universe accidentally funneling into a single point in space

[Seafowl]

If I became a time traveler I would love to just go into these servers, go “I was playing and found this cactus, I know you guys are looking for tall cactuses so I thought I’d share it” and it’s like three times taller than anything they had found befor

[therealda]

I took one look at the thumbnail and I was like "yeah that's normal".

[idadood]

youre saying that we invented a sci-fi supercomputer... just so we could find a giant ass cactus
Humanity has peaked.

[wolfydawolf_]

Government with supercomputer: we use super computer for radar and other important stuff

Minecrafters with supercomputer: B I G C A C T U S