I Gave Minecraft Infinite Time to Beat Itself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t2fV52jMA8

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After an insane number of simulated [music] years,this Minecraft world just killed the Ender Dragon.No player joined, no commands were run,no one placed a single block.Minecraft just beat Minecraft.>> [music] >> Minecraft isn’t frozen when the player is idle.Mobs move, blocks update,lightning strikes, [music] Endermen pick up and move blocks.The world is still completely active even with zero player interaction.A few years ago,a YouTuber named RetroGamingNow made a thought experiment asking whether,with enough time,these same random systems could eventually beat the game by themselves.The basic idea was that Endermen can move blocks,moved blocks can accidentally create snow golems,snow golems can provoke hostile mobs, explosions can slowly open paths,and if all of that somehow lines up around a naturally completed end portal,mobs and blocks could eventually reach the end and even damage the dragon.So, I wanted to find out,

[music] if you isolate those mechanics and give them an absurd amount of time,does the chain actually complete?To test this, I had a few problems to solve.The first problem was that not every Minecraft world can actually [music] win.For this chain to work, the world needs a naturally completed end portal.Without that,there is no way for mobs to reach, the end without a player placing, the eyes of Ender.>> [music] >> And even in a world with a completed portal,the resources are limited.Minecraft feels infinite, but it has a world border.That means there are only so, many pillager outposts and only, so many [music] carved pumpkins,and therefore only so many chances to create snow golems.A world could run for billions of years, only for the last useful pumpkin [music] to be destroyed, before the dragon ever dies.So, before I could simulate Minecraft beating itself,I had to simulate Minecraft worlds.The simulator generates worlds,checks whether they have the ingredients for a possible win,

and then throws away the ones that are dead on arrival.But once I had that world, I ran into the second problem.Time.The sequence I described could take billions of real-life years,so I couldn’t just open the world, walk away,and wait for the dragon to die.But there was still one thing that made this possible.Minecraft without a player runs as just a giant random process.So instead of simulating every tick, I used a Monte Carlo simulation.The sim compresses billions of ordinary ticks into statistically [music], sampled waiting times,while explicitly, tracking the rare events and physical resources, that can advance or destroy the chain.With those two problems solved,it was finally time to actually run the simulation.This is the world the program found.It has a 12-eye portal located under an ice spikes biome,exactly what we need for creating snow golems.The path to the portal from the surface is also quite [music] direct,

only requiring one creeper explosion or a few well-placed blocks by Endermen.This made the seed, which I’ve included in the description,the perfect candidate.Now let’s see what happens when a Minecraft world runs [music] for billions, of years.Within the first year,the first carved pumpkin [music] and TNT had been picked up by Endermen.The carved pumpkin was grabbed at this outpost over 40,000, blocks away from the stronghold,and the first TNT was grabbed from this mansion nearly 300,000 blocks away.For the next 30,000 years,over 100,000, pumpkins would be moved from various outposts by wandering Endermen,and many would even go on to become snow [music] golems.But in the year 33,477, we’d get our first real progress.At this outpost, located just 800 blocks from the stronghold,a pumpkin was picked up by an Enderman.To give some context, here’s the entirety of recorded human history,and here’s where we are in the Minecraft simulation.

That pumpkin would spend another 2,000 years being placed, picked back up,and moved around, before finally creating a snow golem, only a few hundred blocks from the stronghold.Plenty of snow golems had made it into this region before,but most were killed before they could meaningfully contribute to the route.This golem would be different.For a few days,this golem wandered around the stronghold region without accomplishing anything.Then, in year 35,510,it finally provoked a creeper in a place that mattered.The blast opened the first section of the route to the portal.The simulation, had just proven that a route to the portal could actually be opened.And sure enough, around 2,000 years later,another snow golem found itself in exactly the right area.It provoked a creeper, causing explosion that opened another section of the route,and somehow the golem survived.Just a few moments later, another creeper wandered by,locked onto the same golem, and exploded.

With that second blast, the route was complete.Surface mobs could now wander all the way down into the active end portal.Now that there’s finally a path to the portal,I want to explain how the simulation, has actually been handling all of this wandering.In vanilla Minecraft,an Enderman periodically chooses a random place to wander toward.The simulator starts with that same basic cadence,but instead of calculating every individual stroll,it groups the world into large regions.Then it asks a much simpler question.Given the size and terrain of this region,how long would we expect a randomly, wandering Enderman to take before, it crosses into one of the neighboring, regions?Thousands of individual, walks like these can be represented by a single probabilistically, timed movement like this.The larger the region is, the longer that usually takes.Difficult terrain slows it down, and when it finally leaves,the next region is chosen randomly based on the surrounding terrain.

