[HN Gopher] Minecraft's "Pack.png" Seed Reversal Methodology
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Minecraft's "Pack.png" Seed Reversal Methodology
Author : jsnell
Score : 110 points
Date : 2020-09-28 21:15 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.google.com)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I had learned about this here on HN and its just mind blowing
| that they discovered it down to the version range. Amazing that
| it took some months but they did it.
| rightbyte wrote:
| The most impressive part is how they made the search program
| run without bugs. I must be hard to make such a program and not
| be able to validate the input until you find it.
| joeraut wrote:
| A brief summary: pack.png [0] is a 128x128px image of a Minecraft
| world, used within in-game menus. The goal of this project was to
| discover the world seed for generating the Minecraft world that
| pack.png was taken in. This was no small feat, with 2^48 possible
| seeds, and required much analysis, trial-and-error and
| distributed computation to obtain the seed.
|
| The process involved analyzing identifiable world features such
| as the position of clouds, orientations of certain block
| textures, etc. to discover the exact coordinates of blocks in the
| image (which is insane in itself); creating and training a
| machine learning model which was used to upscale the image in
| order to better discern details and manually create a
| reconstruction; figuring out the exact camera perspective via
| regression fitting; deducing how the image was taken (print
| screen -> cropped to 512x512 -> 4x downscale with specific
| resizing algorithm); and more. Through these efforts, they were
| able to narrow down the search space to around 700,000 possible
| seeds, which was within the realm of using distributed computing
| to brute-force -- they then did exactly that!
|
| The YouTuber SalC1 produced an excellent video on the process
| [1].
|
| [0] https://packpng.com/static/pack.png
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6py9q46QU
| [deleted]
| JBiserkov wrote:
| It's incredible that they did it.
|
| It's also incredible how much time and resources were _invested_
| in this. Part of me wants to say _wasted_ on this. In the midst
| of a global pandemic. In the midst of an impending total
| ecosystem collapse.
|
| Fiddling while Rome, scratch that, while the planet burns.
| identity0 wrote:
| Had this never happened, all those GPUs would have spend many
| long nights doing nothing. Gamers have a disproportionate
| number of powerful PCs, and the people that contributed their
| GPUs did it out of love for the game, not for some greater
| societal good.
| merlinscholz wrote:
| Well, the humans that reversed that image don't necessarily
| have the skill sets to help fight a pandemic.
|
| It's like saying your car broke down and the art teacher
| doesn't want to fix it.
| metiscus wrote:
| Following along the stated lines, should all music creation be
| stopped, should artists only paint covid warnings, should
| sculptors only engrave monuments to the covid casualties? My
| point is, if art shouldn't stop because of the pandemic (and it
| shouldn't) then why should science? Just because a painting
| doesn't cure the plague, paintings and art provide pleasant
| distractions. This work can provide satiation to curiosity and
| perhaps the spinoff work can eventually be "useful" in some
| other way as well (I quoted useful because there is a deeper
| philosophic debate that could be had about utility here).
| mrob wrote:
| Video summary of this discovery:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6py9q46QU
| mastazi wrote:
| For context: https://youtu.be/ea6py9q46QU
|
| if you prefer reading instead of watching a video
| https://packpng.com/
|
| Related but different discovery: how the title screen was found
| https://youtu.be/GaRurhiK-Lk
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(page generated 2020-09-28 23:00 UTC)