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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purusha] | [TOKENS: 2727] |
Contents Purusha Purusha (Sanskrit: पुरुष, IAST: Puruṣa) is a complex concept whose meaning evolved in Vedic and Upanishadic times. Depending on the source and historical timeline, it means the cosmic being or self, awareness, and universal principle. In early Vedas, Purusha was a cosmic being whose sacrifice by the gods created all life. This was one of many creation myths discussed in the Vedas. In the Upanishads, the Purusha concept refers to the abstract essence of the Self, Spirit and the Universal Principle that is eternal, indestructible, without form, and all-pervasive. In Samkhya philosophy, Purusha is the plural immobile cosmic principle, pure consciousness, unattached and unrelated to anything, which is "nonactive, unchanging, eternal, and pure". Purusha uniting with Prakṛti (matter) gives rise to life. In Kashmir Shaivism, Purusha is enveloped in five sheaths: time (kāla), desire (raga), restriction (niyati), knowledge (vidyā) and separatedness (kalā); it is the universal Self (paramātman) under limitations as many individual Selfs (jīvātman). Definition and general meaning There is no consensus among schools of Hinduism on the definition of Purusha, and it is left to each school and individual to reach their own conclusions. For example, one of many theistic traditions script such as Kapilasurisamvada, credited to another ancient Hindu philosopher named Kapila, first describes Purusha in a manner similar to Samkhya-Yoga schools, but then proceeds to describe buddhi (intellect) as second Purusha, and ahamkara (egoism) as the third Purusha. Such pluralism and diversity of thought within Hinduism implies that the term Purusha is a complex term with diverse meanings. The animating causes, fields, and principles of nature are Purusha in Hindu philosophy. Hinduism refers to Purusha as the soul of the universe, the universal spirit present everywhere, in everything and everyone, all the time. Purusha is the Universal Principle that is eternal, indestructible, without form, and all-pervasive. It is Purusha in the form of nature’s laws and principles that operate in the background to regulate, guide, and direct change, evolution, cause, and effect. It is Purusha, in the Hindu concept of existence, that breathes life into matter, is the source of all consciousness, one that creates oneness in all life forms, in all of humanity, and the essence of Self. According to Hinduism, it is Purusha why the universe operates, is dynamic and evolves, as against being static. Vedas During the Vedic period, the Purusha concept was one of several mythemes offered for the creation of the universe.[a] Purusa, in the Rigveda, was described as a being who becomes a sacrificial offering of the devatas who sacrifices himself to his own self, and whose sacrifice creates all life forms including human beings. In the Rigveda, "Puruṣa is all that yet hath been and all that is to be" (पुरुष एवेदगं सर्वं यद्भूतं यच्च भव्यम्।). In the Purusha Sukta, the 90th hymn of the 10th book of the Rigveda, varna is portrayed as a result of human beings created from different parts of the body of the divinity Purusha. This Purusha Sukta verse is controversial and is believed by many scholars, such as Max Müller, to be a corruption and medieval or modern era insertion into Veda, because unlike all other major concepts in the Vedas including those of Purusha, the four varnas are never mentioned anywhere else in any of the Vedas, and because this verse is missing in some manuscript prints found in different parts of India. That remarkable hymn (the Purusha Sukta) is in language, metre, and style, very different from the rest of the prayers with which it is associated. It has a decidedly more modern tone, and must have been composed after the Sanskrit language had been refined. — Henry Thomas Colebrooke, There can be little doubt, for instance, that the 90th hymn of the 10th book (Purusha Sukta) is modern both in its character and in its diction. (...) It mentions the three seasons in the order of the Vasanta, spring; Grishma, summer; and Sarad, autumn; it contains the only passage in the Rigveda where the four castes are enumerated. The evidence of language for the modern date of this composition is equally strong. Grishma, for instance, the name for the hot season, does not occur in any other hymn of the Rigveda; and Vasanta also does not belong to the earliest vocabulary of the Vedic poets. — Max Müller, The Purusha Sukta is a later interpolation in the Rig Veda. (...) Verses in the form of questions about the division of Purusha and the origins of the Varnas are a fraudulent emendation of the original. — Babasaheb Ambedkar, Upanishads The abstract idea of Purusha is extensively discussed in various Upanishads, and referred interchangeably as Paramatman and Brahman (not to be confused with Brahmin). In the Upanishads and later texts of Hindu philosophy, the Purusha concept moved away from the Vedic definition of Purusha and was no longer a person, cosmic man or entity. Instead, the concept flowered into a more complex abstraction: Splendid and without a bodily form is this Purusha, without and within, unborn, without life breath and without mind, higher than the supreme element. From him are born life breath and mind. He is the soul of all beings. — Munduka Upanishad, (Translated by Klaus Klostermair) In the Upanishads, the Purusha concept refers to the abstract essence of the Self, Spirit and the Universal Principle that is eternal, indestructible, without form and is all-pervasive. The Purusha concept is explained with the concept of Prakrti in the Upanishads. The Universe is envisioned in these ancient Sanskrit texts as a combination of the perceivable material reality and non-perceivable, non-material laws and principles of nature. Material reality (or Prakrti) is everything that has changed, can change and is subject to cause and effect. Purusha is the universal principle that is unchanging, uncaused but is present everywhere and the reason why Prakrti changes, transforms and transcends all of the time and which is why there is cause and effect. Rishi Angiras of the Atma Upanishad , belonging to the Atharvaveda explains that Purusha, the dweller in the body, is three-fold: the Bahyatman (the Outer-Atman) which is born and dies; the Antaratman (the Inner-Atman) which comprehends the whole range of material phenomena, gross and subtle, with which the Jiva concerns himself; and the Paramatman which is all-pervading, unthinkable, indescribable, is without action and has no Samskaras. In Samkhya and Yoga Both Samkhya, a school of Hindu philosophy that considers reason, as against Nyaya school's logic or Mīmāṃsā school's tradition, as the proper source of knowledge, and Yoga philosophy state that there are two ultimate realities whose interaction accounts for all experiences and universe, namely Purusha (spirit) and Prakrti (matter). The universe is envisioned as a combination of perceivable material reality and non-perceivable, non-material laws and principles of nature. Material reality, or Prakrti, is everything that has changed, can change and is subject to cause and effect. Universal principle, or Purusha, is that which is unchanging (aksara) and is uncaused. Puruṣa is the transcendental self or pure consciousness. It is absolute, independent, free, imperceptible, unknowable through other agencies, above any experience by mind or senses and beyond any words or explanations. It remains pure, "nonattributive consciousness". Puruṣa is neither produced nor does it produce. It is held that unlike Advaita Vedanta and like Purva-Mīmāṃsā, Samkhya believes in a plurality of the puruṣas. Yoga philosophy holds that, in addition to the purusha of each individual, there is a special purusha called Ishvara, which is free of all kleshas and karmas. Both Samkhya and Yoga school holds that the path to moksha (release, Self-realization) includes the realization of Purusha. Puranas In the Puranas, "The Bhagavata Purana and the Mahabharata boldly proclaim Vishnu as ultimate Purusha described in Purusha Sukta prayer", whereas Shiva is described as ultimate Purusha (cosmic male) in Shiva Purana. According to Indologist W. Norman Brown, "The verses of Purusha Sukta are definitely a reference to Vishnu, who, through his three steps, is all-pervading (i.e. he spreads in all directions)". The Bhagavata Purana explains the origin of the four varnas from the body of Purusha, identified as Vishnu: Oh leader of Kurus! From the mouth of the Puruṣa came forth Brahman (the Veda) and the Brāhmaṇa class like syllables coming out from the mouth (head). Hence the Brāhmaṇa Varṇa became the foremost among the Varṇas. From his arms emanated the power of protection and the Kṣatriya class who follows that vow, viz. the duty of protecting the world. This class born from Puruṣa (Lord Viṣṇu) protects the classes of people from wounds (i.e. injuries or troubles) caused by thorns (in the form of miscreants). From the thighs of that All-pervading Lord were born the vocations like agriculture which maintain the livelihood of the public. The Vaiśya class, born from the same part of the body, carries out trades and agriculture for the maintenance of people. From the feet of the Lord was born to service for the achievement of religion. Formerly the Śūdra class was born for the sake of service, whereby Hari is pleased. — Bhagavata Purana, Book 3, Chapter 6 Vedanta In the Bhagavad Gita, purusha is used to refer to Supreme Being in several instances: That Supreme Being (purusha), Partha, is attained by undivided devotion. The living beings are situated within him and he pervades this entire world. — Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 8, verse 22 Arjuna refers to Krishna as purusha in several verses, such as Chapter 10 verse 12, Chapter 11 verse 18, Chapter 11 verse 38. You are the Supreme Brahman, the supreme abode and the supreme purifier. You are the eternal divine purusha, the primordial Deity, unborn and all-pervading. — Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 10, verse 12 In Chapter 15 verse 16 Krishna refers to two types of purushas: kshara (perishable), akshara (imperishable). In verse 17, he identifies himself as "highest purusha" (paramatman), superior to both kshara and akshara. The Brahma Sutra 1.2.13 references Chandogya Upanishad 4.15.1, which describes the purusha that is seen in the eye: The teacher said: "The person seen in the eyes is the Self. It is immortal and fearless. It is Brahman. This is why, if anyone puts clarified butter or water in the eyes, it goes to the corners of the eyes". — Chandogya Upanishad 4.15.1 The Brahma Sutra 1.2.13 clarifies that this person is the highest self, Brahman: (The Person) within the eye (is the highest Self) on account of suitability. — Brahma Sutra 1.2.13 See also Notes References Sources External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Minecraft_Movie#Sequel] | [TOKENS: 6034] |
Contents A Minecraft Movie A Minecraft Movie is a 2025 fantasy adventure comedy film based on the 2011 video game Minecraft developed and published by Mojang Studios. Directed by Jared Hess, from a screenplay Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, and Chris Galletta, based on a story by Allison Schroeder, Bowman, and Palmer, the film stars Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, Sebastian Hansen, and Jennifer Coolidge. It follows four misfits from the fictional town of Chuglass, Idaho, who are pulled through a portal into a cubic world, and must embark on a quest back to the real world with the help of a "crafter" named Steve. Plans for a Minecraft film adaptation originated in 2014, when game creator Markus Persson revealed that Mojang Studios was in talks with Warner Bros. to develop the project. Throughout development, the film shifted between several directors, producers, and story drafts. By 2022, Legendary Entertainment became involved, and Hess was hired as director with Momoa in talks to star. Further casting took place from May 2023 to January 2024. Principal photography began later that month in New Zealand and concluded in April 2024. Mark Mothersbaugh composed the score, and Sony Pictures Imageworks, Wētā FX, and Digital Domain provided the film's visual effects. A Minecraft Movie premiered in London on March 30, 2025, and was released in the United States and Sweden on April 4, by Warner Bros. Pictures. While the film received mixed reviews from critics, it was a box-office success, grossing $961 million and becoming the fifth-highest-grossing film of 2025 and the second-highest-grossing video game film of all time. The film has also been hailed as a Gen Z phenomenon. A sequel is scheduled for release in 2027. Plot Struggling doorknob salesman Steve breaks into a mine to fulfill a childhood dream, where he discovers the Orb of Dominance and the Earth Crystal. When combined, they create a portal that transports him to the Overworld, a world where the terrain is made of easily manipulated cubes. He builds his own paradise and later stumbles across a portal to a hellish world called the Nether. He is imprisoned by Malgosha, the gold-obsessed piglin ruler of the Nether who gravely discourages creativity. Because the Orb would allow her to control the Overworld, Steve has his dog Dennis escape with the Orb and Crystal and hide them under his bed in the real world. Sometime later, 1980s video game champion Garrett "The Garbage Man" Garrison owns a failing video game store in Chuglass, Idaho. He heads to a storage auction to acquire items to sell for cash, ultimately winning the contents of Steve's old house. While searching through the items, particularly hoping to find an Atari Cosmos, he instead finds Steve's old belongings including the Orb and Crystal. Siblings Henry and Natalie move to Chuglass following their mother's death. The two meet Dawn, their real estate agent, who also runs a mobile petting zoo. On Henry's first day of school, he gets in trouble when his experimental jetpack is sabotaged and damages the potato chip factory's mascot Chuggy. To avoid expulsion from Vice Principal Marlene, he pays Garrett to play his uncle and takes him to the video game store. There, Henry discovers the Orb and Crystal and combines them, leading the two to Steve's mine. Natalie finds Henry missing and calls Dawn who tracks down Henry's location via Natalie's phone. As the four reunite, they are sucked into the portal and arrive in the Overworld. Malgosha learns that the Orb has returned and releases Steve from his imprisonment in the Nether to reclaim it, saying that she has Dennis as a hostage. While fighting off monsters at night, Henry learns to manipulate blocks and builds a wooden fortress. The Earth Crystal is destroyed in the commotion. Steve appears at dawn and defeats the monsters as he tells the group that a replacement Crystal will be needed from the Woodland Mansion and joins them. To prepare for this quest, he leads them to a nearby village and demonstrates how to craft. Piglins seeking the Orb of Dominance launch an attack on the village. Steve, Garrett, and Henry narrowly escape while Natalie and Dawn are separated from them and befriend Dennis. Malgosha responds by sending out the Great Hog, a massive Piglin. When Steve mentions that he has a hoard of diamonds, Garrett becomes interested and demands access as an added condition to handing over the Orb. They make a detour and find the hoard, but Henry is angered by their disregard for Natalie's safety. When the Great Hog arrives, they escape using minecarts and the Hog is blown up by creepers. Arriving at the mansion, Steve and Garrett attempt to distract the guards while Henry acquires both the Earth Crystal and an Ender Pearl which can facilitate one's teleportation. Malgosha returns and destroys the bridge to the mansion. Steve and Henry lose the Orb to her, but escape as Garrett seemingly sacrifices himself in the blast. The two awaken with Dawn, Natalie, and Dennis in a mushroom house. Malgosha uses the Orb to superpower the Nether portal, blotting out the sun and declaring war on the Overworld. The party crafts an arsenal of weaponry and an army of iron golems to fight the piglin invasion, while Steve fights Malgosha. Henry uses the Ender Pearl to obtain the Orb, restoring the sunlight and causing Malgosha and her army to zombify. The party, including Garrett who survived the explosion, returns to Chuglass, where they develop the successful video game Block City Battle Buddies. Dawn opens her zoo with Dennis as an attraction, Natalie opens a dojo, Henry completes his jetpack, and Garrett revitalizes the game store with Steve. Cast Amanda Billing portrays Natalie and Henry's mother in a photograph. Mark Wright portrays an HR person at Chuglass High School. YouTubers DanTDM, Aphmau, Mumbo Jumbo, and LDShadowLady make cameos as auction attendees. Jens Bergensten, who is one of the lead designers for Minecraft, makes a cameo appearance as a waiter who tends to Marlene and Nitwit. A pig wearing a crown appears as a tribute to YouTuber Technoblade, who died in 2022. Kate McKinnon makes an uncredited vocal cameo in a post-credits scene as Alex, a woman living in Steve's house, with Alice May Connolly physically portraying Alex. Production Following a series of offers from Hollywood producers to create a Minecraft-related television series and a crowdfunding campaign for a fan film that was shut down by Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson, Persson revealed that Mojang Studios was in talks with Warner Bros. to develop an official Minecraft film in February 2014. Later in October, Mojang CCO Vu Bui stated that the movie was early in development, and would be a "large-budget" production. He also said that the film might not be released until at least 2018. Originally, Roy Lee and Jill Messick were set to produce the project. That same month, Warner Bros. hired Shawn Levy to direct the film, though he and writers Kieran and Michele Mulroney, who were developing the film together, left the project by December. By July 2015, Warner Bros. hired Rob McElhenney to direct the film. He said that he had been drawn to the film based on the open-world nature of the game, an idea Warner Bros. had initially agreed with and for which they had provided him with a preliminary US$150 million budget. Early production started in 2016, and an initial release date was announced for May 24, 2019. Jason Fuchs was set to write the script of the film, and Steve Carell was going to star as the voice of an unknown character. However, by late 2016, McElhenney's Minecraft film "slowly died on the vine", after studio executive Greg Silverman's departure from Warner Brothers in late 2016. Aaron and Adam Nee were tapped to rewrite the script and the film was delayed as a result. No new director was announced at that time. By January 2019, Peter Sollett was announced to write and direct the film, which would feature an entirely different story from McElhenney's version. Messick, who died in 2018, was posthumously credited as producer. The original vision Sollet had for the film involved "a teenage girl and her unlikely group of adventurers" as they set out on a quest to defeat the Ender Dragon, the final boss of the original Minecraft game. The film was later given a new release date of March 4, 2022. In June 2019, Allison Schroeder was hired to write the script and co-write the story with Sollett. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Warner Bros. was forced to adjust its release schedule, which included removing the Minecraft film from its planned release date. In April 2022, production on the Minecraft film was announced to be moving forward without Sollett and Schroeder, with Jared Hess now set to direct, Legendary Entertainment to co-produce (through its executive Mary Parent), and Jason Momoa in early talks to star. The film was also confirmed to be live action. It was also reported that Chris Bowman and Hubbel Palmer, who collaborated with Hess on Masterminds (2016), would rewrite the script. Producer Roy Lee credited new leadership at Warner Brothers for pushing the film into production after so many years saying: "Toby Emmerich shut it down when he first started, and if he had never run Warner Bros., it would’ve been made years earlier. It was only after Pam [Abdy] and Mike [De Luca] started that they reignited the project and it got made." Hess' involvement in the film began after a separate project he was developing with Legendary never materialized, and he was involved by the studio to pitch a take for the Minecraft adaptation. He later stated that he enjoyed trying to "adapt something that doesn't have a story – it's an open sandbox game", and hoped to find an opportunity for a "fun, ridiculous movie". The film's final writing credits went to Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, and Chris Galletta, who wrote the film from a story by Allison Schroeder, Bowman, and Palmer. Off-screen Additional Literary Material credit was given to Hess, McElhenney, Fuchs, Megan Amram, Kevin Biegel, John Francis Daley, Dana Fox, Hannah Friedman, Jonathan Goldstein, Phil Augusta Jackson, Lauryn Kahn, Kieran Mulroney, Michele Mulroney, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, Zak Penn, Simon Rich, Peter Sollett, Laura Steinel, Jon Spaihts, Oren Uziel, and Ben Wexler. While adapting Minecraft into a film, the production crew aimed to make sure that the objects present in the film were faithful to the game, made up only of cubes. This included everything from trees to fruit.: 2:00–2:29 Several YouTubers and members of the Minecraft community were present during the production of the film, with YouTuber Mumbo Jumbo contributing towards designing some of the props.: 2:00–2:29 When writing and directing the film, the team opted to make a story based on Minecraft, rather than making an official canon story, which they viewed as in-line with Minecraft's nature as a sandbox game that lets players create their own stories. As such, the film was titled A Minecraft Movie, rather than The Minecraft Movie. This concept is also applied to the film's depiction of one of Minecraft's characters, Steve, which the production crew described Jack Black's version as one of many Steves not meant to represent the "Steve" present in Minecraft. James Thomas served as the film's editor. While A Minecraft Movie is predominantly a live action film, it uses a heavy amount of CGI to simulate the terrain, animals, monsters, and other objects. Green-screens and in-studio lighting were also used extensively. 3D models were imported into Unreal Engine to create virtual environments of various sets, which were used throughout the production of the film. Visual effects for the film were provided by Sony Pictures Imageworks, Wētā FX, and Digital Domain, with Dan Lemmon serving as visual effects supervisor. Around the same time that Hess was announced to direct the film, it was also stated that Momoa would star in the film. In May 2023, Matt Berry entered negotiations to join the cast, while Danielle Brooks and Sebastian Eugene Hansen joined the cast in November, and Emma Myers joined the cast in December. Jack Black, who previously collaborated with Hess on Nacho Libre in 2006, joined the cast in January 2024, teasing his casting in the film via his official Instagram account. Originally, Berry was supposed to play Steve while Black was set to only appear as a cameo in the form of a talking pig, but due to the 2023 Hollywood labor disputes, Berry had to vacate the role, with Black taking over the role of Steve. According to producer Torfi Frans Olafsson, Black's depiction of Steve was "specific to him". At the same time as Black's casting, Jennifer Coolidge, Kate McKinnon, and Jemaine Clement were also cast in then-undisclosed roles. YouTuber Valkyrae was originally set to appear in the film, but was removed after she openly accused Momoa of mistreating the cast and production crew. Principal photography for the film began in January 2024 near Auckland, and concluded by April of that year. A majority of the scenes set in the fictional town of Chuglass, Idaho were filmed in Huntly, with additional production taking place at Helensville, Auckland Film Studios, and Settlers Country Manor. Originally, filming was going to begin in August 2023, but was delayed due to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Grant Major served as the production designer, and Enrique Chediak served as the cinematographer. Music Mark Mothersbaugh composed the original score, while Gabe Hilfer and Karyn Rachtman serve as music supervisors. Mothersbaugh incorporated "nods" to the music of the game by C418, and said that the score was meant to balance the "charm" of the characters with the action, while retaining a "depth and emotional resonance". From the Minecraft soundtrack, C418's title track plays during the opening credits, and his song "Dragon Fish" plays during a scene with pandas; Lena Raine's track "Pigstep" features during the "Nether's Got Talent" sequence. The film includes several original songs performed by Black, including "I Feel Alive". It was written by Black, and features Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl on drums, Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen, Jellyfish keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr., and Mark Ronson on both rhythm guitar and bass. Brooks also provides backup vocals. The song was released as a single prior to the release of the film on March 20, 2025. Mothersbaugh's score, along with original songs by Benee, Dayglow, and Dirty Honey, was released digitally on March 28. The film also features an instrumental rendition of Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough" performed by Jamieson Shaw. Another song in the film, "Steve's Lava Chicken", went viral online after the film's release and charted in several territories. The song became the shortest song to reach the Top 40 of the UK singles chart, and the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. Marketing The film's first teaser trailer, set to the Beatles's "Magical Mystery Tour", was released on September 4, 2024. Audience reactions to the teaser were noted as "divided" or "generally negative", with criticism for the CGI, design, and live-action nature of the film. Andrew Webster of The Verge said that besides its "unsettling imagery", it "looks like some silly family fun". Tom Power of TechRadar could not decide whether it was "drop-dead gorgeous or the stuff of nightmares". Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft, praised the trailer on Twitter, saying "Ok i'm in Wow this is a weird feeling." Various clips and images from the trailer, such as the designs of a bleating pink sheep and a white llama, and Jack Black saying "I... am Steve", were ridiculed by online commenters. A second trailer, set to MGMT's "Time to Pretend", was released on November 19, to a more positive response from many viewers. A final trailer for the film was released on February 27, and a final teaser for the film was released on March 27. A few days before the film's release, a workprint version featuring incomplete visual effects and CGI, missing credits, and significant chroma key masking errors was leaked onto various piracy websites and spread on social media platforms such as Twitter. Release A Minecraft Movie had its official premiere at the Leicester Square in London, England, on March 30, 2025, and was released theatrically in IMAX in the United States and Sweden by Warner Bros. Pictures on April 4.