HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

They actually already found the panorama world seed [1]! Currently they are working on figuring out what the tallest naturally generated cactus in Minecraft is and so far they found a world seed with a cactus that is 22 blocks tall [2]. This project however is just a filler until they get some more work done trying to figure out how to best brute force the world seed of the iconic pack.png image [3].

[1] - https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/forum_thread.php?i...

[2] - https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/forum_thread.php?i...

[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7f9tMslVE (Interesting bit is around 7:50)

There is a really interesting ongoing project to find the seed used for the default world and server icons:

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbR8ZY1Nsm8

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7f9tMslVE

Part 2 covers most of the efforts to reverse-engineer the seed.

⬐ giancarlostoro

This is quite fascinating, I hope they find it, I'm surprised they havent just emailed Mojang about it.

⬐ sorahn

Dinnerbone has also commented on reddit threads saying they support the project, but they don't think there's anything else mojang can do to help.

⬐ johanj

Part 2 of the videos mentions that Notch replied, saying that he doesn’t remember where the image is from, and that it’s likely coming from a world generated with a random seed.

Summary from the reddit post (written by reddit user Tomlacko):

Minecraft@Home is a volunteer distributed computing project powered by BOINC allowing users to volunteer their idle computers to help advance Minecraft-related research, one of which was this panorama project. In less than 24 hours after launching the panorama application; a volunteer host on Minecraft@Home found this seed. This was approximately 93 days of processing time at a total of 54.5 exaFLOPs compressed into 24 hours. Another ongoing project is search for the tallest cactus (currently we have found a 22 block high one!).

Github: https://github.com/minecrafthome/b1.7_seedfinder

Same team is also working on a much harder problem which is determining the seed of a screenshot included with the Minecraft distribution. There is a nice video about current progress here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7f9tMslVE There are so many reverse engineering tricks done to reduce the 2^64 possible seeds, such as training a neural network with the specific job of upscaling minecraft screenshots.