So, the Endermen still have no idea where the stronghold is.They can move toward it, away from it,get lost hundreds of thousands of blocks from anything useful,or place the block they’re carrying before they ever get there.So, rather than calculating millions of tiny random decisions one by one,the simulator samples how long, it takes until one of those meaningful, events happen.That’s really the trick behind this entire simulation.[music], Taking extremely expensive vanilla systems, and reducing them to probabilistic, models that preserve the behavior we care about.And now that mobs finally had a route into the portal,those same rules could start playing out somewhere much more important.

Here play out means “unfold / happen over time, especially as a situation develops.”

when an event is played out, it happens 发生；出现 SYN enact
Their love affair was played out against the backdrop of war.
他们在战争的背景下发生恋情。

The end.Enderman carrying blocks began finding their way down through the stronghold, and into the portal.And once they got there,they did exactly [music] what they’ve been doing in the overworld.Wander around, place blocks,and mostly accomplish nothing.

But now, every useful placement slowly built towards a much more specific goal.Before the dragon could actually be killed,all 10 of its end crystals had [music] to be destroyed.And since nothing in Minecraft is intentionally trying to do that,the simulation had to build a way for it to happen [music] by accident.Over millions of years,Enderman gradually, carried blocks into the end and placed them around the island.Most were useless,but occasionally enough would accumulate in the right places, to put one of the crystals within range of a projectile.All while this was happening,snow golems and other mobs would occasionally cross into the portal.Eventually, that gave us our first opportunity.After nearly 3 million years, a snow golem fired at an Enderman,missed, and the snowball directly struck one of the end crystals.One down, nine to go.From there, the process repeated.More blocks crossed the portal, more routes were slowly formed,more snow golems found their way into the end.

Most shots went nowhere useful, but every once in a while,a shot connected.What had taken almost 40,000, years to just to reach the portal was now stretching into millions,then tens of millions of simulated years.And by the time eight of the 10 crystals were gone,the simulation had been running for well over 100 million years.But the last two would come from one particularly useful snow golem.A pumpkin that had started back in the overworld eventually became a snow golem,wandered through the portal,and survived long enough in the end to get a shot at crystal number nine.In the year 181, million, it fired at an Enderman and destroyed the ninth crystal.Only one remained.The blocks were already beginning to form a route towards it,but even once the crystal was reachable, the shots still had to line up.The same golem wandered the end for 18, million years until it finally did it again.Every end crystal was now gone.For the first time in almost 200 million simulated years,

the Ender Dragon could take damage without healing it back.But being vulnerable and being dead are two very different things.The dragon was constantly moving,and the only way the simulation had to hurt it was another accident.A snow golem provoking a creeper close enough to the dragon, for the explosion to catch it.And just like everything else in this simulation,most of those opportunities were wasted.

wasted journey / trip / effort etc, a journey etc that does not achieve anything
白费的行程/旅行/努力等:
I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted trip. Mr. Newton isn’t here.
对不起，让你白跑了一趟，牛顿先生不在这里。

28 million years after the final crystal was destroyed,the first one finally connected.For damage.After almost a quarter of a billion years,the dragon had just lost 2% of its health.>> [music] >> And then the waiting started again.Another explosion, then another.Sometimes millions of years passed between hits, sometimes far longer.And while the dragon slowly lost health,the world kept burning through, the finite supply of pumpkins, that made this entire chain possible.Hundreds of millions of years passed, then a billion,>> [music] >> and still the dragon was alive.

By the time it finally dropped below 20 health,almost 2 billion simulated years had passed since the world first started.Eventually, only three health remained.One more useful explosion would do it.And in the year 1.975 billion, it finally happened.Without a single player entering the world, Minecraft had just beaten Minecraft.The world after this looked radically different from when it started.Enderman block movement had scarred most of the vulnerable biomes,with snowy biomes particularly marked by creeper explosions.

~ sb(of an unpleasant experience 不愉快的经历) to leave sb with a feeling of sadness or mental pain 给…留下精神创伤
The experience left her scarred for life.
那段经历给她留下终生的创伤。

~ sth to spoil the appearance of sth 损害…的外观
The hills are scarred by quarries.
采石场破坏了这些山的景观。
battle-scarred buildings
弹痕累累的建筑物

Villagers had long ago gone extinct.>> [music], >> And the end would eventually, lose most of the blocks that covered its surface, as Endermen wandered out of the, end holding blocks far more often, than they wandered in.Eventually, as the world was drained of all of its finite resources,[music] the Minecraft world would reach an equilibrium-like state,a heat death of the Minecraft world,where movable blocks were all distributed.

across the entire world [music] and not much more change was possible.This was truly the end of the simulation.If you want to run the simulator yourself, see it visualized in a unique way,or hear more about how I made it,check out the link to my Patreon in the description,where I share the source code and exclusive behind-the-scenes, content behind my creation process.I want to say an absolutely massive shoutout to my patrons, Mina J,Coda, Odin Allfather,Stefinator, Dragon Slayer,Melichu, Jewel Rain,and Inertia Squared.Your continued support has seriously meant the world to me.You guys are the best.Thank you so much for watching, and have a good day.