[c] The release of the film coincided with Mojang's collaboration with various brands to create promotional products for the film, including action figures of the characters, "creeper green" vanilla milk from TruMoo, Wallpaper Themes for Samsung Galaxy S25, Samsung Neo QLED 8K TV, and Samsung Family Hub SpaceMax Smart Fridge Freezer offered by Samsung, and special Happy Meals offered by McDonald's. The unusual nature of these products, such as the "uncanny" appearance of the Jack Black action figure, garnered both attention and some criticism, though the "Nether Flame Sauce" hot dipping sauce from the McDonald's promotion was lauded for its spice and suitability with Chicken McNuggets. A Minecraft Movie was released for digital download on May 13, 2025, and was released on Ultra HD Blu-ray, Blu-ray, and DVD on June 24. It was released on HBO Max on June 20. Reception A Minecraft Movie grossed $424.1 million in the United States and Canada and $537.1 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $961.2 million. In the United States and Canada, A Minecraft Movie was released alongside Hell of a Summer, and was initially projected to gross $65–70 million from 4,263 theaters in its opening weekend, with some estimates going as high as $80 million. It made an estimated $10.6 million from Thursday night previews, topping Five Nights at Freddy's' $10.3 million for best total by a video game adaptation, and increasing weekend projections to $80–100 million. After making $58 million on its first day (including previews), estimates were again revised to $135–150 million. It ended up debuting with $162.8 million domestically and $313 million globally on its opening weekend, surpassing The Super Mario Bros. Movie domestically, which also featured Black, as the highest-grossing opening weekend for a movie based on a video game. The film had the third-highest Warner Bros. opening weekend, behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, as well as the company's highest April opening weekend, beating out Clash of the Titans. It also beat out Captain America: Brave New World to achieve the biggest opening weekend of 2025 at the time. Additionally, A Minecraft Movie earned the third-highest April opening weekend, trailing Avengers: Endgame and Avengers: Infinity War, and was the second-highest for a Legendary production, only behind Jurassic World. Overall, it would score the fourth-highest opening weekend for a PG-rated film, after The Lion King, Incredibles 2 and Beauty and the Beast. The movie also marked the highest opening weekend for Jared Hess (surpassing Nacho Libre), Danielle Brooks (surpassing The Angry Birds Movie) and Jennifer Coolidge (surpassing American Pie 2). In its second weekend, A Minecraft Movie grossed $78.5 million. Within its first seven days of release, it became the first film of 2025 to reach the $200 million mark domestically, replacing Captain America: Brave New World as the market's highest-grossing film of the year. It also became the second-highest-grossing movie based on a video game, surpassing Sonic the Hedgehog 3. In its third weekend, A Minecraft Movie, grossing $40.5 million, would drop to second place after Warner Bros.' new release Sinners grossed $48 million, in what was considered to be an upset; it was the first time one studio had two films gross more than $40 million over the same weekend since 2009. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 48% of 190 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "Ostensibly a film about celebrating creativity, A Minecraft Movie provides a colorful sandbox for Jack Black and Jason Momoa to amusingly romp around in a story curiously constructed from conventional building blocks." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 45 out of 100, based on 40 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audience reactions to the film were more positive in comparison to critics; filmgoers polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale, while 67% of those surveyed by PostTrak said they would definitely recommend the film. Kids under the age of 12 gave the film an average rating of five out of five stars, while parents gave an average of four and a half out of five stars. Critics were divided on the film's plot and whether or not A Minecraft Movie was a faithful adaptation of the game, as well as if it made sense to viewers unfamiliar with it. Lovia Gyarkye of The Hollywood Reporter and Jesse Hassenger of IGN both believed that the film's plot was confusing. Gyarkye felt that it struggled to maintain a balance between appeasing the Minecraft fandom and writing a film that made sense to a general audience, and Hassenger said that the film was "conceptually muddy" and "confusingly and erratically presented". Mark Kennedy of the Associated Press believed that the film would likely make no sense to a viewer unfamiliar with the source material, but still believed that it was a faithful adaptation. However, he did highlight the film's featuring of concepts not present within the game itself to enable plot progression. Contrarily, Liz Shannon Miller of Consequence believed that the plot was fully comprehensible to someone unfamiliar with the game. Stephen Thompson of NPR stated that "turning Minecraft into a movie presents a challenge, because the film has a lot of character development to catch up on. But, as The Lego Movie and Barbie have demonstrated, it's possible to get it spectacularly right". Some reviewers viewed the fan service present within the film positively, particularly highlighting the tribute to Technoblade. The performances of the cast, particularly Black and Momoa, were praised, with many critics viewing them as helping alleviate or distract from problems present within the film's plot. Miller and Jordan Hoffman of Entertainment Weekly both felt that the story was not the main priority of the film and could be ignored in favor of the performance of the actors, the former believing that the film was mainly made with the intent of having fun. However, some viewed that the characters, despite the performances of their actors, were generally underdeveloped. The sub-plot involving Coolidge's character dating a villager, while viewed as generally unnecessary or relatively thin in terms of character development, was subject to some praise as well. Some reviewers questioned the purpose or value of the film, with some viewing it as nothing more than a product with the intent of promoting Minecraft. Both Kevin Maher of The Times and David Fear of Rolling Stone likened the film to a corporate cash-grab, viewing it as existing with the sole purpose of promoting the Minecraft brand and offering nothing else of value. Maher further viewed the film as lacking a level of versatility present in other video game adaptations, while Fear believed that the film was intentionally confusing so that it would stay in the minds of people longer, and therefore encourage them to purchase merchandise. While Clarisse Loughrey of The Independent believed that the idea behind a live-action Minecraft adaptation was fundamentally flawed and destroyed the spirit of the source material, she felt that the film had "genuine intent" and was not like other adaptations that she viewed as existing solely for the sake of profit. The film has sparked boisterous reactions and disorderly conduct from viewers, particularly Generation Z American and British adolescent boys, with some partaking in a viral Internet phenomenon on TikTok, alongside other social media platforms. Participants would often react enthusiastically to moments in the film that have been the subject of Internet memes, such as spontaneously erupting into loud cheers, jumping in excitement, dancing, or throwing popcorn when Steve exclaims "Chicken jockey!" Other viral lines include "Flint and steel!" and "I… am Steve", though neither approached the frenzy surrounding "Chicken jockey!" In one screening, viral videos emerged documenting audience members hoisting a live chicken after the quote and promptly ejected from the theater at Provo Towne Centre in Provo, Utah; another involved a group setting off fire extinguishers and smoke bombs, suffocating fellow theatergoers; while another led to a violent altercation in the parking lot outside the theater after adults asked four teenagers to quiet down. The trend has also spread to other Gen Z teenage boys from Australia and South Africa. Reactions to the phenomenon have been mixed. Some audience members frowned upon the misconduct as "annoying and disruptive", while several theater chains posted warnings against unruly behavior. Police have also reportedly been called to restore order and eject offenders, including an instance where an employee was physically harmed, although no charges were filed. Hess defended some of these antics as harmless and amusing, further explaining that he and Black had conceived the scene because they "thought it would be funny if Steve announced everything that happens to him, stating the obvious with extreme intensity". Black made a surprise appearance at a screening and warned fans not to throw popcorn. Writing for The Observer, Kate Maltby opined that audiences had crossed the line, pointing to the mess left for janitors to clean up. Many observers noted that the trend was evolving into a distinct cultural phenomenon, particularly emphasizing the immersive and communal nature of the theater experience. Research psychologist Rachel Kowert commented, "While being quiet is generally the norm in traditional theater settings, it's important to recognize that different fan cultures come with their own expectations for how to engage." She added, "In this case, the energy surrounding the Minecraft movie reflects a deeply engaged fandom—one that is enthusiastic about sharing the experience in a communal setting." Others argued that the trend reflected youth culture rather than incivility, akin to concerts or sporting events. Warner Bros. released a special "Block Party Edition" of the film on May 2, 2025, in which fans were encouraged to "sing-along and meme-along" viral moments in the film; in the United Kingdom, the cinema chain Cineworld hosted a similar event dubbed "Chicken jockey screenings" in which fans were encouraged to cosplay and make noises, a move praised for its ingenuity by Vulture's Nicholas Quah. The phenomenon has been compared to audience participation at screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and The Room (2003), as well as the earlier "Gentleminions" TikTok trend surrounding Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022) that similarly involved adolescent boys engaging in outlandish behavior. It has been cited as one of the factors for the film's box-office success. Sequel Talks for a potential sequel to the film began a few days after the film's release. Hess has expressed interest in making a sequel, noting the world's use of infinite mods, characters, and biomes, outlining how Minecraft is virtually endless. He later stated that there were many ideas they had for the film that they were unable to use, but would likely be included as part of a sequel. On April 11, 2025, it was reported that a sequel is in early development. At the end of a behind the scenes interview, the VFX supervisor Sheldon Stopsack and the animation supervisor Kevin Estey both refer to the film's sequel as Another Minecraft Movie. On October 9, a sequel was announced with a release date of July 23, 2027, with Hess returning to direct and Galletta returning to co-write the screenplay. Legendary Pictures will return to produce and provide funding. See also Notes References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://www.bbc.com/gahuza] | [TOKENS: 1356] |
BBC News, Gahuza - Urupapuro rw'itangiriro Inkuru iri kw'isonga Abacuranzi basigaye mu batangiye iri tsinda ni 2, Sebigeri Paul uzwi nka Mimi la Rose na Ngenzi Fidèle uzwi nka Fidèle Jacard. Trump avuze ibi inyuma y'umusi umwe asa n'uwuhaye Irani imisi 10 kugira ngo yemere amasezerano yo guhagarika umugambi wayo wa nikleyeri. Abashinjacyaha mu Bufaransa barimo kurega bagenzi be batatu bari kumwe na we basangira inzoga kandi bakina uwo mukino wamuviriyemo urupfu. Imihate ya Washington, Doha, Luanda na Lome yo kugeza impande zombi ku guhagarika imirwano no kugera ku mahoro kugeza ubu nta musaruro iratanga. Urupfu rwe rwongeye guteza impaka n'ibibazo ku buzima bwo mu mutwe mu rubyiruko hamwe n'ikibazo cyo gutunga imbunda muri Amerika. Gucika kw'itumanaho no kutagira amashanyarazi muri ako gace bituma bigoye kumenya neza ibirimo kuba muri aka karere karimo imirwano mu gihe agahenge kahonyowe. Umuryango we uvuga ko wahawe amakuru ko ku cyumweru tariki 01 Gashyantare(2) yavanywe mu modoka irimo abandi bagenzi bakamwinjiza mu yindi ya gisivile bakamutwara. Bellarmine Mugabe ari mu maboko ya polisi, nyuma y’uko umugabo bivugwa ko yakoraga mu busitani bw'aho yari acumbitse arashwe ndetse agakomereka. Juliet* yabwiye BBC ko yahagaritswe n'uwo mugabo washatse kumujyana muri hoteli ubwo yari imbere y'iduka rinini i Accra, aho yari yajyanye n'abana be gutembera. Uyu muherwe utunze za miliyari yavuze ko "igihe cyose" yicuza kuba atabasha vuga vuba kubona abakoresha urwo rubuga bari munsi y'imyak 13. Cishemere ni ikambi izitijwe n'amabati, ababamwo ntibemerewe gusohoka, naho hari abemererwa kwicara imbere y'amarembo baba bategereje abagiraneza. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor yatawe muri yombi akekwaho imyitwarire mibi mu kazi ka leta, ese ni ibyaha ki mu by'ukuri aregwa? Urashaka kuziganya uburyo ukoresha kuri internet? Hindura uje ku rubuga ruciririrkiye rwa BBC News Gahuza Ivyo BBC Gahuza ibahitiramwo Iyi raporo y'ubutasi bwa Kenya ivuga ko abantu bari hagati y'imyaka 20 na 50 barimo abahoze ari abasirikare, abahoze ari abapolisi n'abashomeri ari bo bashakishwa cyane n'abatwara abarwanyi. Denise Sides yatoranyijwe avuye mu bihumbi by’abasabaga kwemererwa kwitabira amashusho y’indirimbo y'umuririmbyi batari bazi neza uwo ari we. Mu mpera z'icyumweru cyari cyuzuyemo ituze, nyuma gato ya Noheli, itsinda ry'abajura binjiye muri banki iri ku muhanda mugari, ese babishoboye bate?. Izi ntambwe nke zoroshye uzikurikije byagufasha kurushaho kugirana umubano mwiza n'abandi, kandi zigatuma nawe uba inshuti wifuza ko nawe wagira. Ubu burozi, epibatidine, bushobora kuva ku ruhu rw'iyi mitubu ibona mu bihugu bibiri gusa muri Amerika y'epfo. Murekezi yabwiye Urukiko ko uwo yari yahisemo ngo amwunganire yivanye mu rubanza habura iminsi ibiri ngo baze kuburana, kandi yari yaramaze kumwishyura. BBC Gahuza LIVE RADIO Umva ibiganiro vya BBC Gahuza ikibiriraho (live) kuwa mbere gushika ku gatanu isaha 1730 GMT, no kuwa gatandatu 0600 GMT & 0900 GMT no kuwa Mungu 0630 GMT & 1600 GMT. Video Ibiganiro bya radiyo Imikino Podcasts Ikiganiro mpaka ku bibazo bitandukanye Ikiganiro cy’abagore Amakuru y'akarere na mpuzamakungu mutegurirwa na BBC Gahuzamiryango Teramana na BBC Gahuzamiryango mu kinamico Urunana Mubaza ibibazo mufise ku vy'amagara, Muganga akabaha inyishu kuri BBC Gahuzamiryango Dukurikire kuri Izisomwa na benshi Amarembo ngirakamaro Bona amakuru mu zindi ndimi © 2026 BBC. BBC ntibazwa ibivuye ku zindi mbuga. Soma ibijanye n'aho duhagaze ku mihora ijana ahandi |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft#cite_note-:11-30] | [TOKENS: 12858] |
Contents Minecraft Minecraft is a sandbox game developed and published by Mojang Studios. Following its initial public alpha release in 2009, it was formally released in 2011 for personal computers. The game has since been ported to numerous platforms, including mobile devices and various video game consoles. In Minecraft, players explore a procedurally generated world with virtually infinite terrain made up of voxels (cubes). They can discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, build structures, fight hostile mobs, and cooperate with or compete against other players in multiplayer. The game's large community offers a wide variety of user-generated content, such as modifications, servers, player skins, texture packs, and custom maps, which add new game mechanics and possibilities. Originally created by Markus "Notch" Persson using the Java programming language, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten was handed control over the game's development following its full release. In 2014, Mojang and the Minecraft intellectual property were purchased by Microsoft for US$2.5 billion; Xbox Game Studios hold the publishing rights for the Bedrock Edition, the unified cross-platform version which evolved from the Pocket Edition codebase[i] and replaced the legacy console versions. Bedrock is updated concurrently with Mojang's original Java Edition, although with numerous, generally small, differences. Minecraft is the best-selling video game in history with over 350 million copies sold. It has received critical acclaim, winning several awards and being cited as one of the greatest video games of all time. Social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, and the annual Minecon conventions have played prominent roles in popularizing it. The wider Minecraft franchise includes several spin-off games, such as Minecraft: Story Mode, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft Legends. A film adaptation, titled A Minecraft Movie, was released in 2025 and became the second highest-grossing video game film of all time. Gameplay Minecraft is a 3D sandbox video game that has no required goals to accomplish, giving players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game. The game features an optional achievement system. Gameplay is in the first-person perspective by default, but players have the option of third-person perspectives. The game world is composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes, referred to as blocks—representing various materials, such as dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water, and lava. The core gameplay revolves around picking up and placing these objects. These blocks are arranged in a voxel grid, while players can move freely around the world. Players can break, or mine, blocks and then place them elsewhere, enabling them to build things. Very few blocks are affected by gravity, instead maintaining their voxel position in the air. Players can also craft a wide variety of items, such as armor, which mitigates damage from attacks; weapons (such as swords or bows and arrows), which allow monsters and animals to be killed more easily; and tools (such as pickaxes or shovels), which break certain types of blocks more quickly. Some items have multiple tiers depending on the material used to craft them, with higher-tier items being more effective and durable. They may also freely craft helpful blocks—such as furnaces which can cook food and smelt ores, and torches that produce light—or exchange items with villagers (NPC) through trading emeralds for different goods and vice versa. The game has an inventory system, allowing players to carry a limited number of items. The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, with one full cycle lasting for 20 real-time minutes. The game also contains a material called redstone, which can be used to make primitive mechanical devices, electrical circuits, and logic gates, allowing for the construction of many complex systems. New players are given a randomly selected default character skin out of nine possibilities, including Steve or Alex, but are able to create and upload their own skins. Players encounter various mobs (short for mobile entities) including animals, villagers, and hostile creatures. Passive mobs, such as cows, pigs, and chickens, spawn during the daytime and can be hunted for food and crafting materials, while hostile mobs—including large spiders, witches, skeletons, and zombies—spawn during nighttime or in dark places such as caves. Some hostile mobs, such as zombies and skeletons, burn under the sun if they have no headgear and are not standing in water. Other creatures unique to Minecraft include the creeper (an exploding creature that sneaks up on the player) and the enderman (a creature with the ability to teleport as well as pick up and place blocks). There are also variants of mobs that spawn in different conditions; for example, zombies have husk and drowned variants that spawn in deserts and oceans, respectively. The Minecraft environment is procedurally generated as players explore it using a map seed that is randomly chosen at the time of world creation (or manually specified by the player). Divided into biomes representing different environments with unique resources and structures, worlds are designed to be effectively infinite in traditional gameplay, though technical limits on the player have existed throughout development, both intentionally and not. Implementation of horizontally infinite generation initially resulted in a glitch termed the "Far Lands" at over 12 million blocks away from the world center, where terrain generated as wall-like, fissured patterns. The Far Lands and associated glitches were considered the effective edge of the world until they were resolved, with the current horizontal limit instead being a special impassable barrier called the world border, located 30 million blocks away. Vertical space is comparatively limited, with an unbreakable bedrock layer at the bottom and a building limit several hundred blocks into the sky. Minecraft features three independent dimensions accessible through portals and providing alternate game environments. The Overworld is the starting dimension and represents the real world, with a terrestrial surface setting including plains, mountains, forests, oceans, caves, and small sources of lava. The Nether is a hell-like underworld dimension accessed via an obsidian portal and composed mainly of lava. Mobs that populate the Nether include shrieking, fireball-shooting ghasts, alongside anthropomorphic pigs called piglins and their zombified counterparts. Piglins in particular have a bartering system, where players can give them gold ingots and receive items in return. Structures known as Nether Fortresses generate in the Nether, containing mobs such as wither skeletons and blazes, which can drop blaze rods needed to access the End dimension. The player can also choose to build an optional boss mob known as the Wither, using skulls obtained from wither skeletons and soul sand. The End can be reached through an end portal, consisting of twelve end portal frames. End portals are found in underground structures in the Overworld known as strongholds. To find strongholds, players must craft eyes of ender using an ender pearl and blaze powder. Eyes of ender can then be thrown, traveling in the direction of the stronghold. Once the player reaches the stronghold, they can place eyes of ender into each portal frame to activate the end portal. The dimension consists of islands floating in a dark, bottomless void. A boss enemy called the Ender Dragon guards the largest, central island. Killing the dragon opens access to an exit portal, which, when entered, cues the game's ending credits and the End Poem, a roughly 1,500-word work written by Irish novelist Julian Gough, which takes about nine minutes to scroll past, is the game's only narrative text, and the only text of significant length directed at the player.: 10–12 At the conclusion of the credits, the player is teleported back to their respawn point and may continue the game indefinitely. In Survival mode, players have to gather natural resources such as wood and stone found in the environment in order to craft certain blocks and items. Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn in darker areas outside a certain radius of the character, requiring players to build a shelter in order to survive at night. The mode also has a health bar which is depleted by attacks from mobs, falls, drowning, falling into lava, suffocation, starvation, and other events. Players also have a hunger bar, which must be periodically refilled by eating food in-game unless the player is playing on peaceful difficulty. If the hunger bar is empty, the player starves. Health replenishes when players have a full hunger bar or continuously on peaceful. Upon losing all health, players die. The items in the players' inventories are dropped unless the game is reconfigured not to do so. Players then re-spawn at their spawn point, which by default is where players first spawn in the game and can be changed by sleeping in a bed or using a respawn anchor. Dropped items can be recovered if players can reach them before they despawn after 5 minutes. Players may acquire experience points (commonly referred to as "xp" or "exp") by killing mobs and other players, mining, smelting ores, animal breeding, and cooking food. Experience can then be spent on enchanting tools, armor and weapons. Enchanted items are generally more powerful, last longer, or have other special effects. The game features two more game modes based on Survival, known as Hardcore mode and Adventure mode. Hardcore mode plays identically to Survival mode, but with the game's difficulty setting locked to "Hard" and with permadeath, forcing them to delete the world or explore it as a spectator after dying. Adventure mode was added to the game in a post-launch update, and prevents the player from directly modifying the game's world. It was designed primarily for use in custom maps, allowing map designers to let players experience it as intended. In Creative mode, players have access to an infinite number of all resources and items in the game through the inventory menu and can place or mine them instantly. Players can toggle the ability to fly freely around the game world at will, and their characters usually do not take any damage nor are affected by hunger. The game mode helps players focus on building and creating projects of any size without disturbance. Multiplayer in Minecraft enables multiple players to interact and communicate with each other on a single world. It is available through direct game-to-game multiplayer, local area network (LAN) play, local split screen (console-only), and servers (player-hosted and business-hosted). Players can run their own server by making a realm, using a host provider, hosting one themselves or connect directly to another player's game via Xbox Live, PlayStation Network or Nintendo Switch Online. Single-player worlds have LAN support, allowing players to join a world on locally interconnected computers without a server setup. Minecraft multiplayer servers are guided by server operators, who have access to server commands such as setting the time of day and teleporting players. Operators can also set up restrictions concerning which usernames or IP addresses are allowed or disallowed to enter the server. Multiplayer servers have a wide range of activities, with some servers having their own unique rules and customs. The largest and most popular server is Hypixel, which has been visited by over 14 million unique players. Player versus player combat (PvP) can be enabled to allow fighting between players. In 2013, Mojang announced Minecraft Realms, a server hosting service intended to enable players to run server multiplayer games easily and safely without having to set up their own. Unlike a standard server, only invited players can join Realms servers, and these servers do not use server addresses. Minecraft: Java Edition Realms server owners can invite up to twenty people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at a time. Minecraft Realms server owners can invite up to 3,000 people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at one time. The Minecraft: Java Edition Realms servers do not support user-made plugins, but players can play custom Minecraft maps. Minecraft Bedrock Realms servers support user-made add-ons, resource packs, behavior packs, and custom Minecraft maps. At Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016, support for cross-platform play between Windows 10, iOS, and Android platforms was added through Realms starting in June 2016, with Xbox One and Nintendo Switch support to come later in 2017, and support for virtual reality devices. On 31 July 2017, Mojang released the beta version of the update allowing cross-platform play. Nintendo Switch support for Realms was released in July 2018. The modding community consists of fans, users and third-party programmers. Using a variety of application program interfaces that have arisen over time, they have produced a wide variety of downloadable content for Minecraft, such as modifications, texture packs and custom maps. Modifications of the Minecraft code, called mods, add a variety of gameplay changes, ranging from new blocks, items, and mobs to entire arrays of mechanisms. The modding community is responsible for a substantial supply of mods from ones that enhance gameplay, such as mini-maps, waypoints, and durability counters, to ones that add to the game elements from other video games and media. While a variety of mod frameworks were independently developed by reverse engineering the code, Mojang has also enhanced vanilla Minecraft with official frameworks for modification, allowing the production of community-created resource packs, which alter certain game elements including textures and sounds. Players can also create their own "maps" (custom world save files) that often contain specific rules, challenges, puzzles and quests, and share them for others to play. Mojang added an adventure mode in August 2012 and "command blocks" in October 2012, which were created specially for custom maps in Java Edition. Data packs, introduced in version 1.13 of the Java Edition, allow further customization, including the ability to add new achievements, dimensions, functions, loot tables, predicates, recipes, structures, tags, and world generation. The Xbox 360 Edition supported downloadable content, which was available to purchase via the Xbox Games Store; these content packs usually contained additional character skins. It later received support for texture packs in its twelfth title update while introducing "mash-up packs", which combined texture packs with skin packs and changes to the game's sounds, music and user interface. The first mash-up pack (and by extension, the first texture pack) for the Xbox 360 Edition was released on 4 September 2013, and was themed after the Mass Effect franchise. Unlike Java Edition, however, the Xbox 360 Edition did not support player-made mods or custom maps. A cross-promotional resource pack based on the Super Mario franchise by Nintendo was released exclusively for the Wii U Edition worldwide on 17 May 2016, and later bundled free with the Nintendo Switch Edition at launch. Another based on Fallout was released on consoles that December, and for Windows and Mobile in April 2017. In April 2018, malware was discovered in several downloadable user-made Minecraft skins for use with the Java Edition of the game. Avast stated that nearly 50,000 accounts were infected, and when activated, the malware would attempt to reformat the user's hard drive. Mojang promptly patched the issue, and released a statement stating that "the code would not be run or read by the game itself", and would run only when the image containing the skin itself was opened. In June 2017, Mojang released the "1.1 Discovery Update" to the Pocket Edition of the game, which later became the Bedrock Edition. The update introduced the "Marketplace", a catalogue of purchasable user-generated content intended to give Minecraft creators "another way to make a living from the game". Various skins, maps, texture packs and add-ons from different creators can be bought with "Minecoins", a digital currency that is purchased with real money. Additionally, users can access specific content with a subscription service titled "Marketplace Pass". Alongside content from independent creators, the Marketplace also houses items published by Mojang and Microsoft themselves, as well as official collaborations between Minecraft and other intellectual properties. By 2022, the Marketplace had over 1.7 billion content downloads, generating over $500 million in revenue. Development Before creating Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson was a game developer at King, where he worked until March 2009. At King, he primarily developed browser games and learned several programming languages. During his free time, he prototyped his own games, often drawing inspiration from other titles, and was an active participant on the TIGSource forums for independent developers. One such project was "RubyDung", a base-building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but with an isometric, three-dimensional perspective similar to RollerCoaster Tycoon. Among the features in RubyDung that he explored was a first-person view similar to Dungeon Keeper, though he ultimately discarded this idea, feeling the graphics were too pixelated at the time. Around March 2009, Persson left King and joined jAlbum, while continuing to work on his prototypes. Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game first released in April 2009, inspired Persson's vision for RubyDung's future direction. Infiniminer heavily influenced the visual style of gameplay, including bringing back the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals. However, unlike Infiniminer, Persson wanted Minecraft to have RPG elements. The first public alpha build of Minecraft was released on 17 May 2009 on TIGSource. Over the years, Persson regularly released test builds that added new features, including tools, mobs, and entire new dimensions. In 2011, partly due to the game's rising popularity, Persson decided to release a full 1.0 version—a second part of the "Adventure Update"—on 18 November 2011. Shortly after, Persson stepped down from development, handing the project's lead to Jens "Jeb" Bergensten. On 15 September 2014, Microsoft, the developer behind the Microsoft Windows operating system and Xbox video game console, announced a $2.5 billion acquisition of Mojang, which included the Minecraft intellectual property. Persson had suggested the deal on Twitter, asking a corporation to buy his stake in the game after receiving criticism for enforcing terms in the game's end-user license agreement (EULA), which had been in place for the past three years. According to Persson, Mojang CEO Carl Manneh received a call from a Microsoft executive shortly after the tweet, asking if Persson was serious about a deal. Mojang was also approached by other companies including Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts. The deal with Microsoft was arbitrated on 6 November 2014 and led to Persson becoming one of Forbes' "World's Billionaires". After 2014, Minecraft's primary versions received usually annual major updates—free to players who have purchased the game— each primarily centered around a specific theme. For instance, version 1.13, the Update Aquatic, focused on ocean-related features, while version 1.16, the Nether Update, introduced significant changes to the Nether dimension. However, in late 2024, Mojang announced a shift in their update strategy; rather than releasing large updates annually, they opted for a more frequent release schedule with smaller, incremental updates, stating, "We know that you want new Minecraft content more often." The Bedrock Edition has also received regular updates, now matching the themes of the Java Edition updates. Other versions of the game, such as various console editions and the Pocket Edition, were either merged into Bedrock or discontinued and have not received further updates. On 7 May 2019, coinciding with Minecraft's 10th anniversary, a JavaScript recreation of an old 2009 Java Edition build named Minecraft Classic was made available to play online for free. On 16 April 2020, a Bedrock Edition-exclusive beta version of Minecraft, called Minecraft RTX, was released by Nvidia. It introduced physically-based rendering, real-time path tracing, and DLSS for RTX-enabled GPUs. The public release was made available on 8 December 2020. Path tracing can only be enabled in supported worlds, which can be downloaded for free via the in-game Minecraft Marketplace, with a texture pack from Nvidia's website, or with compatible third-party texture packs. It cannot be enabled by default with any texture pack on any world. Initially, Minecraft RTX was affected by many bugs, display errors, and instability issues. On 22 March 2025, a new visual mode called Vibrant Visuals, an optional graphical overhaul similar to Minecraft RTX, was announced. It promises modern rendering features—such as dynamic shadows, screen space reflections, volumetric fog, and bloom—without the need of RTX-capable hardware. Vibrant Visuals was released as a part of the Chase the Skies update on 17 June 2025 for Bedrock Edition and is planned to release on Java Edition at a later date. Development began for the original edition of Minecraft—then known as Cave Game, and now known as the Java Edition—in May 2009,[k] and ended on 13 May, when Persson released a test video on YouTube of an early version of the game, dubbed the "Cave game tech test" or the "Cave game tech demo". The game was named Minecraft: Order of the Stone the next day, after a suggestion made by a player. "Order of the Stone" came from the webcomic The Order of the Stick, and "Minecraft" was chosen "because it's a good name". The title was later shortened to just Minecraft, omitting the subtitle. Persson completed the game's base programming over a weekend in May 2009, and private testing began on TigIRC on 16 May. The first public release followed on 17 May 2009 as a developmental version shared on the TIGSource forums. Based on feedback from forum users, Persson continued updating the game. This initial public build later became known as Classic. Further developmental phases—dubbed Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev—were released throughout 2009 and 2010. The first major update, known as Alpha, was released on 30 June 2010. At the time, Persson was still working a day job at jAlbum but later resigned to focus on Minecraft full-time as sales of the alpha version surged. Updates were distributed automatically, introducing new blocks, items, mobs, and changes to game mechanics such as water flow. With revenue generated from the game, Persson founded Mojang, a video game studio, alongside former colleagues Jakob Porser and Carl Manneh. On 11 December 2010, Persson announced that Minecraft would enter its beta phase on 20 December. He assured players that bug fixes and all pre-release updates would remain free. As development progressed, Mojang expanded, hiring additional employees to work on the project. The game officially exited beta and launched in full on 18 November 2011. On 1 December 2011, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten took full creative control over Minecraft, replacing Persson as lead designer. On 28 February 2012, Mojang announced the hiring of the developers behind Bukkit, a popular developer API for Minecraft servers, to improve Minecraft's support of server modifications. This move included Mojang taking apparent ownership of the CraftBukkit server mod, though this apparent acquisition later became controversial, and its legitimacy was questioned due to CraftBukkit's open-source nature and licensing under the GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License. In August 2011, Minecraft: Pocket Edition was released as an early alpha for the Xperia Play via the Android Market, later expanding to other Android devices on 8 October 2011. The iOS version followed on 17 November 2011. A port was made available for Windows Phones shortly after Microsoft acquired Mojang. Unlike Java Edition, Pocket Edition initially focused on Minecraft's creative building and basic survival elements but lacked many features of the PC version. Bergensten confirmed on Twitter that the Pocket Edition was written in C++ rather than Java, as iOS does not support Java. On 10 December 2014, a port of Pocket Edition was released for Windows Phone 8.1. In July 2015, a port of the Pocket Edition to Windows 10 was released as the Windows 10 Edition, with full crossplay to other Pocket versions. In January 2017, Microsoft announced that it would no longer maintain the Windows Phone versions of Pocket Edition. On 20 September 2017, with the "Better Together Update", the Pocket Edition was ported to the Xbox One, and was renamed to the Bedrock Edition. The console versions of Minecraft debuted with the Xbox 360 edition, developed by 4J Studios and released on 9 May 2012. Announced as part of the Xbox Live Arcade NEXT promotion, this version introduced a redesigned crafting system, a new control interface, in-game tutorials, split-screen multiplayer, and online play via Xbox Live. Unlike the PC version, its worlds were finite, bordered by invisible walls. Initially, the Xbox 360 version resembled outdated PC versions but received updates to bring it closer to Java Edition before eventually being discontinued. The Xbox One version launched on 5 September 2014, featuring larger worlds and support for more players. Minecraft expanded to PlayStation platforms with PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 editions released on 17 December 2013 and 4 September 2014, respectively. Originally planned as a PS4 launch title, it was delayed before its eventual release. A PlayStation Vita version followed in October 2014. Like the Xbox versions, the PlayStation editions were developed by 4J Studios. Nintendo platforms received Minecraft: Wii U Edition on 17 December 2015, with a physical release in North America on 17 June 2016 and in Europe on 30 June. The Nintendo Switch version launched via the eShop on 11 May 2017. During a Nintendo Direct presentation on 13 September 2017, Nintendo announced that Minecraft: New Nintendo 3DS Edition, based on the Pocket Edition, would be available for download immediately after the livestream, and a physical copy available on a later date. The game is compatible only with the New Nintendo 3DS or New Nintendo 2DS XL systems and does not work with the original 3DS or 2DS systems. On 20 September 2017, the Better Together Update introduced Bedrock Edition across Xbox One, Windows 10, VR, and mobile platforms, enabling cross-play between these versions. Bedrock Edition later expanded to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, with the latter receiving the update in December 2019, allowing cross-platform play for users with a free Xbox Live account. The Bedrock Edition released a native version for PlayStation 5 on 22 October 2024, while the Xbox Series X/S version launched on 17 June 2025. On 18 December 2018, the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, and Wii U versions of Minecraft received their final update and would later become known as "Legacy Console Editions". On 15 January 2019, the New Nintendo 3DS version of Minecraft received its final update, effectively becoming discontinued as well. An educational version of Minecraft, designed for use in schools, launched on 1 November 2016. It is available on Android, ChromeOS, iPadOS, iOS, MacOS, and Windows. On 20 August 2018, Mojang announced that it would bring Education Edition to iPadOS in Autumn 2018. It was released to the App Store on 6 September 2018. On 27 March 2019, it was announced that it would be operated by JD.com in China. On 26 June 2020, a public beta for the Education Edition was made available to Google Play Store compatible Chromebooks. The full game was released to the Google Play Store for Chromebooks on 7 August 2020. On 20 May 2016, China Edition (also known as My World) was announced as a localized edition for China, where it was released under a licensing agreement between NetEase and Mojang. The PC edition was released for public testing on 8 August 2017. The iOS version was released on 15 September 2017, and the Android version was released on 12 October 2017. The PC edition is based on the original Java Edition, while the iOS and Android mobile versions are based on the Bedrock Edition. The edition is free-to-play and had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. This version of Bedrock Edition is exclusive to Microsoft's Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems. The beta release for Windows 10 launched on the Windows Store on 29 July 2015. After nearly a year and a half in beta, Microsoft fully released the version on 19 December 2016. Called the "Ender Update", this release implemented new features to this version of Minecraft like world templates and add-on packs. On 7 June 2022, the Java and Bedrock Editions of Minecraft were merged into a single bundle for purchase on Windows; those who owned one version would automatically gain access to the other version. Both game versions would otherwise remain separate. Around 2011, prior to Minecraft's full release, Mojang collaborated with The Lego Group to create a Lego brick-based Minecraft game called Brickcraft. This would have modified the base Minecraft game to use Lego bricks, which meant adapting the basic 1×1 block to account for larger pieces typically used in Lego sets. Persson worked on an early version called "Project Rex Kwon Do", named after the character of the same name from the film Napoleon Dynamite. Although Lego approved the project and Mojang assigned two developers for six months, it was canceled due to the Lego Group's demands, according to Mojang's Daniel Kaplan. Lego considered buying Mojang to complete the game, but when Microsoft offered over $2 billion for the company, Lego stepped back, unsure of Minecraft's potential. On 26 June 2025, a build of Brickcraft dated 28 June 2012 was published on a community archive website Omniarchive. Initially, Markus Persson planned to support the Oculus Rift with a Minecraft port. However, after Facebook acquired Oculus in 2013, he abruptly canceled the plans, stating, "Facebook creeps me out." In 2016, a community-made mod, Minecraft VR, added VR support for Java Edition, followed by Vivecraft for HTC Vive. Later that year, Microsoft introduced official Oculus Rift support for Windows 10 Edition, leading to the discontinuation of the Minecraft VR mod due to trademark complaints. Vivecraft was endorsed by Minecraft VR contributors for its Rift support. Also available is a Gear VR version, titled Minecraft: Gear VR Edition. Windows Mixed Reality support was added in 2017. On 7 September 2020, Mojang Studios announced that the PlayStation 4 Bedrock version would receive PlayStation VR support later that month. In September 2024, the Minecraft team announced they would no longer support PlayStation VR, which received its final update in March 2025. Music and sound design Minecraft's music and sound effects were produced by German musician Daniel Rosenfeld, better known as C418. To create the sound effects for the game, Rosenfeld made extensive use of Foley techniques. On learning the processes for the game, he remarked, "Foley's an interesting thing, and I had to learn its subtleties. Early on, I wasn't that knowledgeable about it. It's a whole trial-and-error process. You just make a sound and eventually you go, 'Oh my God, that's it! Get the microphone!' There's no set way of doing anything at all." He reminisced on creating the in-game sound for grass blocks, stating "It turns out that to make grass sounds you don't actually walk on grass and record it, because grass sounds like nothing. What you want to do is get a VHS, break it apart, and just lightly touch the tape." According to Rosenfeld, his favorite sound to design for the game was the hisses of spiders. He elaborates, "I like the spiders. Recording that was a whole day of me researching what a spider sounds like. Turns out, there are spiders that make little screeching sounds, so I think I got this recording of a fire hose, put it in a sampler, and just pitched it around until it sounded like a weird spider was talking to you." Many of the sound design decisions by Rosenfeld were done accidentally or spontaneously. The creeper notably lacks any specific noises apart from a loud fuse-like sound when about to explode; Rosenfeld later recalled "That was just a complete accident by Markus and me [sic]. We just put in a placeholder sound of burning a matchstick. It seemed to work hilariously well, so we kept it." On other sounds, such as those of the zombie, Rosenfeld remarked, "I actually never wanted the zombies so scary. I intentionally made them sound comical. It's nice to hear that they work so well [...]." Rosenfeld remarked that the sound engine was "terrible" to work with, remembering "If you had two song files at once, it [the game engine] would actually crash. There were so many more weird glitches like that the guys never really fixed because they were too busy with the actual game and not the sound engine." The background music in Minecraft consists of instrumental ambient music. To compose the music of Minecraft, Rosenfeld used the package from Ableton Live, along with several additional plug-ins. Speaking on them, Rosenfeld said "They can be pretty much everything from an effect to an entire orchestra. Additionally, I've got some synthesizers that are attached to the computer. Like a Moog Voyager, Dave Smith Prophet 08 and a Virus TI." On 4 March 2011, Rosenfeld released a soundtrack titled Minecraft – Volume Alpha; it includes most of the tracks featured in Minecraft, as well as other music not featured in the game. Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku chose the music in Minecraft as one of the best video game soundtracks of 2011. On 9 November 2013, Rosenfeld released the second official soundtrack, titled Minecraft – Volume Beta, which included the music that was added in a 2013 "Music Update" for the game. A physical release of Volume Alpha, consisting of CDs, black vinyl, and limited-edition transparent green vinyl LPs, was issued by indie electronic label Ghostly International on 21 August 2015. On 14 August 2020, Ghostly released Volume Beta on CD and vinyl, with alternate color LPs and lenticular cover pressings released in limited quantities. The final update Rosenfeld worked on was 2018's 1.13 Update Aquatic. His music remained the only music in the game until 2020's "Nether Update", introducing pieces from Lena Raine. Since then, other composers have made contributions, including Kumi Tanioka, Samuel Åberg, Aaron Cherof, and Amos Roddy, with Raine remaining as the new primary composer. Ownership of all music besides Rosenfeld's independently released albums has been retained by Microsoft, with their label publishing all of the other artists' releases. Gareth Coker also composed some of the music for the game's mini games from the Legacy Console editions. Rosenfeld had stated his intent to create a third album of music for the game in a 2015 interview with Fact, and confirmed its existence in a 2017 tweet, stating that his work on the record as of then had tallied up to be longer than the previous two albums combined, which in total clocks in at over 3 hours and 18 minutes. However, due to licensing issues with Microsoft, the third volume has since not seen release. On 8 January 2021, Rosenfeld was asked in an interview with Anthony Fantano whether or not there was still a third volume of his music intended for release. Rosenfeld responded, saying, "I have something—I consider it finished—but things have become complicated, especially as Minecraft is now a big property, so I don't know." Reception Minecraft has received critical acclaim, with praise for the creative freedom it grants players in-game, as well as the ease of enabling emergent gameplay. Critics have expressed enjoyment in Minecraft's complex crafting system, commenting that it is an important aspect of the game's open-ended gameplay. Most publications were impressed by the game's "blocky" graphics, with IGN describing them as "instantly memorable". Reviewers also liked the game's adventure elements, noting that the game creates a good balance between exploring and building. The game's multiplayer feature has been generally received favorably, with IGN commenting that "adventuring is always better with friends". Jaz McDougall of PC Gamer said Minecraft is "intuitively interesting and contagiously fun, with an unparalleled scope for creativity and memorable experiences". It has been regarded as having introduced millions of children to the digital world, insofar as its basic game mechanics are logically analogous to computer commands. IGN was disappointed about the troublesome steps needed to set up multiplayer servers, calling it a "hassle". Critics also said that visual glitches occur periodically. Despite its release out of beta in 2011, GameSpot said the game had an "unfinished feel", adding that some game elements seem "incomplete or thrown together in haste". A review of the alpha version, by Scott Munro of the Daily Record, called it "already something special" and urged readers to buy it. Jim Rossignol of Rock Paper Shotgun also recommended the alpha of the game, calling it "a kind of generative 8-bit Lego Stalker". On 17 September 2010, gaming webcomic Penny Arcade began a series of comics and news posts about the addictiveness of the game. The Xbox 360 version was generally received positively by critics, but did not receive as much praise as the PC version. Although reviewers were disappointed by the lack of features such as mod support and content from the PC version, they acclaimed the port's addition of a tutorial and in-game tips and crafting recipes, saying that they make the game more user-friendly. The Xbox One Edition was one of the best received ports, being praised for its relatively large worlds. The PlayStation 3 Edition also received generally favorable reviews, being compared to the Xbox 360 Edition and praised for its well-adapted controls. The PlayStation 4 edition was the best received port to date, being praised for having 36 times larger worlds than the PlayStation 3 edition and described as nearly identical to the Xbox One edition. The PlayStation Vita Edition received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for its technical limitations. The Wii U version received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for a lack of GamePad integration. The 3DS version received mixed reviews, being criticized for its high price, technical issues, and lack of cross-platform play. The Nintendo Switch Edition received fairly positive reviews from critics, being praised, like other modern ports, for its relatively larger worlds. Minecraft: Pocket Edition initially received mixed reviews from critics. Although reviewers appreciated the game's intuitive controls, they were disappointed by the lack of content. The inability to collect resources and craft items, as well as the limited types of blocks and lack of hostile mobs, were especially criticized. After updates added more content, Pocket Edition started receiving more positive reviews. Reviewers complimented the controls and the graphics, but still noted a lack of content. Minecraft surpassed over a million purchases less than a month after entering its beta phase in early 2011. At the same time, the game had no publisher backing and has never been commercially advertised except through word of mouth, and various unpaid references in popular media such as the Penny Arcade webcomic. By April 2011, Persson estimated that Minecraft had made €23 million (US$33 million) in revenue, with 800,000 sales of the alpha version of the game, and over 1 million sales of the beta version. In November 2011, prior to the game's full release, Minecraft beta surpassed 16 million registered users and 4 million purchases. By March 2012, Minecraft had become the 6th best-selling PC game of all time. As of 10 October 2014[update], the game had sold 17 million copies on PC, becoming the best-selling PC game of all time. On 25 February 2014, the game reached 100 million registered users. By May 2019, 180 million copies had been sold across all platforms, making it the single best-selling video game of all time. The free-to-play Minecraft China version had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. By 2023, the game had sold over 300 million copies. As of April 2025, Minecraft has sold over 350 million copies. The Xbox 360 version of Minecraft became profitable within the first day of the game's release in 2012, when the game broke the Xbox Live sales records with 400,000 players online. Within a week of being on the Xbox Live Marketplace, Minecraft sold a million copies. GameSpot announced in December 2012 that Minecraft sold over 4.48 million copies since the game debuted on Xbox Live Arcade in May 2012. In 2012, Minecraft was the most purchased title on Xbox Live Arcade; it was also the fourth most played title on Xbox Live based on average unique users per day. As of 4 April 2014[update], the Xbox 360 version has sold 12 million copies. In addition, Minecraft: Pocket Edition has reached a figure of 21 million in sales. The PlayStation 3 Edition sold one million copies in five weeks. The release of the game's PlayStation Vita version boosted Minecraft sales by 79%, outselling both PS3 and PS4 debut releases and becoming the largest Minecraft launch on a PlayStation console. The PS Vita version sold 100,000 digital copies in Japan within the first two months of release, according to an announcement by SCE Japan Asia. By January 2015, 500,000 digital copies of Minecraft were sold in Japan across all PlayStation platforms, with a surge in primary school children purchasing the PS Vita version. As of 2022, the Vita version has sold over 1.65 million physical copies in Japan, making it the best-selling Vita game in the country. Minecraft helped improve Microsoft's total first-party revenue by $63 million for the 2015 second quarter. The