The time he spent doing this he could have taken a FPGA and made the next super-bang-whizmo.
This is a bad leap of logic right here. He simulated a very simple and well-understood piece of circuitry in a novel environment.This doesn't necessarily translate to being able to come up with something completely new and revolutionary.
No doubt, this kid is incredibly smart though. Probably some day he will be able to come up with the next super-bang-whizmo. To do that he'll need a deep understanding of the fundamentals of his field. He'll need to know it so inside out that he could build a computer out of the most unlikely materials, like say a video game. I don't think this was a lost opportunity cost. The world is not poorer by one gadget because he spent time modeling an ALU in Minecraft instead of on an FPGA. The world is now richer by one engineering student who knows his field a better than he did before.Probably better than he would have by doing it in a more conventional fashion.
Doing the same thing on an FPGA would not have been noteworthy. It's been done probably thousands of times before, and is likely included as sample code when you buy the FPGA kit.
I really liked the part of Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age that had the main character, as an exercise, go through learning how to program all kinds of low-level parts via physical analogs (gears and water sluices and so on) in her illustrated primer’s story, and then realize at the end that she understood how real computers work.
This is a bad leap of logic right here. He simulated a very simple and well-understood piece of circuitry in a novel environment.This doesn't necessarily translate to being able to come up with something completely new and revolutionary.
No doubt, this kid is incredibly smart though. Probably some day he will be able to come up with the next super-bang-whizmo. To do that he'll need a deep understanding of the fundamentals of his field. He'll need to know it so inside out that he could build a computer out of the most unlikely materials, like say a video game. I don't think this was a lost opportunity cost. The world is not poorer by one gadget because he spent time modeling an ALU in Minecraft instead of on an FPGA. The world is now richer by one engineering student who knows his field a better than he did before.Probably better than he would have by doing it in a more conventional fashion.
Doing the same thing on an FPGA would not have been noteworthy. It's been done probably thousands of times before, and is likely included as sample code when you buy the FPGA kit.