posted by AmbientMorality
on Mon, 2017-01-30 09:38
In-game name:
AmbientMorality
Age (Optional):
16
Why are you interested in joining this server?:
I would like to join this server to learn and prototype adder and ALU designs. For me, some of the most fun about redstone is playing around with new concepts and ideas, even if they don't always work as well as hoped: that's part of the design process. I've grown more and more interested in engineering as a field in general, which is all about brainstorming, designing, and iterating really fascinating concepts; redstone is much the same, and often a very slow poor design can suddenly become a very unique design with a little bit more effort and work. I suppose that advancement, and the occasional reward of a success, is what really makes redstone so fun.
Current Redstone knowledge:
My current redstone knowledge is mostly limited to ALUs and adders. While I've definitely learned a lot about those designs, I know little about CPUs beyond the theory (instruction sets, the general design considerations, building out a block diagram from your requirements): I've never actually implemented a CPU.
The two screenshots below may show some of my redstone knowledge. The first is described in the first paragraph below; the second is from my application on another redstone server and it's a simple CLE adder. It was much larger than it needed to be; I learned just after that that propagate could be OR instead of XOR, which dramatically reduces the size (I believe that's what the Newo CLE does, for example).
Past Redstone Experience:
While it's definitely not the fastest adder I've built, or the smallest, I think my best redstone creation was a carry lookahead adder. Utilizing a parallel prefix network of my own design (a mix between Sklansky and Brent-Kung), it manages to be a good tradeoff between logical depth, wiring space, and number of nodes. With the overall ALU around it, it's about around 12 ticks or something for 8 bits, so certainly not great. That being said, it was very rewarding to learn all about parallel prefix networks, run though the math of them, and finally implement something that was truly unique. I actually trialed with that build on another redstone server, so attached is a screenshot of the build.
I suppose one other interesting build I made was a Ling adder. Ling adders are parallel prefix adders, but they have more complex initial propagate/generate logic and more complex sum logic but a far simpler prefix operation (which is really where the delay comes from in real world adders, but that isn't really true in minecraft). I unfortunately don't have screenshots of it, but the general summary is that building a Ling adder in minecraft offers negative performance compared to a regular adder. The extra busing and circuitry at the ends by far negate the speed and complexity improvements in the parallel prefix network.
About how often do you play Minecraft?:
1-5 hours per day
Anything else you'd like to mention? (Optional):
I sometimes get a bit overly enthusiastic about spaceflight or in particular private space companies such as SpaceX.
Application status:
Approved
What kind of creations would you like to build on this server?:
While I may eventually build something complex like a CPU, at present I would like to focus on just playing around with ALU designs. I tend to focus on real-world redstone in most other cases, so I'd like to branch out into the world of minecraft based architectures: for example, I would like to more completely understand CCA's logic (which I do not understand well currently). After that, I'd definitely like to try other builds I haven't focused on elsewhere: binary multipliers and dividers have been something I've functionally ignored as I learned about CPU architectures and so on. So in general, this server will allow me to test small but unique computational contraptions and explore whether there are any new, smaller, or plain unique methods.