game, including all of its versions, had over 112 million monthly active players by September 2019. On its 11th anniversary in May 2020, the company announced that Minecraft had reached over 200 million copies sold across platforms with over 126 million monthly active players. By April 2021, the number of active monthly users had climbed to 140 million. In July 2010, PC Gamer listed Minecraft as the fourth-best game to play at work. In December of that year, Good Game selected Minecraft as their choice for Best Downloadable Game of 2010, Gamasutra named it the eighth best game of the year as well as the eighth best indie game of the year, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun named it the "game of the year". Indie DB awarded the game the 2010 Indie of the Year award as chosen by voters, in addition to two out of five Editor's Choice awards for Most Innovative and Best Singleplayer Indie. It was also awarded Game of the Year by PC Gamer UK. The game was nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Technical Excellence, and Excellence in Design awards at the March 2011 Independent Games Festival and won the Grand Prize and the community-voted Audience Award. At Game Developers Choice Awards 2011, Minecraft won awards in the categories for Best Debut Game, Best Downloadable Game and Innovation Award, winning every award for which it was nominated. It also won GameCity's video game arts award. On 5 May 2011, Minecraft was selected as one of the 80 games that would be displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of The Art of Video Games exhibit that opened on 16 March 2012. At the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards, Minecraft won the award for Best Independent Game and was nominated in the Best PC Game category. In 2012, at the British Academy Video Games Awards, Minecraft was nominated in the GAME Award of 2011 category and Persson received The Special Award. In 2012, Minecraft XBLA was awarded a Golden Joystick Award in the Best Downloadable Game category, and a TIGA Games Industry Award in the Best Arcade Game category. In 2013, it was nominated as the family game of the year at the British Academy Video Games Awards. During the 16th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences nominated the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft for "Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year". Minecraft Console Edition won the award for TIGA Game Of The Year in 2014. In 2015, the game placed 6th on USgamer's The 15 Best Games Since 2000 list. In 2016, Minecraft placed 6th on Time's The 50 Best Video Games of All Time list. Minecraft was nominated for the 2013 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite App, but lost to Temple Run. It was nominated for the 2014 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite Video Game, but lost to Just Dance 2014. The game later won the award for the Most Addicting Game at the 2015 Kids' Choice Awards. In addition, the Java Edition was nominated for "Favorite Video Game" at the 2018 Kids' Choice Awards, while the game itself won the "Still Playing" award at the 2019 Golden Joystick Awards, as well as the "Favorite Video Game" award at the 2020 Kids' Choice Awards. Minecraft also won "Stream Game of the Year" at inaugural Streamer Awards in 2021. The game later garnered a Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award nomination for Favorite Video Game in 2021, and won the same category in 2022 and 2023. At the Golden Joystick Awards 2025, it won the Still Playing Award - PC and Console. Minecraft has been subject to several notable controversies. In June 2014, Mojang announced that it would begin enforcing the portion of Minecraft's end-user license agreement (EULA) which prohibits servers from giving in-game advantages to players in exchange for donations or payments. Spokesperson Owen Hill stated that servers could still require players to pay a fee to access the server and could sell in-game cosmetic items. The change was supported by Persson, citing emails he received from parents of children who had spent hundreds of dollars on servers. The Minecraft community and server owners protested, arguing that the EULA's terms were more broad than Mojang was claiming, that the crackdown would force smaller servers to shut down for financial reasons, and that Mojang was suppressing competition for its own Minecraft Realms subscription service. The controversy contributed to Notch's decision to sell Mojang. In 2020, Mojang announced an eventual change to the Java Edition to require a login from a Microsoft account rather than a Mojang account, the latter of which would be sunsetted. This also required Java Edition players to create Xbox network Gamertags. Mojang defended the move to Microsoft accounts by saying that improved security could be offered, including two-factor authentication, blocking cyberbullies in chat, and improved parental controls. The community responded with intense backlash, citing various technical difficulties encountered in the process and how account migration would be mandatory, even for those who do not play on servers. As of 10 March 2022, Microsoft required that all players migrate in order to maintain access the Java Edition of Minecraft. Mojang announced a deadline of 19 September 2023 for account migration, after which all legacy Mojang accounts became inaccessible and unable to be migrated. In June 2022, Mojang added a player-reporting feature in Java Edition. Players could report other players on multiplayer servers for sending messages prohibited by the Xbox Live Code of Conduct; report categories included profane language,[l] substance abuse, hate speech, threats of violence, and nudity. If a player was found to be in violation of Xbox Community Standards, they would be banned from all servers for a specific period of time or permanently. The update containing the report feature (1.19.1) was released on 27 July 2022. Mojang received substantial backlash and protest from community members, one of the most common complaints being that banned players would be forbidden from joining any server, even private ones. Others took issue to what they saw as Microsoft increasing control over its player base and exercising censorship, leading some to start a hashtag #saveminecraft and dub the version "1.19.84", a reference to the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The "Mob Vote" was an online event organized by Mojang in which the Minecraft community voted between three original mob concepts; initially, the winning mob was to be implemented in a future update, while the losing mobs were scrapped, though after the first mob vote this was changed, and losing mobs would now have a chance to come to the game in the future. The first Mob Vote was held during Minecon Earth 2017 and became an annual event starting with Minecraft Live 2020. The Mob Vote was often criticized for forcing players to choose one mob instead of implementing all three, causing divisions and flaming within the community, and potentially allowing internet bots and Minecraft content creators with large fanbases to conduct vote brigading. The Mob Vote was also blamed for a perceived lack of new content added to Minecraft since Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang in 2014. The 2023 Mob Vote featured three passive mobs—the crab, the penguin, and the armadillo—with voting scheduled to start on 13 October. In response, a Change.org petition was created on 6 October, demanding that Mojang eliminate the Mob Vote and instead implement all three mobs going forward. The petition received approximately 445,000 signatures by 13 October and was joined by calls to boycott the Mob Vote, as well as a partially tongue-in-cheek "revolutionary" propaganda campaign in which sympathizers created anti-Mojang and pro-boycott posters in the vein of real 20th century propaganda posters. Mojang did not release an official response to the boycott, and the Mob Vote otherwise proceeded normally, with the armadillo winning the vote. In September 2024, as part of a blog post detailing their future plans for Minecraft's development, Mojang announced the Mob Vote would be retired. Cultural impact In September 2019, The Guardian classified Minecraft as the best video game of the 21st century to date, and in November 2019, Polygon called it the "most important game of the decade" in its 2010s "decade in review". In June 2020, Minecraft was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Minecraft is recognized as one of the first successful games to use an early access model to draw in sales prior to its full release version to help fund development. As Minecraft helped to bolster indie game development in the early 2010s, it also helped to popularize the use of the early access model in indie game development. Social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit have played a significant role in popularizing Minecraft. Research conducted by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania showed that one-third of Minecraft players learned about the game via Internet videos. In 2010, Minecraft-related videos began to gain influence on YouTube, often made by commentators. The videos usually contain screen-capture footage of the game and voice-overs. Common coverage in the videos includes creations made by players, walkthroughs of various tasks, and parodies of works in popular culture. By May 2012, over four million Minecraft-related YouTube videos had been uploaded. The game would go on to be a prominent fixture within YouTube's gaming scene during the entire 2010s; in 2014, it was the second-most searched term on the entire platform. By 2018, it was still YouTube's biggest game globally. Some popular commentators have received employment at Machinima, a now-defunct gaming video company that owned a highly watched entertainment channel on YouTube. The Yogscast is a British company that regularly produces Minecraft videos; their YouTube channel has attained billions of views, and their panel at Minecon 2011 had the highest attendance. Another well-known YouTube personality is Jordan Maron, known online as CaptainSparklez, who has also created many Minecraft music parodies, including "Revenge", a parody of Usher's "DJ Got Us Fallin' in Love". Minecraft's popularity on YouTube was described by Polygon as quietly dominant, although in 2019, thanks in part to PewDiePie's playthroughs of the game, Minecraft experienced a visible uptick in popularity on the platform. Longer-running series include Far Lands or Bust, dedicated to reaching the obsolete "Far Lands" glitch by foot on an older version of the game. YouTube announced that on 14 December 2021 that the total amount of Minecraft-related views on the website had exceeded one trillion. Minecraft has been referenced by other video games, such as Torchlight II, Team Fortress 2, Borderlands 2, Choplifter HD, Super Meat Boy, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Binding of Isaac, The Stanley Parable, and FTL: Faster Than Light. Minecraft is officially represented in downloadable content for the crossover fighter Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, with Steve as a playable character with a moveset including references to building, crafting, and redstone, alongside an Overworld-themed stage. It was also referenced by electronic music artist Deadmau5 in his performances. The game is also referenced heavily in "Informative Murder Porn", the second episode of the seventeenth season of the animated television series South Park. In 2025, A Minecraft Movie was released. It made $313 million in the box office in the first week, a record-breaking opening for a video game adaptation. Minecraft has been noted as a cultural touchstone for Generation Z, as many of the generation's members played the game at a young age. The possible applications of Minecraft have been discussed extensively, especially in the fields of computer-aided design (CAD) and education. In a panel at Minecon 2011, a Swedish developer discussed the possibility of using the game to redesign public buildings and parks, stating that rendering using Minecraft was much more user-friendly for the community, making it easier to envision the functionality of new buildings and parks. In 2012, a member of the Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab, Cody Sumter, said: "Notch hasn't just built a game. He's tricked 40 million people into learning to use a CAD program." Various software has been developed to allow virtual designs to be printed using professional 3D printers or personal printers such as MakerBot and RepRap. In September 2012, Mojang began the Block by Block project in cooperation with UN Habitat to create real-world environments in Minecraft. The project allows young people who live in those environments to participate in designing the changes they would like to see. Using Minecraft, the community has helped reconstruct the areas of concern, and citizens are invited to enter the Minecraft servers and modify their own neighborhood. Carl Manneh, Mojang's managing director, called the game "the perfect tool to facilitate this process", adding "The three-year partnership will support UN-Habitat's Sustainable Urban Development Network to upgrade 300 public spaces by 2016." Mojang signed Minecraft building community, FyreUK, to help render the environments into Minecraft. The first pilot project began in Kibera, one of Nairobi's informal settlements and is in the planning phase. The Block by Block project is based on an earlier initiative started in October 2011, Mina Kvarter (My Block), which gave young people in Swedish communities a tool to visualize how they wanted to change their part of town. According to Manneh, the project was a helpful way to visualize urban planning ideas without necessarily having a training in architecture. The ideas presented by the citizens were a template for political decisions. In April 2014, the Danish Geodata Agency generated all of Denmark in fullscale in Minecraft based on their own geodata. This is possible because Denmark is one of the flattest countries with the highest point at 171 meters (ranking as the country with the 30th smallest elevation span), where the limit in default Minecraft was around 192 meters above in-game sea level when the project was completed. Taking advantage of the game's accessibility where other websites are censored, the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders has used an open Minecraft server to create the Uncensored Library, a repository within the game of journalism by authors from countries (including Egypt, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam) who have been censored and arrested, such as Jamal Khashoggi. The neoclassical virtual building was created over about 250 hours by an international team of 24 people. Despite its unpredictable nature, Minecraft speedrunning, where players time themselves from spawning into a new world to reaching The End and defeating the Ender Dragon boss, is popular. Some speedrunners use a combination of mods, external programs, and debug menus, while other runners play the game in a more vanilla or more consistency-oriented way. Minecraft has been used in educational settings through initiatives such as MinecraftEdu, founded in 2011 to make the game affordable and accessible for schools in collaboration with Mojang. MinecraftEdu provided features allowing teachers to monitor student progress, including screenshot submissions as evidence of lesson completion, and by 2012 reported that approximately 250,000 students worldwide had access to the platform. Mojang also developed Minecraft: Education Edition with pre-built lesson plans for up to 30 students in a closed environment. Educators have used Minecraft to teach subjects such as history, language arts, and science through custom-built environments, including reconstructions of historical landmarks and large-scale models of biological structures such as animal cells. The introduction of redstone blocks enabled the construction of functional virtual machines such as a hard drive and an 8-bit computer. Mods have been created to use these mechanics for teaching programming. In 2014, the British Museum announced a project to reproduce its building and exhibits in Minecraft in collaboration with the public. Microsoft and Code.org have offered Minecraft-based tutorials and activities designed to teach programming, reporting by 2018 that more than 85 million children had used their resources. In 2025, the Musée de Minéralogie in Paris held a temporary exhibition titled "Minerals in Minecraft." Following the initial surge in popularity of Minecraft in 2010, other video games were criticised for having various similarities to Minecraft, and some were described as being "clones", often due to a direct inspiration from Minecraft, or a superficial similarity. Examples include Ace of Spades, CastleMiner, CraftWorld, FortressCraft, Terraria, BlockWorld 3D, Total Miner, and Luanti (formerly Minetest). David Frampton, designer of The Blockheads, reported that one failure of his 2D game was the "low resolution pixel art" that too closely resembled the art in Minecraft, which resulted in "some resistance" from fans. A homebrew adaptation of the alpha version of Minecraft for the Nintendo DS, titled DScraft, has been released; it has been noted for its similarity to the original game considering the technical limitations of the system. In response to Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang and their Minecraft IP, various developers announced further clone titles developed specifically for Nintendo's consoles, as they were the only major platforms not to officially receive Minecraft at the time. These clone titles include UCraft (Nexis Games), Cube Life: Island Survival (Cypronia), Discovery (Noowanda), Battleminer (Wobbly Tooth Games), Cube Creator 3D (Big John Games), and Stone Shire (Finger Gun Games). Despite this, the fears of fans were unfounded, with official Minecraft releases on Nintendo consoles eventually resuming. Markus Persson made another similar game, Minicraft, for a Ludum Dare competition in 2011. In 2025, Persson announced through a poll on his X account that he was considering developing a spiritual successor to Minecraft. He later clarified that he was "100% serious", and that he had "basically announced Minecraft 2". Within days, however, Persson cancelled the plans after speaking to his team. In November 2024, artificial intelligence companies Decart and Etched released Oasis, an artificially generated version of Minecraft, as a proof of concept. Every in-game element is completely AI-generated in real time and the model does not store world data, leading to "hallucinations" such as items and blocks appearing that were not there before. In January 2026, indie game developer Unomelon announced that their voxel sandbox game Allumeria would be playable in Steam Next Fest that year. On 10 February, Mojang issued a DMCA takedown of Allumeria on Steam through Valve, alleging the game was infringing on Minecraft's copyright. Some reports suggested that the takedown may have used an automatic AI copyright claiming service. The DMCA was later withdrawn. Minecon was an annual official fan convention dedicated to Minecraft. The first full Minecon was held in November 2011 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The event included the official launch of Minecraft; keynote speeches, including one by Persson; building and costume contests; Minecraft-themed breakout classes; exhibits by leading gaming and Minecraft-related companies; commemorative merchandise; and autograph and picture times with Mojang employees and well-known contributors from the Minecraft community. In 2016, Minecon was held in-person for the last time, with the following years featuring annual "Minecon Earth" livestreams on minecraft.net and YouTube instead. These livestreams, later rebranded to "Minecraft Live", included the mob/biome votes, and announcements of new game updates. In 2025, "Minecraft Live" became a biannual event as part of Minecraft's changing update schedule.[citation needed] Notes References External links |
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Contents Prakriti Prakriti (Sanskrit: प्रकृति IAST: Prakṛti) is "the original or natural form or condition of anything, original or primary substance". It is a key concept in Hinduism, formulated by the Samkhya school, where it does not refer merely to matter or nature, but includes all cognitive, moral, psychological, emotional, sensorial and physical aspects of reality. Prakriti has three different innate qualities (guṇas), whose equilibrium is the basis of all empirical reality, which is in the form of the pancha bhutas (five basic elements) – Akasha, Vayu, Agni, Jala, and Prithvi. Prakriti contrasts with Puruṣa, which is pure awareness and metaphysical consciousness. The term is also found in the texts of other Indian religions such as Jainism and Buddhism. Etymology and meaning Prakriti (Sanskrit: प्रकृति) is an early Indic concept meaning "making or placing before or at first, the original or natural form or condition of anything, original or primary substance". The term is discussed by Yāska (~600 BCE) in Nirukta, and is found in numerous Hindu texts. It connotes "nature, body, matter, phenomenal universe" in Hindu texts. According to Dan Lusthaus, In Sāṃkhya puruṣa signifies the observer, the 'witness'. Prakṛti includes all the cognitive, moral, psychological, emotional, sensorial and physical aspects of reality. It is often mistranslated as 'matter' or 'nature' – in non-Sāṃkhyan usage it does mean 'essential nature' – but that distracts from the heavy Sāṃkhyan stress on prakṛti's cognitive, mental, psychological and sensorial activities. Moreover, subtle and gross matter are its most derivative byproducts, not its core. Only prakṛti acts. Pancha Prakriti In Indian languages derived from Sanskrit roots, Prakriti refers to the feminine aspect of all life forms. A woman can be seen as a symbol of Prakriti. According to Sanskrit scriptures, Brahma Vaivarta Purana, five Hindu goddesses are considered as the complete feminine personification of Prakriti – Saraswati, Lakshmi, Parvati, Gayatri and Radha. Together these five goddesses are worshiped as Pancha Prakriti. Samkhya In Samkhya philosophy, the term prakriti is used in three distinct ways. Prakriti sometimes refers specifically to Mula-Prakriti (root-nature), also known as the unmanifest (avyakta) or the principal (pradhana), which is the fundamental, uncaused source of the material world. When paired with vikriti (modification), prakriti signifies "source", Mula-Prakriti is only prakriti, while the intellect, ego, and five sense qualities are both prakriti and vikriti, forming the eight prakritis. Prakriti can also refer to the entire twenty-four tattvas (elements), encompassing both unmanifest and manifest. Samkhya texts contrast Prakriti with Purusha (spirit, consciousness) where Prakriti refers to "the material world, nature, matter, physical and psychological character, constitution, temper, disposition". According to Knut Jacobsen, in the dualistic system of the Samkhya school, "Purusha is the principle of pure consciousness, while Prakriti is the principle of matter", where Purusha is the conscious witness in every living being, while Prakriti is the manifest world. Both the Bhagavad Gita and the Samkhya school of philosophy posit that prakṛti is composed of the three guṇas: sattva (preservation), rajas (creation), and tamas (destruction). Sattva encompasses qualities of goodness, light, and harmony. Rajas is associated with concepts of energy, activity, and passion; so that, depending on how it is used, it can either have a supportive or hindering effect on the evolution of the soul. Tamas is commonly associated with inertia, darkness, insensitivity. Souls who are more Tamasic are considered imbued in darkness and take the longest to reach liberation. In Samkhya, prakriti, comprising the three gunas, exists in equilibrium before the cosmos manifests, neutralizing each other's properties. Samkhya argues that the complex and purposeful nature of the world suggests that it exists for the sake of something else, particularly the conscious souls. This view suggests that prakriti, though unconscious, serves to aid the liberation of the soul, similar to how milk nourishes a calf. Yoga Sutras In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, prakriti is described as encompassing the entire cosmos including its physical aspects. It is characterized by the three gunas - sattva, rajas, and tamas. However, the emphasis within the text primarily is on the psychological manifestations of these guṇas. Sattva, the purest guna, is associated with qualities like lucidity, tranquility, wisdom, discrimination, detachment, happiness, and peacefulness when expressed in the mind (citta). Rajas is characterized by traits like hankering, power, and various forms of movement and creative activity. Tamas is marked by qualities such as ignorance, delusion, lethargy, and disinclination toward constructive activity. These psychological attributes reveal the nature of the gunas in Yoga. Bhagavad Gita The Bhagavad Gita emphasizes the role of prakriti as the material energy of the universe, created and controlled by God (Krishna), and its distinction from purusha in different verses. In Chapter 4 verse 6, Krishna describes prakriti as His own power, through which He manifests in the world. In Chapter 7 verse 4 and 5, Krishna mentions two types of prakriti: Earth, water, fire, air, space, mind, intellect, and the sense of ego comprise the eight component parts of my energy known as prakriti. This is the inferior prakriti, but you should also know about my higher prakriti, which is distinct from it. This is the element of life, O mighty one, the jiva bhuta, by means of which this world is held in place. — Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 7, verse 4-5 In Chapter 13 verses 19–23, Krishna discusses the eternal nature of both prakriti and purusha, as well as their distinction. You should understand that both prakriti (matter) and purusha (spirit) have no beginning. You should also know that all transformations and the gunas have their origin in prakriti. — Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 13, verse 19 It is described in Bhagavad Gita as the "primal motive force". It is the essential constituent of the universe and is at the basis of all the activity of the creation. Vedanta In Vishishtadvaita Vedanta, a sub-school of Indian philosophy, Prakṛti is one of the six substances (dravya). The guṇas (qualities) are the attributes of primordial Nature (Prakṛti), and not its constituents, unlike Sāṅkhya. These qualities are inseparable from Prakṛti, but not identical with it and inextricably related to Ishvara. Prakṛti in Vishishtadvaita Vedanta is limited above by the eternal manifestation (nityavibhuti) whereas it's infinite in Sāṅkhya. According to Dvaita Vedanta, Prakṛti is the material cause (Satkaryavada) of the world. Prakriti is closely associated with the concept of Maya within Hindu texts more broadly. Jainism In Jainism the term "Prakriti" is used in its theory of Karma, and is considered "that form of matter which covers the perfections of the soul (jiva) and prevents its liberation". See also References External links |
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fastai A Layered API for Deep Learning Jeremy Howard and Sylvain Gugger August 13, 2021 Abstract: fastai is a deep learning library which provides practitioners with high-level components that can quickly and easily provide state-of-the-art results in standard deep learning domains, and provides researchers with low-level components that can be mixed and matched to build new approaches. It aims to do both things without substantial compromises in ease of use, flexibility, or performance. This is possible thanks to a carefully layered architecture, which expresses common underlying patterns of many deep learning and data processing techniques in terms of decoupled abstractions. These abstractions can be expressed concisely and clearly by leveraging the dynamism of the underlying Python language and the flexibility of the PyTorch library. fastai includes: We have used this library to successfully create a complete deep learning course, which we were able to write more quickly than using previous approaches, and the code was more clear. The library is already in wide use in research, industry, and teaching. Contents Introduction fastai is a modern deep learning library, available from GitHub as open source under the Apache 2 license, which can be installed directly using the conda or pip package managers. It includes complete documentation and tutorials, and is the subject of the book Deep Learning for Coders with fastai and PyTorch: AI Applications Without a PhD (Howard and Gugger 2020). fastai is organized around two main design goals: to be approachable and rapidly productive, while also being deeply hackable and configurable. Other libraries have tended to force a choice between conciseness and speed of development, or flexibility and expressivity, but not both. We wanted to get the clarity and development speed of Keras (Chollet and others 2015) and the customizability of PyTorch. This goal of getting the best of both worlds has motivated the design of a layered architecture. A high-level API powers ready-to-use functions to train models in various applications, offering customizable models with sensible defaults. It is built on top of a hierarchy of lower level APIs which provide composable building blocks. This way, a user wanting to rewrite part of the high-level API or add particular behavior to suit their needs doesn’t have to learn how to use the lowest level. The high-level of the API is most likely to be useful to beginners and to practitioners who are mainly in interested in applying pre-existing deep learning methods. It offers concise APIs over four main application areas: vision, text, tabular and time-series analysis, and collaborative filtering. These APIs choose intelligent default values and behaviors based on all available information. For instance, fastai provides a single Learner class which brings together architecture, optimizer, and data, and automatically chooses an appropriate loss function where possible. Integrating these concerns into a single class enables fastai to curate appropriate default choices. To give another example, generally a training set should be shuffled, and a validation does not need to be. So fastai provides a single DataLoaders class which automatically constructs validation and training data loaders with these details already handled. This helps practitioners ensure that they don’t make mistakes such as failing to include a validation set. In addition, because the training set and validation set are integrated into a single class, fastai is able, by default, always to display metrics during training using the validation set. This use of intelligent defaults–based on our own experience or best practices–extends to incorporating state-of-the-art research wherever possible. For instance, transfer learning is critically important for training models quickly, accurately, and cheaply, but the details matter a great deal. fastai automatically provides transfer learning optimised batch-normalization (Ioffe and Szegedy 2015) training, layer freezing, and discriminative learning rates (Howard and Ruder 2018). In general, the library’s use of integrated defaults means it requires fewer lines of code from the user to re-specify information or merely to connect components. As a result, every line of user code tends to be more likely to be meaningful, and easier to read. The mid-level API provides the core deep learning and data-processing methods for each of these applications, and low-level APIs provide a library of optimized primitives and functional and object-oriented foundations, which allows the mid-level to be developed and customised. The library itself is built on top of PyTorch (Paszke et al. 2017), NumPy (Oliphant, n.d.), PIL (Clark and Contributors, n.d.), pandas (McKinney 2010), and various other libraries. In order to achieve its goal of hackability, the library does not aim to supplant or hide these lower levels or these foundation. Within a fastai model, one can interact directly with the underlying PyTorch primitives; and within a PyTorch model, one can incrementally adopt components from the fastai library as conveniences rather than as an integrated package. We believe fastai meets its design goals. A user can create and train a state-of-the-art vision model using transfer learning with four understandable lines of code. Perhaps more tellingly, we have been able to implement recent deep learning research papers with just a couple of hours work, whilst matching the performance shown in the papers. We have also used the library for our winning entry in the DawnBench competition (Cody A. Coleman and Zahari 2017), training a ResNet-50 on ImageNet to accuracy in 18 minutes. The following sections describe the main functionality of the various API levels in more detail and review prior related work. We chose to include a lot of code to illustrate the concepts we are presenting. While that code made change slightly as the library or its dependencies evolve (it is running against fastai v2.0.0), the ideas behind stay the same. The next section reviews the high-level APIs “out-of-the-box” applications for some of the most used deep learning domains. The applications provided are vision, text, tabular, and collaborative filtering. Applications Here is an example of how to fine tune an ImageNet (Deng et al. 2009) model on the Oxford IIT Pets dataset (Parkhi et al. 2012) and achieve close to state-of-the-art accuracy within a couple of minutes of training on a single GPU: This is not an excerpt; these are all of the lines of code necessary for this task. Each line of code does one important task, allowing the user to focus on what they need to do, rather than minor details. Let’s look at each line in turn: This first line imports all the necessary pieces from the library. fastai is designed to be usable in a read–eval–print loop (REPL) environment as well as in a complex software system. Even if using the “import ” syntax is not generally recommended, REPL programmers generally prefer the symbols they need to be directly available to them, which is why fastai supports the ”import ” style. The library is carefully designed to ensure that importing in this way only imports the symbols that are actually likely to be useful to the user and avoids cluttering the namespace or shadowing important symbols. The second line downloads a standard dataset from the fast.ai datasets collection (if not previously downloaded) to a configurable location (~/.fastai/data by default), extracts it (if not previously extracted), and returns a pathlib.Path object with the extracted location. This line sets up the DataLoaders object. This is an abstraction that represents a combination of training and validation data and will be described more in a later section. DataLoaders can be flexibly defined using the data block API (see 3.1), or, as here, can be built for specific predefined applications using specific subclasses. In this case, the ImageDataLoaders subclass is created using a regular expression labeller. Many other labellers are provided, particularly focused on labelling based on different kinds of file and folder name patterns, which are very common across a wide range of datasets. One interesting feature of this API, which is also shared by lower level fastai data APIs, is the separation of item level and batch level transforms. Item transforms are applied, in this case, to individual images on the CPU. Batch transforms, on the other hand, are applied to a mini batch, on the GPU if available. While fastai supports data augmentation on the GPU, images need to be of the same size before being batched. aug_transforms() selects a set of data augmentations that work well across a variety of vision datasets and problems and can be fully customized by providing parameters to the function. This is a good example of a simple “helper function”; it is not strictly necessary, because the user can list all the augmentations that they require using the individual data augmentation classes. However, by providing a single function which curates best practices and makes the most common types of customization available through a single function, users have fewer pieces to learn in order to get good results. After defining a DataLoaders object the user can easily look at the data with a single line of code: This fourth line creates a Learner, which provides an abstraction combining an optimizer, a model, and the data to train it – this will be described in more detail in 4.1. Each application has a customized function that creates a Learner, which will automatically handle whatever details it can for the user. For instance, in this case it will download an ImageNet-pretrained model, if not already available, remove the classification head of the model, replace it with a head appropriate for this particular dataset, and set appropriate defaults for the optimizer, weight decay, learning rate, and so forth (except where overridden by the user). The fifth line fits the model. In this case, it is using the 1cycle policy (Smith 2018), which is a recent best practice for training and is not widely available in most deep learning libraries by default. It is annealing both the learning rates, and the momentums, printing metrics on the validation set, displaying results in an HTML table (if run in a Jupyter Notebook, or a console table otherwise), recording losses and metrics after every batch to allow plotting later, and so forth. A GPU will be used if one is available. After training a model the user can view the results in various ways, including analysing the errors with show_results(): Here is another example of a vision application, this time for segmentation on the CamVid dataset (Brostow et al. 2008): The lines of code to create and train this model are almost identical to those for a classification model, except for those necessary to tell fastai about the differences in the processing of the input data. The exact same line of code that was used for the image classification example can also be used to display the segmentation data: Furthermore, the user can also view the results of the model, which again are visualized automatically in a way suitable for this task: In modern natural language processing (NLP), perhaps the most important approach to building models is through fine tuning pre-trained language models. To train a language model in fastai requires very similar code to the previous examples (here on the IMDb dataset (Maas et al. 2011)): Fine-tuning this model for classification requires the same basic steps: The same API is also used to view the DataLoaders: The biggest challenge with creating text applications is often the processing of the input data. fastai provides a flexible processing pipeline with predefined rules for best practices, such as handling capitalization by adding tokens. For instance, there is a compromise between lower-casing all text and losing information, versus keeping the original capitalisation and ending up with too many tokens in your vocabulary. fastai handles this by adding a special single token representing that the next symbol should be treated as uppercase or sentence case and then converts the text itself to lowercase. fastai uses a number of these special tokens. Another example is that a sequence of more than three repeated characters is replaced with a special repetition token, along with a number of repetitions and then the repeated character. These rules largely replicate the approaches discussed in (Howard and Ruder 2018) and are not normally made available as defaults in most NLP modelling libraries. The tokenization is flexible and can support many different organizers. The default used is Spacy. A SentencePiece tokenizer (Kudo and Richardson 2018) is also provided by the library. Subword tokenization (Wu et al. 2016) (Kudo 2018), such as that provided by SentencePiece, has been used in many recent NLP breakthroughs (Radford et al. 2019) (Devlin et al. 2018). Numericalization and vocabulary creation often requires many lines of code, and careful management here fails and caching. In fastai that is handled transparently and automatically. Input data can be provided in many different forms, including: a separate file on disk for each document, delimited files in various formats, and so forth. The API also allows for complete customisation. SentencePiece is particularly useful for handling multiple languages and was used in MultiFIT (Eisenschlos et al. 2019), along with fastai, for this purpose. This provided models and state-of-the-art results across many different languages using a single code base. fastai’s text models are based on AWD-LSTM (Merity, Keskar, and Socher 2017). The user community have provided external connectors to the popular HuggingFace Transformers library (Wolf et al. 2019). The training of the models proceeds in the same way as for the vision examples with defaults appropriate for these models automatically selected. We are not aware of other libraries that provide direct support for transfer learning best practices in NLP, such as those shown in (Howard and Ruder 2018). Because the tokenisation is built on top of a layered architecture, users can replace the base tokeniser with their own choices and will automatically get support for the underlying parallel process model provided by fastai. It will also automatically handle serialization of intermediate outputs so that they can be reused in future processing pipelines. The results of training the model can be visualised with the same API as used for image models, shown in a way appropriate for NLP: Tabular models have not been very widely used in deep learning; Gradient boosting machines and similar methods are more commonly used in industry and research settings. However, there have been examples of competition winning approaches and academic state-of-the-art results using deep learning (Brébisson et al. 2015). Deep learning models are particularly useful for datasets with high cardinality categorical variables because they provide embeddings that can be used even for non-deep learning models (Guo and Berkhahn 2016). One of the challenges is there has not been examples of libraries which directly support best practices for tabular modelling using deep learning. The pandas library (McKinney 2010) already provides excellent support for processing tabular data sets, and fastai does not attempt to replace it. Instead, it adds additional functionality to pandas DataFrames through various pre-processing functions, such as automatically adding features that are useful for modelling with date data. fastai also provides features for automatically creating appropriate DataLoaders with separated validation and training sets, using a variety of mechanisms, such as randomly splitting rows, or selecting rows based on some column. The code to create and train a model suitable for this data should look familiar, there is just information specific to tabular data requires when building the DataLoaders object. As for every other application, dls.show_batch and learn.show_results will display a DataFrame with some samples. fastai also integrates with NVIDIA’s cuDF library, providing end-to-end GPU optimized data processing and model training. fastai is the first deep learning framework to integrate with cuDF in this way. Collaborative filtering is normally modelled using a probabilistic matrix factorisation approach (Mnih and Salakhutdinov 2008). In practice however, a dataset generally has much more than just (for example) a user ID and a product ID, but instead has many characteristics of the user, product, time period, and so forth. It is quite standard to use those to train a model, therefore, fastai attempts to close the gap between collaborative filtering and tabular modelling. A collaborative filtering model in fastai can be simply seen as a tabular model with high cardinality categorical variables. A classic matrix factorisation model is also provided. Both are trained using the same steps that we’ve seen in the other applications, as in this example using the popular Movielens dataset (Harper and Konstan 2015): fastai is mostly focused on model training, but once this is done you can easily export the PyTorch model to serve it in production. The command Learner.export will serialize the model as well as the input pipeline (just the transforms, not the training data) to be able to apply the same to new data. The library provides Learner.predict and Learner.get_preds to evaluate the model on on item or a new inference DataLoader. Such a DataLoader can easily be built from a set of items with the command test_dl. High-level API design considerations The high-level API is that which is used by people using these applications. All the fastai applications share some basic components. One such component is the visualisation API, which uses a small number of methods, the main ones being show_batch (for showing input data) and show_results (for showing model results). Different types of model and datasets are able to use this consistent API because of fastai’s type dispatch system, a lower-level component which will be discussed in 5.3. The transfer learning capability shared across the applications relies on PyTorch’s parameter groups, and fastai’s mid-level API then leverages these groups, such as the generic optimizer (see 4.3). In all those applications, the Learner obtained gets the same functionality for the model training. The recommended way of training models using a variant of the 1cycle policy (Smith 2018) which uses a warm-up and annealing for the learning rate while doing the opposite with the momentum parameter: The learning rate is the most important hyper-parameter to tune (and very often the only one since the library sets proper defaults). Other libraries often provide help for grid search or AutoML to guess the best value, but the fastai library implements the learning rate finder (Smith 2015) which much more quickly provides the best value for this parameter after a mock training. The command learn.lr_find() will return a graph like this: Another important high-level API component, which is shared across all of the applications, is the data block API. The data block API is an expressive API for data loading. It is the first attempt we are aware of to systematically define all of the steps necessary to prepare data for a deep learning model, and give users a mix and match recipe book for combining these pieces (which we refer to as data blocks). The steps that are defined by the data block API are: Here is an example of how to use the data block API to get the MNIST dataset (LeCun, Cortes, and Burges 2010) ready for modelling: In fastai v1 and earlier we used a fluent instead of a functional API for this (meaning the statements to execute those steps were chained one after the other). We discovered that this was a mistake; while fluent APIs are flexible in the order in which the user can define the steps, that order is very important in practice. With this functional DataBlock you don’t have to remember if you need to split before or after labelling your data, for instance. Also, fluent APIs, at least in Python, tend not to work well with auto completion technologies. The data processing can be defined using Transforms (see 5.2). Here is an example of using the data blocks API to complete the same segmentation seen earlier: Object detection can also be completed using the same functionality (here using the COCO dataset (Lin et al. 2014)): In this case, the targets are a tuple of two things: a list of bounding boxes and a list of labels. This is why there are three blocks, a list of getters and an extra argument to specify how many of the blocks should be considered the input (the rest forming the target). The data for language modeling seen earlier can also be built using the data blocks API: We have heard from users that they find the data blocks API provides a good balance of conciseness and expressivity. Many libraries have provided various approaches to data processing. In the data science domain the scikit-learn (Pedregosa et al. 2011) pipeline approach is widely used. This API provides a very high level of expressivity, but is not opinionated enough to ensure that a user completes all of the steps necessary to get their data ready for modelling. As another example, TensorFlow (Abadi et al. 2015) provides the tf.data library, which does not as precisely map the steps necessary for users to complete their task to the functionality provided by the API. The Torchvision (Massa and Chintala, n.d.) library is a good example of an API which is highly specialised to a small subset of data processing tasks for a specific subdomain. fastai tries to capture the benefits of both extremes of the spectrum, without compromises; the data blocks API is how most users transform their data for use with the library. Users often need to use existing pure PyTorch code (i.e. code that doesn’t use fastai), such as their existing code-bases developed without fastai, or using third party code written in pure PyTorch. fastai supports incrementally adding fastai features to this code, without requiring extensive rewrites. For instance, at the time of writing, the official PyTorch repository includes a MNIST training example1. In order to train this example using fastai’s Learner only two steps are required. First, the 30 lines in the example covering the test() and train() functions can be removed. Then, the 4 lines of the training loop is replaced with this code: With no other changes, the user now has the benefit of all fastai’s callbacks, progress reporting, integrated schedulers such as 1cycle training, and so forth. As the application examples have shown, the fastai library allows training a variety of kinds of application models, with a variety of kinds of datasets, using a very consistent API. The consistency covers not just the initial training, but also visualising and exploring the input data and model outputs. Such consistency helps students, both through having less to learn, and through showing the unifying concepts across different types of model. It also helps practitioners and researchers focus on their model development rather than learning incidental differences between APIs across domains. It is of particular benefit when, for instance, an NLP expert tries to bring their expertise across to a computer vision application. There are many libraries that provide high level APIs to specific applications, such as Facebook’s Torchvision (Massa and Chintala, n.d.), Detectron (Girshick et al. 2018), and Fairseq (Ott et al. 2019). However, each library has a different API, input representation, and requires different assumptions about training details, all of which a user must learn from scratch each time. This means that there are many deep learning practitioners and researchers who become specialists in specific subfields, partially based on their understanding of the toiling of those subfields. By providing a consistent API fastai users are able to quickly move between different fields and reuse their expertise. Customizing the behaviour of predefined applications can be challenging, which means that researchers often end up “reinventing the wheel”, or, constraining themselves to the specific parts which there tooling allows them to customize. Because fastai provides a layered architecture, users of the software can customize every part, as they need. The layered architecture is also an important foundation in allowing PyTorch users to incrementally add fastai functionality to existing code bases. Furthermore, fastai’s layers are reused across all applications, so an investment in learning them can be leveraged across many different projects. The approach of creating layered APIs has a long history in software engineering. Software engineering best practices involve building up decoupled components which can be tied together in flexible ways, and then creating increasingly less abstract and more customized layers on top of each part. The layered API design is also important for researchers and practitioners aiming to create best in class results. As the field of deep learning matures, there are more and more architectures, optimizers, data processing pipelines, and other approaches that can be selected from. Trying to bring multiple approaches together into a single project can be extremely challenging, when each one is using a different, incompatible API, and has different expectations about how a model is trained. For instance, in the original mixup article (Zhang et al. 2017), the code provided by the researchers only works on one specific dataset, with one specific set of metrics, and with one specific optimizer. Attempting to combine the researchers’ mixup code with other training best practices, such as mixed precision training (Micikevicius et al. 2017), requires rewriting it largely from scratch. The next section will look at the mid-level API pieces that fastai provides, which can be mixed and matched together to allow custom approaches to be quickly and reliably created. Mid-level APIs Many libraries, including fastai version 1 or earlier, provide a high-level API to users, and a low-level API used internally for that functionality, but nothing in between. This has two problems: the first is that it becomes harder and harder to create additional high-level functionality, as the system becomes more sophisticated, because the low-level API becomes increasingly complicated and cluttered. The second problem is that for users of the system who want to customize and adapt it, they often have to rewrite significant parts of the high-level API, and understand the large surface area of the low-level API in order to do so. This tends to mean that only a small dedicated community of specialists can really customize the software. These issues are common across nearly all software development, and many software engineers have worked hard to find ways to deal with this complexity and develop layered architectures. The issue in the deep learning community, however, is that these practices have not seemed to be widely understood or adopted. There are, however, exceptions; most relevant to this paper, the PyTorch library (Paszke et al. 2017) has a carefully layered design and is highly customizable. Much of the innovation in fastai is in its new mid-level APIs. This section will look at the following mid-level APIs: data, callbacks, optimizer, model layers, and metrics. These APIs are what the four fastai applications are built with and are also fully documented and available to users so that they can build their own applications or customize the existing ones. As already noted, a library can provide more appropriate defaults and user-friendly behaviour by ensuring that classes have all the information they need to make appropriate choices. One example of this is the DataLoaders class, which brings together all the information necessary for creating the data required for modelling. fastai also provides the Learner class, which brings together all the information necessary for training a model based on the data. The information which Learner requires, and is stored as state within a learner object, is: a PyTorch model, and optimizer, a loss function, and a DataLoaders object. Passing in the optimizer and loss function is optional, and in many situations fastai can automatically select appropriate defaults. Learner is also responsible (along with Optimizer) for handling fastai’s transfer learning functionality. When creating a Learner the user can pass a splitter. This is a function that describes how to split the layers of a model into PyTorch parameter groups, which can then be frozen, trained with different learning rates, or more generally handled differently by an optimizer. One area that we have found particularly sensitive in transfer learning is the handling of batch-normalization layers (Ioffe and Szegedy 2015). We tried a wide variety of approaches to training and updating the moving average statistics of those layers, and different configurations could often change the error rate by as much as 300%. There was only one approach that consistently worked well across all datasets that we tried, which is to never freeze batch-normalization layers, and never turn off the updating of their moving average statistics. Therefore, by default, Learner will bypass batch-normalization layers when a user asks to freeze some parameter groups. Users often report that this one minor tweak dramatically improves their model accuracy and is not something that is found in any other libraries that we are aware of. DataLoaders and Learner also work together to ensure that model weights and input data are all on the same device. This makes working with GPUs significantly more straightforward and makes it easy to switch from CPU to GPU as needed. In fastai version 0.7, we repeatedly modified the training loop in Learner to support many different tweaks and customizations. Over time, however, this became unwieldy. We noticed that there was a core subset of functionality that appeared in every one of these tweaks, and that all the other changes that were required could be refactored into a specific set of customization points. In other words, a wide variety of training methods can be represented using a single, universal training system. Once we extracted those common pieces, we were left with the basic fastai training loop, and the customisation points that we call two-way callbacks. The Learner class’s novel 2-way callback system allows gradients, data, losses, control flow, and anything else to be read and changed at any point during training. There is a rich history of using callbacks to allow for customisation of numeric software, and today nearly all modern deep learning libraries provide this functionality. However, fastai’s callback system is the first that we are aware of that supports the design principals necessary for complete two-way callbacks: This is the way callbacks are usually designed, but in addition, there is a key design principal: This is why we call these 2-way callbacks, as the information not only flows from the training loop to the callbacks, but on the other way as well. For instance, here is the code for training a single batch b in fastai: This example clearly shows how every step of the process is associated with a callback (the calls to self.cb() and shows how exceptions are used as a flexible control flow mechanism for them. In fastai v0.7, we did not follow these three design principles. As a result, we had to frequently change the training loop to support additional functionality, and new research papers. On the other hand, with this new callback system we have not had to change the training loop at all, and have used callbacks to implement mixup augmentation, generative adversarial networks, optimized mixed precision training, PyTorch hooks, the learning rate finder, and many more. Most importantly, we have not yet come across any cases where mixing and matching these callbacks has caused any problems. Therefore, users can use all the training features that they want, and can easily do ablation studies, adding, removing, and modifying techniques as needed. A good example of a fastai callback is GANTrainer, which implements training of generative adversarial networks (Goodfellow et al. 2014). To do so, it must complete the following tasks: To do so, it relies on a GANModule that contains the generator and the critic, then delegates the input to the proper model depending on the value of a flag gen_mode and on a GANLoss that also has a generator or critic behavior and handles the evaluation mentioned earlier. Then, it defines the following callback methods: This callback is then customized with another callback, which defines at what point to switch from critic to generator and vice versa. fastai includes several possibilities for this purpose, such as an AdaptiveGANSwitcher, which automatically switches between generator and critic training based on reaching certain thresholds in their respective losses. This approach to training can allow models to be trained significantly faster and more easily than with standard fixed schedule approaches. fastai provides a new generic optimizer foundation that allows recent optimization techniques to be implemented in a handful of lines of code, by refactoring out the common functionality of modern optimizers into two basic pieces: This has allowed us to implement every optimizer that we have attempted in fastai, without needing to extend or change this foundation. This has been very beneficial, both for research and development. As an example of a development improvement, here are the entire changes needed to make to support decoupled weight decay (also known as AdamW (Loshchilov and Hutter 2017)): On the other hand, the implementation in the PyTorch library required creating an entirely new class, with over 50 lines of code. The benefit for research comes about because it it easy to rapidly implement new papers as they come out, recognise similarities and differences across techniques, and try out variants and combinations of these underlying differences, many of which have not yet been published. The resulting code tends to look a lot like the maths shown in the paper. For instance, here is the code in fastai, and the algorithm from the paper, for the LAMB optimizer (You et al. 2019): The only difference between the code and the figure are: In order to support modern optimizers such as LARS fastai allows the user to choose whether to aggregate stats at model, layer, or per activation level. Nearly all machine learning and deep learning libraries provide some support for metrics. These are generally defined as simple functions which take the mean, or in some cases a custom reduction function, across some measurement which is logged during training. However, some metrics cannot be correctly defined using this framework. For instance, the dice coefficient, which is widely used for measuring segmentation accuracy, cannot be directly expressed using a simple reduction. In order to provide a more flexible foundation to support metrics like this fastai provides a Metric abstract class which defines three methods: reset, accumulate, and value (which is a property). Reset is called at the start of training, accumulate is called after each batch, and then finally value is called to calculate the final check. Whenever possible, we can thus avoid recording and storing all predictions in memory. For instance, here is the definition of the dice coefficient: The Scikit-learn library (Pedregosa et al. 2011) already provides a wide variety of useful metrics, so instead of reinventing them, fastai provides a simple wrapper function, skm_to_fastai, which allows them to be used in fastai, and can automatically add pre-processing steps such as sigmoid, argmax, and thresholding. Many libraries have recently started integrating access to external datasets directly into their APIs. fastai builds on this trend, by curating and collecting a number of datasets (hosted by the AWS Public Dataset Program2) in a single place and making them available through the fastai.data.external module. fastai automatically downloads, extracts, and caches these datasets when they are first used. This is similar to functionality provided by Torchvision, TensorFlow datasets, and similar libraries, with the addition of closer integration into the fastai ecosystem. For instance, fastai provides cut-down “sample” versions of many of its datasets, which are small enough that they can be downloaded and used directly in documentation, continuous integration testing, and so forth. These datasets are also used in the documentation, along with examples showing users what they can expect when training models with his datasets. Because the documentation is written in interactive notebooks (as discussed in a later section) this also means that users can directly experiment with these datasets and models by simply running and modifying the documentation notebooks. Once a user has their data available, they need to get it into a form that can be fed to a PyTorch model. The most common class used to feed models directly is the DataLoader class in PyTorch. This class provides fast and reliable multi-threaded data-processing execution, with several points allowing customisation. However, we have found that it is not flexible enough to conveniently do some of the tasks that we have required, such as building a DataLoader for an NLP language model. Therefore, fastai includes a new DataLoader class on top of the internal classes that PyTorch uses. This combines the benefits of the fast and reliable infrastructure provided by PyTorch with a more flexible and expressive front-end for the user. DataLoader provides 15 extension points via customizable methods, which can be replaced by the user as required. These customizable methods represent the 15 stages of data loading that we have identified, and which fit into three broad stages: sample creation, item creation, and batch creation. In contrast, in the standard PyTorch DataLoader class only a small subset of these stages is explicitly made available for customization by the user. Unless a user’s requirements are met by this subset, the user is forced to implement their own solution from scratch. The impact of this additional customizability can be quite significant. For instance, the fastai language model DataLoader went from 90 lines of code to 30 lines of code after adopting this approach. What makes this flexibility possible is a Python decorator that is called funcs_kwargs. This decorator creates a class in which any method can be replaced by passing a new function to the constructor, or by replacing it through subclassing. This allows users to replace any part of the logic in the DataLoader class. In order to maximise the power of this, nearly every part of the fastai DataLoader is a method with a single line of code. Therefore, virtually every design choice can be adjusted by users. fastai also provides a transformed DataLoader called TfmdDL, which subclasses DataLoader. In TfmdDL the callbacks and customization points execute Pipelines of Transforms. Both mechanisms are described in 5.2; this section provides a brief overview here. A Transform is simply a Python function, which can also include its inverse function – that is, the function which “undoes” the transform. Transforms can be composed using the Pipeline class, which then allows the entire function composition to be inverted as well. We refer to these two directions, the forward and inverse directions of the functions, as the Transforms’ encodes and decodes methods. TfmdDL provides the foundations for the visualisation support discussed in the application section, having the basic template for showing a batch of data. In order to do this, it needs to decode any transforms in the pipeline, which it does automatically. For instance, an integer representing a level of a category will be converted back into the string that the integer represents. When users who need to create a new kind of block for the data blocks API, or need a level of customization that even the data blocks API doesn’t support, they can use the mid-level components that the data block API is built on. These are a small number of simple classes which combine the transform pipelines functionality of fastai with Python’s collections interface. The most basic class is transformed list, or TfmdLists, which lazily applies a transform pipeline to a collection, whilst providing a standard Python collection interface. This is an important foundational functionality for deep learning, such as the ability to index into a collection of filenames, and on demand read an image file then apply any processing, such as data augmentation and normalization, necessary for a model. TfmdLists also provides subset functionality, which allows the user to define subsets of the data, such as those representing training and validation sets. Information about what subset an item belongs to is passed down to transforms, so that they can ensure that they do the appropriate processing – for instance, data augmentation processing would be generally skipped for a validation set, unless doing test time augmentation. Another important data class at this layer of the API is Datasets, which applies multiple transform pipelines in parallel to a single collection. Like TfmdLists, it provides a standard Python collection interface. Indexing into a Datasets object returns a couple containing the result of each transform pipeline on the input item. This is the class used by the data blocks API to return, for instance, a tuple of an image tensor, and a label for that image, both derived from the same input filename. PyTorch (like many other libraries) provides a basic “sequential” layer object, which can be combined in sequence to form a component of a network. This represents simple composition of functions, where each layer’s output is the next layer’s input. However, many components in modern network architectures cannot be represented in this way. For instance, ResNet blocks (He et al. 2015), and any other block which requires a skip connection, are not compatible with sequential layers. The normal workaround for this in PyTorch is to write a custom forward function, effectively relying on the full flexibility of Python to escape the limits of composing these sequence layers. However, there is a significant downside: the model is now no longer amenable to easy analysis and modification, such as removing the final few layers in order to do transfer learning. This also makes it harder to support automatic drawing graphs representing a model, printing a model summary, accurately reporting on model computation requirements by layer, and so forth. Therefore, fastai attempts to provide the basic foundations to allow modern neural network architectures to be built by stacking a small number of predefined building blocks. The first piece of this system is the SequentialEx layer. This layer has the same basic API as PyTorch’s nn.Sequential, with one key difference: the original input value to the function is available to every layer in the block. Therefore, the user can, for instance, include a layer which adds the current value of the sequential block to the input value of the sequential block (such as is done in a ResNet). To take full advantage of this capability, fastai also provides a MergeLayer class. This allows the user to pass any function, which will in turn be provided with the layer block input value, and the current value of the sequential block. For instance, if you pass in a simple add function, then MergeLayer provides the functionality of an identity connection in a standard resnet block. Or, if the user passes in a concatenation function, then it provides the basic functionality of a concatenating connection in a Densenet block (Huang, Liu, and Weinberger 2016). In this way, fastai provides primitives which allow representing modern network architecture out of predefined building blocks, without falling back to Python code in the forward function. fastai also provides a general-purpose class for combining these layers into a wide range of modern convolutional neural network architectures. These are largely based on the underlying foundations from ResNet (He et al. 2015), and therefore this class is called XResNet. By providing parameters to this class, the user can customise it to create architectures that include squeeze and excitation blocks (Hu, Shen, and Sun 2017), grouped convolutions such as in ResNext (Xie et al. 2017), depth-wise convolutions such as in the Xception architecture (Chollet 2016), widening factors such as in Wide ResNets (Zagoruyko and Komodakis 2016), self-attention and symmetric self-attention functionality , custom activation functions, and more. By using this generic refactoring of these clusters of modern neural network architectures, we have been able to design and experiment with novel combinations very easily. It is also clearer to users exactly what is going on in their models, because the various specific architectures are clearly represented as changes to input parameters. One set of techniques that is extremely useful in practice are the tweaks to the ResNet architecture described in (He et al. 2018). These approaches are used by default in XResNet. Another architecture tweak which has worked well in many situations is the recently developed Mish activation function (Misra 2019). fastai includes an implementation of Mish which is optimised using PyTorch’s just-in-time compiler (JIT). A similar approach has been used to refactor the U-Net architecture (Ronneberger, Fischer, and Brox 2015). Through looking at a range of competition winning and state-of-the-art papers in segmentation, we curated a set of approaches that work well together in practice. These are made available by default in fastai’s U-Net implementation, which also dynamically creates the U-Net cross connections for any given input size. Low-level APIs The layered approach of the fastai library has a specific meaning at the lower levels of it stack. Rather than treating Python (Python Core Team 2019) itself as the base layer of the computation, which the middle layer relies on, those layers rely on a set of basic abstractions provided by the lower layer. The middle layer is programmed in that set of abstractions. The low-level of the fastai stack provides a set of abstractions for: The rest of this section will explain how the transform pipeline system is built on top of the foundations provided by PyTorch, type dispatch, and semantic tensors, providing the flexible infrastructure needed for the rest of fastai. The main foundation for fastai is the PyTorch (Paszke et al. 2017) library. PyTorch provides a GPU optimised tensor class, a library of useful model layers, classes for optimizing models, and a flexible programming model which integrates these elements. fastai uses building blocks from all parts of the PyTorch library, including directly patching its tensor class, entirely replacing its library of optimizers, providing simplified mechanisms for using its hooks, and so forth. In earlier prototypes of fastai we used TensorFlow (Abadi et al. 2015) as our platform (and before that used (Theano Development Team 2016)), but switched to PyTorch because we found that it had a fast core, a simple and well curated API, and rapidly growing popularity in the research community. At this point most papers at the top deep learning conferences are implemented using PyTorch. fastai builds on many other open source libraries. For CPU image processing fastai uses and extends the Python imaging library (PIL) (Clark and Contributors, n.d.), for reading and processing tabular data it uses pandas, for most of its metrics it uses Scikit-Learn (Pedregosa et al. 2011), and for plotting it uses Matplotlib (Hunter 2007). These are the most widely used libraries in the Python open source data science community and provide the features necessary for the fastai library. One key motivation is the need to often be able to undo some subset of transformations that are applied to create the data used to modelling. This strings that represent categories cannot be used in models directly and are turned into integers using some vocabulary. And pixel values for images are generally normalized. Neither of these can be directly visualized, and therefore at inference time we need to apply the inverse of these functions to get data that is understandable. Therefore, fastai introduces a Transform class, which provides callable objects, along with a decode method. The decode method is designed to invert the function provided by a transform; it needs to be implemented manually by the user ; it is similar to the inverse_transform you can provide in Scikit-Learn (Pedregosa et al. 2011) pipelines and transformers. By providing both the encode and decode methods in a single place, the user ends up with a single object which they can compose into pipelines, serialize, and so forth. Another motivation for this part of the API is the insight that PyTorch data loaders provide tuples, and PyTorch models expect tuples as inputs. Sometimes these tuples should behave in a connected and dependent way, such as in a segmentation model, where data augmentation must be applied to both the independent and dependent variables in the same basic way. Sometimes, however, different implementations must be used for different types; for instance, when doing affine transformations to a segmentation mask nearest-neighbor interpolation is needed, but for an image generally a smoother interpolation function would be used. In addition, sometimes transforms need to be able to opt out of processing altogether, depending on context. For instance, except when doing test time augmentation, data augmentation methods should not be applied to the validation set. Therefore, fastai automatically passes the current subset index to transforms, allowing them to modify their behaviour based on subset (for instance, training versus validation). This is largely hidden from the user, because base classes are provided which automatically do this context-dependent skipping. However, advanced users requiring complete customization can use this functionality directly. Transforms in deep learning pipelines often require state, which can be dependent on the input data. For example, normalization statistics could be based on a sample of data batches, a categorization transform could get its vocabulary directly from the dependent variable, or an NLP numericalization transform could get its vocabulary from the tokens used in the input corpus. Therefore, fastai transforms and pipelines support a setup method, which can be used to create this state when setting up a Pipeline. When pipelines are set up, all previous transforms in the pipeline are run first, so that the transform being set up receives the same structure of data that it will when being called. This is closely connected to the implementation of TfmdList. Because a TfmdList lazily applies a pipeline to a collection, fastai can automatically call the Pipeline setup method as soon as it is connected to the collection in a TfmdList. The fastai type dispatch system is like the functools.singledispatch system provided in the Python standard library while supporting multiple dispatch over two parameters. Dispatch over two parameters is necessary for any situation where the user wants to be able to customize behavior based on both the input and target of a model. For instance, fastai uses this for the show_batch and show_results methods. As shown in the application section, these methods automatically provide an appropriate visualisation of the input, target, and results of a model, which requires responding to the types of both parameters. In one example the input was an image, and the target was a segmentation mask, and the show results method automatically used a colour-coded overlay for the mask. On the other hand, for an image classification problem, the input would be shown as an image, the prediction and target would be shown as text labels, and color-coded based on whether they were correct. It also provides a more expressive and yet concise syntax for registering additional dispatched functions or methods, taking advantage of Python’s recently introduced type annotations syntax. Here is an example of creating two different methods which dispatch based on parameter types: Here f_td_test has a generic implementation for x of numeric types and all ys, then a specialized implementation when x is an int and y is a float. By using fastai’s transform pipeline functionality, which depends heavily on types, the mid and high-level APIs can provide a lot of power, conciseness, and expressivity for users. However, this does not work well with the types provided by PyTorch, since the basic tensor type does not have any subclasses which can be used for type dispatch. Furthermore, subclassing PyTorch tensors is challenging, because the basic functionality for instantiating the subclasses is not provided and doing any kind of tensor operation will strip away the subclass information. Therefore, fastai provides a new tensor base class, which can be easily instantiated and subclass. fastai also patches PyTorch’s tensor class to attempt to maintain subclass information through operations wherever possible. Unfortunately, it is not possible to always perfectly maintain this information throughout every possible operation, and therefore all fastai Transform automatically maintain subclass types appropriately. fastai also provides the same functionality for Python imaging library classes, along with some basic type hierarchies for Python built-in collection types, NumPy arrays, and so forth. The fastai library provides most data augmentation in computer vision on the GPU at the batch level. Historically, the processing pipeline in computer vision has always been to open the images and apply data augmentation on the CPU, using a dedicated library such as PIL (Clark and Contributors, n.d.) or OpenCV (Bradski 2000), then batch the results before transferring them to the GPU and using them to train the model. On modern GPUs however, architectures like a standard ResNet-50 are often CPU-bound. Therefore fastai implements most common functions on the GPU, using PyTorch’s implementation of grid_sample (which does the interpolation from the coordinate map and the original image). Most data augmentations are random affine transforms (rotation, zoom, translation, etc), functions on a coordinates map (perspective warping) or easy functions applied to the pixels (contrast or brightness changes), all of which can easily be parallelized and applied to a batch of images. In fastai, we combine all affine and coordinate transforms in one step to only apply one interpolation, which results in a smoother result. Most other vision libraries do not do this and lose a lot of detail of the original image when applying several transformations in a row. The type-dispatch system helps apply appropriate transforms to images, segmentation masks, key-points or bounding boxes (and users can add support for other types by writing their own functions). fastai has a few more additions designed to make Python easier to use, including a NumPy-like API for lists called L, and some decorators to make delegation or patching easier. Delegation is used when one function will call another and send it a bunch of keyword arguments with defaults. To avoid repeating those, they are often grouped into **kwargs. The problem is that they then disappear from the signature of the function that delegates, and you can’t use the tools from modern IDEs to get tab-completion for those delegated arguments or see them in its signature. To solve this, fastai provides a decorator called @delegates that will analyze the signature of the delegated function to change the signature of the original function. For instance the initialization of Learner has 11 keyword-arguments, so any function that creates a Learner uses this decorator to avoid mentioning them all. As an example, the function tabular_learner is defined like this: but when you look at its signature, you will see the 11 additional arguments of Learner.__init__ with their defaults. Monkey-patching is an important functionality of the Python language when you want to add functionality to existing objects. fastai makes it easier and more concise with a @patch decorator, using Python’s type-annotation system. For instance, here is how fastai adds the read() method to the pathlib.Path class: Lastly, inspired by the NumPy (Oliphant, n.d.) library, fastai provides a collection type, called L, that supports fancy indexing and has a lot of methods that allow users to write simple expressive code. For example, the code below takes a list of pairs, selects the second item of each pair, takes its absolute value, filters items greater than 4, and adds them up: L uses context-dependent functionality to simplify user code. For instance, the sorted method can take any of the following as a key: a callable (sorts based on the value of calling the key with the item), a string (used as an attribute name), or an int (used as an index). nbdev In order to assist in developing this library, we built a programming environment called nbdev, which allows users to create complete Python packages, including tests and a rich documentation system, all in Jupyter Notebooks (Kluyver et al. 2016). nbdev is a system for exploratory programming. Exploratory programming is based on the observation that most developers spend most of their time as coders exploring and experimenting. Exploration is easiest developing on the prompt (or REPL), or using a notebook-oriented development system like Jupyter Notebooks. But these systems are not as strong for the “programming” part, since they’re missing features provided by IDEs and editors like good documentation lookup, good syntax highlighting, integration with unit tests, and (most importantly) the ability to produce final, distributable source code files. nbdev is built on top of Jupyter Notebook and adds the following critically important tools for software development: We plan to provide more information about the features, benefits, and history behind nbdev in a future paper. Related work There has been a long history of high-level APIs for deep learning in Python, and this history has been a significant influence on the development of fastai. The first example of a Python library for deep learning that we have found is Calysto/conx, which implemented back propagation in Python in 2001. Since that time there have been dozens of approaches to high level APIs with perhaps the most significant, in chronological order, being Lasagne (Dieleman et al. 2015) (begun in 2013), Fuel/Blocks (begun in 2014), and Keras (Chollet and others 2015) (begun in 2015). There have been other directions as well, such as the configuration-based approach popularized by Caffe (Jia et al. 2014), and lower-level libraries such as Theano (Theano Development Team 2016), TensorFlow (Abadi et al. 2015) and PyTorch (Paszke et al. 2017). APIs from general machine learning libraries have also been an important influence on fastai. SPSS and SAS provided many utilities for data processing and analysis since the early days of statistical computing. The development of the S language was a very significant advance, which led directly to projects such as R (R Core Team 2017), SPLUS, and xlisp-stat (Luke Tierney 1989). The direction taken by R for both data processing (largely focused on the “Tidyverse” (Wickham et al. 2019)) and model building (built on top of R’s rich “formula” system) shows how a very different set of design choices can result in a very different (and effective) user experience. Scikit-learn (Pedregosa et al. 2011), Torchvision (Massa and Chintala, n.d.), and pandas (McKinney 2010) are examples of libraries which provide a function composition abstraction that (like fastai’s Pipeline) are designed to help users process their data into the format they need (Scikit-Learn also being able to perform learning and predictions on that processed data). There are also projects such as MLxtend (Raschka 2018) that provide a variety of utilities building on the functionality of their underlying programming languages (Python, in the case of MLxtend). The most important influence on fastai is, of course, PyTorch (Paszke et al. 2017); fastai would not have been possible without it. The PyTorch API is extensible and flexible, and the implementation is efficient. fastai makes heavy use of torch.Tensor and torch.nn (including torch.nn.functional). On the other hand, fastai does not make much use of PyTorch’s higher level APIs, such as nn.optim and annealing, instead independently creating overlapping functionality based on the design approaches and goals described above. Results and conclusion Early results from using fastai are very positive. We have used the fastai library to rewrite the entire fast.ai course “Practical Deep Learning for Coders”, which contains 14 hours of material, across seven modules, and covers all the applications described in this paper (and some more). We found that we were able to replicate or improve on all the results in previous versions of the material and were able to create the data pipelines and models needed much more quickly and easily than we could before. We have also heard from early adopters of pre-release versions of the library that they have been able to more quickly and easily write deep learning code and build models than with previous versions. fastai has already been selected as part of the official PyTorch Ecosystem3. According to the 2019 Kaggle ML & DS Survey4, 10% of data scientists in the Kaggle community are already using fastai. Many researchers are using fastai to support their work (e.g. (Revay and Teschke 2019) (Koné and Boulmane 2018) (Elkins, Freitas, and Sanz 2019) (Anand et al. 2019)). Based on our experience with fastai, we believe that using a layered API in deep learning has very significant benefits for researchers, practitioners, and students. Researchers can see links across different areas more easily, rapidly combine and restructure ideas, and run experiments on top of strong baselines. Practitioners can quickly build prototypes, and then build on and optimize those prototypes by leveraging fastai’s PyTorch foundations, without rewriting code. Students can experiment with models and try out variations, without being overwhelmed by boilerplate code when first learning ideas. The basic ideas expressed in fastai are not limited to use in PyTorch, or even Python. There is already a partial port of fastai to Swift, called SwiftAI (Jeremy Howard, Sylvain Gugger, and contributors 2019), and we hope to see similar projects for more languages and libraries in the future. We would like to express our deep appreciation to Alexis Gallagher, who was instrumental throughout the paper-writing process, and who inspired the functional-style data blocks API. Many thanks also to Sebastian Raschka for commissioning this paper and acting as the editor for the special edition of Information that it appears in, to the Facebook PyTorch team for all their support throughout fastai’s development, to the global fast.ai community who through forums.fast.ai have contributed many ideas and pull requests that have been invaluable to the development of fastai, to Chris Lattner and the Swift for TensorFlow team who helped develop the Swift courses at course.fast.ai and SwiftAI, to Andrew Shaw for contributing to early prototypes of showdoc in nbdev, to Stas Bekman for contributing to early prototypes of the git hooks in nbdev and to packaging and utilities, and to the developers of the Python programming language, which provides such a strong foundation for fastai’s features. References Abadi, Martı́n, Ashish Agarwal, Paul Barham, Eugene Brevdo, Zhifeng Chen, Craig Citro, Greg S. 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Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/. Revay, Shauna, and Matthew Teschke. 2019. “Multiclass Language Identification Using Deep Learning on Spectral Images of Audio Signals.” Ronneberger, Olaf, Philipp Fischer, and Thomas Brox. 2015. “U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation.” CoRR abs/1505.04597. http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.04597. Smith, Leslie N. 2015. “No More Pesky Learning Rate Guessing Games.” CoRR abs/1506.01186. http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.01186. Smith, Leslie N. 2018. “A Disciplined Approach to Neural Network Hyper-Parameters: Part 1 - Learning Rate, Batch Size, Momentum, and Weight Decay.” CoRR abs/1803.09820. http://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09820. Theano Development Team. 2016. “Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions.” arXiv E-Prints abs/1605.02688 (May). http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.02688. 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You, Yang, Jing Li, Jonathan Hseu, Xiaodan Song, James Demmel, and Cho-Jui Hsieh. 2019. “Reducing BERT Pre-Training Time from 3 Days to 76 Minutes.” CoRR abs/1904.00962. http://arxiv.org/abs/1904.00962. Zagoruyko, Sergey, and Nikos Komodakis. 2016. “Wide Residual Networks.” CoRR abs/1605.07146. http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.07146. Zhang, Hongyi, Moustapha Cissé, Yann N. Dauphin, and David Lopez-Paz. 2017. “Mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization.” CoRR abs/1710.09412. http://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09412. Footnotes Footnotes |
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[SOURCE: https://www.fast.ai/posts/2021-08-02-fastdownload.html] | [TOKENS: 591] |
fastdownload: the magic behind one of the famous 4 lines of code Jeremy Howard August 2, 2021 On this page Summary: Today we’re launching fastdownload, a new library that makes it easy for your users to download, verify, and extract archives. Background At fast.ai we focussed on making important technical topics more accessible. That means that the libraries we create do as much as possible for the user, without limiting what’s possible. fastai is famous for needing just four lines of code to get world-class deep learning results with vision, text, tabular, or recommendation system data: There have been many pages written about most of these: the flexibility of the Data Block API, the power of cnn_learner, and the state of the art transfer learning provided by fine_tune. But what about untar_data? This first line of code, although rarely discussed, is actually a critical part of the puzzle. Here’s what it does: Thanks to this, users don’t have to worry about where their archives and data can be stored, whether they’ve downloaded a URL before or not, and whether their downloaded file is the correct version. fastai handles all this for the user, letting them spend more of their time on the actual modeling process. fastdownload fastdownload, launched today, allows you to provide this same convenience for your users. It helps you make datasets or other archives available for your users while ensuring they are downloaded correctly with the latest version. Your user just calls a single method, FastDownload.get, passing the URL required, and the URL will be downloaded and extracted to the directories you choose. The path to the extracted file is returned. If that URL has already been downloaded, then the cached archive or contents will be used automatically. However, if that size or hash of the archive is different to what it should be, then the user will be informed, and a new version will be downloaded. In the future, you may want to update one or more of your archives. When you do so, fastdownload will ensure your users have the latest version, by checking their downloaded archives against your updated file size and hash information. fastdownload will add a file download_checks.py to your Python module which contains file sizes and hashes for your archives. Because it’s a regular python file, it will be automatically included in your package if you upload it to pypi or a conda channel. Here’s all you need to provide a function that works just like untar_data: You can modify the locations that files are downloaded to by creating a config file ~/.myapp/config.ini (if you don’t have one, it will be created for you). The values in this file can be absolute or relative paths (relative paths are resolved relative to the location of the ini file). If you want to give fastdownload a try, then head over to the docs and follow along with the walk-thru. |
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[SOURCE: https://www.fast.ai/posts/2021-07-19-copilot.html] | [TOKENS: 4298] |
Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse? Jeremy Howard July 19, 2021 On this page Background GitHub Copilot is a new service from GitHub and OpenAI, described as “Your AI pair programmer”. It is a plugin to Visual Studio Code which auto-generates code for you based on the contents of the current file, and your current cursor location. It really feels quite magical to use. For example, here I’ve typed the name and docstring of a function which should “Write text to file fname”: The grey body of the function has been entirely written for me by Copilot! I just hit Tab on my keyboard, and the suggestion gets accepted and inserted into my code. This is certainly not the first “AI powered” program synthesis tool. GitHub’s Natural Language Semantic Code Search in 2018 demonstrated finding code examples using plain English descriptions. Tabnine has provided “AI powered” code completion for a few years now. Where Copilot differs is that it can generate entire multi-line functions and even documentation and tests, based on the full context of a file of code. This is particularly exciting for us at fast.ai because it holds the promise that it may lower the barrier to coding, which would greatly help us in our mission. Therefore, I was particularly keen to dive into Copilot. However, as we’ll see, I’m not yet convinced that Copilot is actually a blessing. It may even turn out to be a curse. Copilot is powered by a deep neural network language model called Codex, which was trained on public code repositories on GitHub. This is of particular interest to me, since in back in 2017 I was the first person to demonstrate that a general purpose language model can be fine-tuned to get state of the art results on a wide range of NLP problems. I developed and showed that as part of a fast.ai lesson. Sebastian Ruder and I then fleshed out the approach and wrote a paper, which was published in 2018 by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). OpenAI’s Alec Radford told me that this paper inspired him to create GPT, which Codex is based on. Here’s the moment from that lesson where I showed for the first time that language model fine tuning gives a state of the art result in classifying IMDB sentiment: A language model is trained to guess missing words in a piece of text. The traditional “ngram” approach used in previous years can not do a good job of this, since context is required to guess correctly. For instance, consider how you would go about filling in the missing words in each of these examples: Knowing that in one case “hot day” is correct, but in another that “hot dog” is correct, requires reading and (to some extent) understanding the whole sentence. The Codex language model learns to guess missing symbols in programming code, so it has to learn a lot about the structure and meaning of computer code. As we’ll discuss later, language models do have some significant limitations that are fundamentally due to how they’re created. The fact that Copilot is trained on publicly available code, under a variety of licenses, has led to many discussions about the ethical and legal implications. Since this has been widely discussed I won’t go into it further here, other than to point out one clear legal issue for users of Copilot discussed by IP lawyer Kate Downing, which is that in some cases using Copilot’s suggestions may be a breach of license (or require relicensing your own work under a GPL-compatible license): “The more complex and lengthy the suggestion, the more likely it has some sort of copyrightable expression.” Walk-through Before we dive into Copilot more deeply, let’s walk-through some more examples of using it in practice. In order to know whether that auto-generated write_text function actually works, we need a test. Let’s get Copilot to write that too! In this case, I just typed in the name of my test function, and Copilot filled in the docstring for me: After accepting that suggestion, Copilot got a bit confused and suggested a meaningless function containing many lines of near duplicate code: No problem – Copilot can show us other suggested options, by hitting Ctrl-Enter. The first listed actually looks pretty reasonable (except for an odd extra tab character in the first line): Here Copilot assumes there’s a function available called read_text, which doesn’t actually exist. But it’s easy enough for us to ask Copilot to write and test that for us too. I also asked Copilot to create a function for me that would “Tar and optionally compress directory dir to dest in bz2, xz, or gzip format”, which resulted in: I also had Copilot create a test using the same basic approach as above, and it wrote: That test doesn’t actually pass, since getnames in the last line includes the parent directory, but it’s an easy enough fix from there. Copilot even cleverly decided to use the write_text function I created earlier, which is something I wasn’t expecting. You can even use Copilot to write prose. I’m writing this blog post in vscode right now, and just clicked the “enable Copilot” button. After I typed the previous sentence, here’s what Copilot recommended as a completion: “I can now write my blog post in a single line of text, and Copilot will generate the rest of the post for me” Clearly Copilot has a rather inflated understanding of its own prose generation capabilities! Code problems The code Copilot writes is not very good code. For instance, consider the tar_dir function above. There’s a lot of duplicate code there, which means more code to maintain in the future, and more code for a reader to understand. In addition, the docstring said “optionally compress”, but the generated code always compresses. We could fix these issues by writing it this way instead: A bigger problem is that both write_text and tar_dir shouldn’t have been written at all, since the functionality for both is already provided by Python’s standard library (as pathlib’s write_text and shutil’s make_archive). The standard library versions are also better, with pathlib’s write_text doing additional error checking and supporting text encoding and error handling, and make_archive supporting zip files and any other archive format you register. Why Copilot writes bad code According to OpenAI’s paper, Codex only gives the correct answer 29% of the time. And, as we’ve seen, the code it writes is generally poorly refactored and fails to take full advantage of existing solutions (even when they’re in Python’s standard library). Copilot has read GitHub’s entire public code archive, consisting of tens of millions of repositories, including code from many of the world’s best programmers. Given this, why does Copilot write such crappy code? The reason is because of how language models work. They show how, on average, most people write. They don’t have any sense of what’s correct or what’s good. Most code on GitHub is (by software standards) pretty old, and (by definition) written by average programmers. Copilot spits out it’s best guess as to what those programmers might write if they were writing the same file that you are. OpenAI discuss this in their Codex paper: “As with other large language models trained on a next-token prediction objective, Codex will generate code that is as similar as possible to its training distribution. One consequence of this is that such models may do things that are unhelpful for the user” One important way that Copilot is worse than those average programmers is that it doesn’t even try to compile the code or check that it works or consider whether it actually does what the docs say it should do. Also, Codex was not trained on code created in the last year or two, so it’s entirely missing recent versions, libraries, and language features. For instance, prompting it to create fastai code results only in proposals that use the v1 API, rather than v2, which was released around a year ago. Complaining about the quality of the code written by Copilot feels a bit like coming across a talking dog, and complaining about its diction. The fact that it’s talking at all is impressive enough! Let’s be clear: The fact that Copilot (and Codex) writes reasonable-looking code is an amazing achievement. From a machine learning and language synthesis research point of view, it’s a big step forward. But we also need to be clear that reasonable-looking code that doesn’t work, doesn’t check edge cases, and uses obsolete methods, and is verbose and creates technical debt, can be a big problem. The problems with auto-generated code Code creation tools have been around nearly as long as code has been around. And they’ve been controversial throughout their history. Most time coding is not taken up in writing code, but with designing, debugging, and maintaining code. When code is automatically generated, it’s easy to end up with a lot more of it. That’s not necessarily a problem, if all you have to do to maintain or debug it is to modify the source which the code is auto-generated from, such as when using code template tools. Even then, things can get confusing when debugging, since the debugger and stack traces will generally point at the verbose generated code, not at the templated source. With Copilot, we don’t have any of these upsides. We nearly always have to modify the code that’s created, and if we want to change how it works, we can’t just go back and change the prompt. We have to debug the generated code directly. As a rule of thumb, less code means less to maintain and understand. Copilot’s code is verbose, and it’s so easy to generate lots of it that you’re likely to end up with a lot of code! Python has rich dynamic and meta-programming features that greatly reduce the need for code generation. I’ve heard a number of programmers say that they like that Copilot writes a lot of boilerplate for you. However, I almost never write any boilerplate anyway – any time in the past I found myself needing boilerplate, I used dynamic Python to refactor the boilerplate out so I didn’t need to write it or generate it any more. For instance, in ghapi I used dynamic Python to create a complete interface to GitHub’s entire API in a package that weighs in at just 40kB (by comparison, an equivalent packages in Go contains over 100,000 lines of code, most of it auto-generated). A very instructive example is what happened when I prompted Copilot with: With a very small amount of additional typing, it generated these 89 lines of code nearly entirely automatically! In one sense, that’s really impressive. It does indeed basically do what was requested – finetune a PyTorch model. However, it finetunes the model badly. This model will train slowly, and result in poor accuracy. Fine tuning a model correctly requires considering things like handling batchnorm layer statistics, finetuning the head of the model before the body, picking a learning rate correctly, using an appropriate annealing schedule, and so forth. Also, we probably want to use mixed precision training on any CUDA GPU created in the last few years, and are likely to want to add better augmentation methods such as MixUp. Fixing the code to add these would require many hundreds of lines more code, and a lot of expertise in deep learning, or the use of a higher level API such as fastai, which can finetune a PyTorch model in 4 lines of code, resulting in something with higher accuracy, faster, and that’s more extensible.) I’m not really sure what would be best for Copilot to do in this situation. I don’t think what it’s doing now is actually useful in practice, although it’s an impressive-looking demonstration. Parsing Python with a regular expression I asked the fast.ai community for examples of times where Copilot had been helpful in writing code for them. One person told me they found it invaluable when they were writing a regex to extract comments from a string containing python code (since they wanted to map each parameter name in a function to its comment). I decided to try this for myself. Here’s the prompt for Copilot: Here’s the generated code: This code doesn’t work, since the ^ character is incorrectly binding the match to the start of the line. It’s also not actually capturing the comment since it’s missing any capturing groups. (The second suggestion from Copilot correctly removes the ^ character, but still doesn’t include the capturing group.) These are minor issues, however, compared to the big problem with this code, which is that a regex can’t actually parse Python comments correctly. For instance, this would fail, since the # in tag_prefix:str="#" would be incorrectly parsed as the start of a comment: It turns out that it’s not possible to correctly parse Python code using regular expressions. But Copilot did what we asked: in the prompt comment we explicitly asked for a regex, and that’s what Copilot gave us. The community member who provided this example did exactly that when they wrote their code, since they assumed that a regex was the correct way to solve this problem. (Although even when I tried removing “regex to” from the prompt Copilot still prompted to use a regex solution.) The issue in this case isn’t really that Copilot is doing something wrong, it’s that what it’s designed to do might not be what’s in the best interest of the programer. GitHub markets Copilot as a “pair programmer”. But I’m not sure this really captures what it’s doing. A good pair programmer is someone who helps you question your assumptions, identify hidden problems, and see the bigger picture. Copilot doesn’t do any of those things – quite the opposite, it blindly assumes that your assumptions are appropriate and focuses entirely on churning out code based on the immediate context of where your text cursor is right now. Cognitive Bias and AI Pair Programming An AI pair programmer needs to work well with humans. And visa versa. However humans have two cognitive biases in particular that makes this difficult: automation bias and anchoring bias. Thanks to this pair of human foibles, we will all have a tendency to over-rely on Copilot’s proposals, even if we explicitly try not to do so. Wikipedia describes automation bias as: “the propensity for humans to favor suggestions from automated decision-making systems and to ignore contradictory information made without automation, even if it is correct” Automation bias is already recognized as a significant problem in healthcare, where computer decision support systems are used widely. There are also many examples in the judicial and policing communities, such as the city official in California who incorrectly described an IBM Watson tool used for predictive policing: “With machine learning, with automation, there’s a 99% success, so that robot is—will be—99% accurate in telling us what is going to happen next”, leading the city mayor to say “Well, why aren’t we mounting .50-calibers [out there]?” (He claimed he was he was “being facetious.”) This kind of inflated belief about the capabilities of AI can also impact users of Copilot, especially programmers who are not confident of their own capabilities. The Decision Lab describes anchoring bias as: “a cognitive bias that causes us to rely too heavily on the first piece of information we are given about a topic.” Anchoring bias has been very widely documented and is taught at many business schools as a useful tool, such as in negotiation and pricing. When we’re typing into vscode, Copilot jumps in and suggests code completions entirely automatically and without any interaction on our part. That often means that before we’ve really had a chance to think about where we’re heading, Copilot has already plotted a path for us. Not only is this then the “first piece of information” we’re getting, but it’s also an example of “suggestions from automated decision making systems” – we’re getting a double-hit of cognitive biases to overcome! And it’s not just happening once, but every time we write just a few more words in our text editor. Unfortunately, one of the things we know about cognitive biases is that just being aware of them isn’t enough to avoid being fooled by them. So this isn’t something GitHub can fix just through careful presentation of Copilot suggestions and user education. Stack Overflow, Google, and API Usage Examples Generally if a programmer doesn’t know how to do something, and isn’t using Copilot, they’ll Google it. For instance, the coder we discussed earlier who wanted to find parameters and comments in a string containing code might search for something like: “python extract parameter list from code regex”. The second result to this search is a Stack Overflow post with an accepted answer that correctly said it can’t be done with Python regular expressions. Instead, the answer suggested using a parser such as pyparsing. I then tried searching for “pyparsing python comments” and found that this module solves our exact problem. I also tried searching for “*extract comments from python file”, which gave a first result showing how to solve the problem using the Python standard library’s tokenize module. In this case, the requester introduced their problem by saying “I’m trying to write a program to extract comments in code that user enters. I tried to use regex, but found it difficult to write.” Sounds familiar! This took me a couple of minutes longer that finding a prompt for Copilot that gave an answer, but it resulted in me learning far more about the problem and the possible space of solutions. The Stack Overflow discussions helped me understand the challenges of dealing with quoted strings in Python, and also explained the limitations of Python’s regular expression engine. In this case, I felt like the Copilot approach would be worse for both experienced and beginner programmers. Experienced programmers would need to spend time studying the various options proposed, recognize that they don’t correctly solve the problem, and then would have to search online for solutions anyway. Beginner programmers would likely feel like they’ve solved the problem, wouldn’t actually learn what they need to understand about limitations and capabilities of regular expressions, and would end up with broken code without even realizing it. In addition to CoPilot, Microsoft, the owners of GitHub, have created a different but related product called “API Usage Examples”. Here’s an example taken directly from their web-site: This tool looks for examples online of people using the API or library that you’re working with, and will provide examples of real code showing how it’s used, along with links to the source of the example. This is an interesting approach that’s somewhere between Stack Overflow (but misses the valuable discussions) and Copilot (but doesn’t provide proposals customized to your particular code context). The crucial extra piece here is that it links to the source. That means that the coder can actually see the full context of how other people are using that feature. The best ways to get better at coding are to read code and to write code. Helping coders find relevant code to read looks to be an excellent approach to both solving people’s problems whilst also helping them improve their skills. Whether Microsoft’s API Usage Examples feature turns out the be great will really depend on their ability to rank code by quality, and show the best examples of usage. According to the product manager (on Twitter) this is something they’re currently working on. Conclusions I still don’t know the answer to the question in the title of this post, “Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?” It could be a blessing to some, and a curse to others. For those for whom it’s a curse, they may not find that out for years, because the curse would be that they’re learning less, learning slower, increasing technical debt, and introducing subtle bugs – are all things that you might well not notice, particularly for newer developers. Copilot might be more useful for languages that are high on boilerplate, and have limited meta-programming functionality, such as Go. (A lot of people today use templated code generation with Go for this reason.) Another area that it may be particularly suited to is experienced programmers working in unfamiliar languages, since it can help get the basic syntax right and point to library functions and common idioms. The thing to remember is that Copilot is an early preview of a very new technology that’s going to get better and better. There will be many competitors popping up in the coming months and years, and GitHub will no doubt release new and better versions of their own tool. To see real improvements in program synthesis, we’ll need to go beyond just language models, to a more holistic solution that incorporates best practices around human-computer interaction, software engineering, testing, and many other disciplines. Currently, Copilot feels like a product designed and implemented by machine learning researchers, rather than a complete solution incorporating all needed domain expertise. I’m sure that will change. |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson#cite_note-30] | [TOKENS: 3525] |
Contents Markus Persson Markus Alexej Persson (/ˈpɪərsən/ ⓘ PEER-sən, Swedish: [ˈmǎrːkɵs ˈpæ̌ːʂɔn] ⓘ; born 1 June 1979), known by the pseudonym Notch, is a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He is the creator of Minecraft, the best-selling video game in history. He founded the video game development company Mojang Studios in 2009. Persson began developing video games at an early age. His commercial success began after he published an early version of Minecraft in 2009. Prior to the game's official retail release in 2011, it had sold over four million copies. After this point Persson stood down as the lead designer and transferred his creative authority to Jens Bergensten. In September 2014 Persson announced his intention to leave Mojang, and in November of that year the company was sold to Microsoft reportedly for US$2.5 billion, which made him a billionaire. Since 2016 several of Persson's posts on Twitter regarding feminism, race, and transgender rights have caused public controversies. He has been described as "an increasingly polarizing figure, tweeting offensive statements regarding race, the LGBTQ community, gender, and other topics." In an effort to distance itself from Persson, Microsoft removed mentions of his name from Minecraft (excluding one instance in the game's end credits) and did not invite him to the game's tenth anniversary celebration. In 2015 he co-founded a separate game studio called Rubberbrain, which was relaunched in 2024 as Bitshift Entertainment. Early life Markus Alexej Persson was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to a Finnish mother, Ritva, and a Swedish father, Birger, on 1 June 1979. He has one sister. He grew up in Edsbyn until he was seven years old, when his family moved back to Stockholm. In Edsbyn, Persson's father worked for the railroad, and his mother was a nurse. He spent much time outdoors in Edsbyn, exploring the woods with his friends. When Persson was about seven years old, his parents divorced, and he and his sister lived with their mother. His father moved to a cabin in the countryside. Persson said in an interview that they experienced food insecurity around once a month. Persson lost contact with his father for several years after the divorce. According to Persson, his father suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and medication abuse, and went to jail for robberies. While his father had somewhat recovered during Persson's early life, his father relapsed, contributing to the divorce. His sister also experimented with drugs and ran away from home. He had gained interest in video games at an early age. His father was "a really big nerd", who built his own modem and taught Persson to use the family's Commodore 128. On it, Persson played bootleg games and loaded in various type-in programs from computer magazines with the help of his sister. The first game he purchased with his own money was The Bard's Tale. He began programming on his father's Commodore 128 home computer at the age of seven. He produced his first game at the age of eight, a text-based adventure game. By 1994 Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18. Persson, although introverted, was well-liked by his peers, but after entering secondary school was a "loner" and reportedly had only one friend. He spent most of his spare time with games and programming at home. He managed to reverse-engineer the Doom engine, which he continued to take great pride in as of 2014[update]. He never finished high school, but was reportedly a good student. Career Persson started his career working as a web designer. He later found employment at Game Federation, where he met Rolf Jansson. The pair worked in their spare time to build the 2006 video game Wurm Online. The game was released through a new entity, "Mojang Specifications AB". Persson left the project in late 2007. As Persson wanted to reuse the name "Mojang", Jansson agreed to rename the company to Onetoofree AB. Between 2004 and 2009 Persson worked as a game developer for Midasplayer (later known as King). There, he worked as a programmer, mostly building browser games made in Flash. He later worked as a programmer for jAlbum. Prior to creating Minecraft, Persson developed multiple, small games. He also entered a number of game design competitions and participated in discussions on the TIGSource forums, a web forum for independent game developers. One of Persson's more notable personal projects was called RubyDung, an isometric three-dimensional base-building game like RollerCoaster Tycoon and Dwarf Fortress. While working on RubyDung, Persson experimented with a first-person view mode similar to that found in Dungeon Keeper. However, he felt the graphics were too pixelated and omitted this mode. In 2009 Persson found inspiration in Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game. Infiniminer heavily influenced his future work on RubyDung, and was behind Persson's reasoning for returning the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals to the game. RubyDung is the earliest known Minecraft prototype created by Persson. On 17 May 2009 Persson released the original edition (later called "Classic version") of Minecraft on the TIGSource forums. He regularly updated the game based on feedback from TIGSource users. Persson released several new versions of Minecraft throughout 2009 and 2010, going through several phases of development including Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev. On 30 June 2010 Persson released the game's Alpha version. While working on the pre-Alpha version of Minecraft, Persson continued working at jAlbum. In 2010, after the release and subsequent success of Minecraft's Alpha version, Persson moved from a full-time role to a part-time role at jAlbum. He left jAlbum later that same year. In September 2010 Persson travelled to Valve Corporation's headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, United States, where he took part in a programming exercise and met Gabe Newell. Persson was subsequently offered a job at Valve, which he turned down in order to continue work on Minecraft. On 20 December 2010 Minecraft moved into its beta phase and began expanding to other platforms, including mobile. In January 2011 Minecraft reached one million registered accounts. Six months afterwards, it reached ten million. The game has sold over four million copies by 7 November 2011. Mojang held the first Minecon from 18 to 19 November 2011 to celebrate its full release, and subsequently made it an annual event. Following this, on 11 December 2011, Persson transferred creative control of Minecraft to Jens Bergensten and began working on another game title, 0x10c, although he reportedly abandoned the project around 2013. In 2013 Mojang recorded revenues of $330 million and profits of $129 million. Persson has stated that, due to the intense media attention and public pressure, he became exhausted with running Minecraft and Mojang. In a September 2014 blog post he shared his realization that he "didn't have the connection to my fans I thought I had", that he had "become a symbol", and that he did not wish to be responsible for Mojang's increasingly large operation. In June 2014 Persson tweeted "Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig", reportedly partly as a joke. Persson controlled a 71% stake in Mojang at the time. The offer attracted significant interest from Activision Blizzard, EA, and Microsoft. Forbes later reported that Microsoft wanted to purchase the game as a "tax dodge" to turn their taxable excess liquid cash into other assets. In September 2014 Microsoft agreed to purchase Mojang for $2.5 billion, making Persson a billionaire. He then left the company after the deal was finalised in November. Since leaving Mojang, Persson has worked on several small projects. On 23 June 2014 he founded a company with Porsér called Rubberbrain AB; the company had no games by 2021, despite spending SEK 60 million. The company was relaunched as Bitshift Entertainment, LLC on 28 March 2024. Persson expressed interest in creating a new video game studio in 2020, and in developing virtual reality games. He has also since created a series of narrative-driven immersive events called ".party()", which uses extensive visual effects and has been hosted in multiple cities. At the beginning of 2025 Persson decided to create a spiritual successor to Minecraft, referred to as "Minecraft 2", in response to the results of a poll on X. However, after speaking to his team, he shortly went against this in favour of developing the other choice on his Twitter poll, a roguelike titled Levers and Chests. Games Persson's most popular creation is the survival sandbox game Minecraft, which was first publicly available on 17 May 2009 and fully released on 18 November 2011. Persson left his job as a game developer to work on Minecraft full-time until completion. In early 2011, Mojang AB sold the one millionth copy of the game, several months later their second, and several more their third. Mojang hired several new staff members for the Minecraft team, while Persson passed the lead developer role to Jens Bergensten. He stopped working on Minecraft after a deal with Microsoft to sell Mojang for $2.5 billion. This brought his net worth to US$1.5 billion. Persson and Jakob Porsér came up with the idea for Scrolls including elements from board games and collectible card games. Persson noted that he will not be actively involved in development of the game and that Porsér will be developing it. Persson revealed on his Tumblr blog on 5 August 2011 that he was being sued by a Swedish law firm representing Bethesda Softworks over the trademarked name of Scrolls, claiming that it conflicted with their The Elder Scrolls series of games. On 17 August 2011 Persson challenged Bethesda to a Quake 3 tournament to decide the outcome of the naming dispute. On 27 September 2011 Persson confirmed that the lawsuit was going to court. ZeniMax Media, owner of Bethesda Softworks, announced the lawsuit's settlement in March 2012. The settlement allowed Mojang to continue using the Scrolls trademark. In 2018, Scrolls was made available free of charge and renamed to Caller's Bane. Cliffhorse is a humorous game programmed in two hours using the Unity game engine and free assets. The game took inspiration from Skyrim's physics engine, "the more embarrassing minimum-effort Greenlight games", Goat Simulator, and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. The game was released to Microsoft Windows systems as an early access and honourware game on the first day of E3 2014, instructing users to donate Dogecoin to "buy" the game before downloading it. The game accumulated over 280,000 dogecoins. Following the end to his involvement with Minecraft, Persson began pre-production of an alternate reality space game set in the distant future in March 2012. On April Fools' Day Mojang launched a satirical website for Mars Effect (parody of Mass Effect), citing the lawsuit with Bethesda as an inspiration. However, the gameplay elements remained true and on 4 April, Mojang revealed 0x10c (pronounced "Ten to the C") as a space sandbox title. Persson officially halted game production in August 2013. However, C418, the composer of the game's soundtrack (as well as that of Minecraft), released an album of the work he had made for the game. In 2013, Persson made a free game called Shambles in the Unity game engine. Persson has also participated in several Ludum Dare 48-hour game making competitions. Personal life In 2011 Persson married Elin Zetterstrand, whom he had dated for four years before. Zetterstrand was a former moderator on the Minecraft forums. They had a daughter together, but by mid-2012, he began to see little of her. On 15 August 2012 he announced that he and his wife had filed for divorce. The divorce was finalised later that year. On 14 December 2011 Persson's father committed suicide with a handgun after drinking heavily. In an interview with The New Yorker, Persson said of his father: When I decided I wanted to quit my day job and work on my own games, he was the only person who supported my decision. He was proud of me and made sure I knew. When I added the monsters to Minecraft, he told me that the dark caves became too scary for him. But I think that was the only true criticism I ever heard from him. Persson later admitted that he himself suffered from depression and various highs and lows in his mood. Persson has criticised the stance of large game companies on piracy. He once stated that "piracy is not theft", viewing unauthorised downloads as potential future customers. Persson stated himself to be a member of the Pirate Party of Sweden in 2011. He is also a member of Mensa. He has donated to numerous charities, including Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Under his direction, Mojang spent a week developing Catacomb Snatch for the Humble Indie Bundle and raised US$458,248 for charity. He also donated $250,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2012. In 2011 he gave $3 million in dividends back to Mojang employees. According to Forbes, his net worth in 2023 was around $1.2 billion. In 2014 Persson was one of the biggest taxpayers in Sweden. Around 2014, he lived in a multi-level penthouse in Östermalm, Stockholm, an area he described as "where the rich people live". In December 2014 Persson purchased a home in Trousdale Estates, a neighbourhood in Beverly Hills, California, in the United States, for $70 million, a record sales price for Beverly Hills at the time. Persson reportedly outbid Beyoncé and Jay-Z for the property. Persson began receiving criticism for political and social opinions he expressed on social media as early as 2016. November 30, 2017 In 2017, he proposed a heterosexual pride holiday, and wrote that those who opposed the idea "deserve to be shot." After facing backlash, he deleted the tweets and rescinded his statements, writing, "So yeah, it's about pride of daring to express, not about pride of being who you are. I get it now." Later in the year, he wrote that feminism is a "social disease" and called the video game developer and feminist Zoë Quinn a "cunt", although he was generally critical of the GamerGate movement. He has described intersectional feminism as a "framework for bigotry" and the use of the word mansplaining as being sexist. Also in 2017, Persson tweeted that "It's okay to be white". Later that year, he stated that he believed in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. In 2019, he tweeted referencing QAnon, saying "Q is legit. Don't trust the media." Later in 2019, he tweeted in response to a pro-transgender internet meme that, "You are absolutely evil if you want to encourage delusion. What happened to not stigmatizing mental illness?" He then also promoted claims that people were fined for "using the wrong pronoun". However, after facing backlash, he tweeted a day afterwards that he had "no idea what [being trans is] like of course, but it's inspiring as hell when people open up and choose to actually be who they know themselves as. Not because it's a cool choice, because it's a big step. I gues [sic] that's actually cool nvm". Later that year, Microsoft removed two mentions of Persson's name in the "19w13a" snapshot of Minecraft and did not invite him to the 10-year anniversary celebration of the game. A spokesperson for Microsoft stated that his views "do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang". He is still mentioned in the End Poem ("a flat, infinite world created by a man called Markus").[citation needed] Awards References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World#cite_note-Britannica2-63] | [TOKENS: 5641] |
Contents World The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique, while others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some treat the world as one simple object, while others analyze the world as a complex made up of parts. In scientific cosmology, the world or universe is commonly defined as "the totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Theories of modality talk of possible worlds as complete and consistent ways how things could have been. Phenomenology, starting from the horizon of co-given objects present in the periphery of every experience, defines the world as the biggest horizon, or the "horizon of all horizons". In philosophy of mind, the world is contrasted with the mind as that which is represented by the mind. Theology conceptualizes the world in relation to God, for example, as God's creation, as identical to God, or as the two being interdependent. In religions, there is a tendency to downgrade the material or sensory world in favor of a spiritual world to be sought through religious practice. A comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it, as is found in religions, is known as a worldview. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world, while eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. In various contexts, the term "world" takes a more restricted meaning associated, for example, with the Earth and all life on it, with humanity as a whole, or with an international or intercontinental scope. In this sense, world history refers to the history of humanity as a whole, and world politics is the discipline of political science studying issues that transcend nations and continents. Other examples include terms such as "world religion", "world language", "world government", "world war", "world population", "world economy", or "world championship". Etymology The English word world comes from the Old English weorold. The Old English is a reflex of the Common Germanic *weraldiz, a compound of weraz 'man' and aldiz 'age', thus literally meaning roughly 'age of man'; this word led to Old Frisian warld, Old Saxon werold, Old Dutch werolt, Old High German weralt, and Old Norse verǫld. The corresponding word in Latin is mundus, literally 'clean, elegant', itself a loan translation of Greek cosmos 'orderly arrangement'. While the Germanic word thus reflects a mythological notion of a "domain of Man" (compare Midgard), presumably as opposed to the divine sphere on the one hand and the chthonic sphere of the underworld on the other, the Greco-Latin term expresses a notion of creation as an act of establishing order out of chaos. Conceptions Different fields often work with quite different conceptions of the essential features associated with the term "world". Some conceptions see the world as unique: there can be no more than one world. Others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some see worlds as complex things composed of many substances as their parts while others hold that worlds are simple in the sense that there is only one substance: the world as a whole. Some characterize worlds in terms of objective spacetime while others define them relative to the horizon present in each experience. These different characterizations are not always exclusive: it may be possible to combine some without leading to a contradiction. Most of them agree that worlds are unified totalities. Monism is a thesis about oneness: that only one thing exists in a certain sense. The denial of monism is pluralism, the thesis that, in a certain sense, more than one thing exists. There are many forms of monism and pluralism, but in relation to the world as a whole, two are of special interest: existence monism/pluralism and priority monism/pluralism. Existence monism states that the world is the only concrete object there is. This means that all the concrete "objects" we encounter in our daily lives, including apples, cars and ourselves, are not truly objects in a strict sense. Instead, they are just dependent aspects of the world-object. Such a world-object is simple in the sense that it does not have any genuine parts. For this reason, it has also been referred to as "blobject" since it lacks an internal structure like a blob. Priority monism allows that there are other concrete objects besides the world. But it holds that these objects do not have the most fundamental form of existence, that they somehow depend on the existence of the world. The corresponding forms of pluralism state that the world is complex in the sense that it is made up of concrete, independent objects. Scientific cosmology can be defined as the science of the universe as a whole. In it, the terms "universe" and "cosmos" are usually used as synonyms for the term "world". One common definition of the world/universe found in this field is as "[t]he totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Some definitions emphasize that there are two other aspects to the universe besides spacetime: forms of energy or matter, like stars and particles, and laws of nature. World-conceptions in this field differ both concerning their notion of spacetime and of the contents of spacetime. The theory of relativity plays a central role in modern cosmology and its conception of space and time. A difference from its predecessors is that it conceives space and time not as distinct dimensions but as a single four-dimensional manifold called spacetime. This can be seen in special relativity in relation to the Minkowski metric, which includes both spatial and temporal components in its definition of distance. General relativity goes one step further by integrating the concept of mass into the concept of spacetime as its curvature. Quantum cosmology uses a classical notion of spacetime and conceives the whole world as one big wave function expressing the probability of finding particles in a given location. The world-concept plays a role in many modern theories of modality, sometimes in the form of possible worlds. A possible world is a complete and consistent way how things could have been. The actual world is a possible world since the way things are is a way things could have been. There are many other ways things could have been besides how they actually are. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US election, but she could have won. So there is a possible world in which she did. There is a vast number of possible worlds, one corresponding to each such difference, no matter how small or big, as long as no outright contradictions are introduced this way. Possible worlds are often conceived as abstract objects, for example, in terms of non-obtaining states of affairs or as maximally consistent sets of propositions. On such a view, they can even be seen as belonging to the actual world. Another way to conceive possible worlds, made famous by David Lewis, is as concrete entities. On this conception, there is no important difference between the actual world and possible worlds: both are conceived as concrete, inclusive and spatiotemporally connected. The only difference is that the actual world is the world we live in, while other possible worlds are not inhabited by us but by our counterparts. Everything within a world is spatiotemporally connected to everything else but the different worlds do not share a common spacetime: They are spatiotemporally isolated from each other. This is what makes them separate worlds. It has been suggested that, besides possible worlds, there are also impossible worlds. Possible worlds are ways things could have been, so impossible worlds are ways things could not have been. Such worlds involve a contradiction, like a world in which Hillary Clinton both won and lost the 2016 US election. Both possible and impossible worlds have in common the idea that they are totalities of their constituents. Within phenomenology, worlds are defined in terms of horizons of experiences. When we perceive an object, like a house, we do not just experience this object at the center of our attention but also various other objects surrounding it, given in the periphery. The term "horizon" refers to these co-given objects, which are usually experienced only in a vague, indeterminate manner. The perception of a house involves various horizons, corresponding to the neighborhood, the city, the country, the Earth, etc. In this context, the world is the biggest horizon or the "horizon of all horizons". It is common among phenomenologists to understand the world not just as a spatiotemporal collection of objects but as additionally incorporating various other relations between these objects. These relations include, for example, indication-relations that help us anticipate one object given the appearances of another object and means-end-relations or functional involvements relevant for practical concerns. In philosophy of mind, the term "world" is commonly used in contrast to the term "mind" as that which is represented by the mind. This is sometimes expressed by stating that there is a gap between mind and world and that this gap needs to be overcome for representation to be successful. One problem in philosophy of mind is to explain how the mind is able to bridge this gap and to enter into genuine mind-world-relations, for example, in the form of perception, knowledge or action. This is necessary for the world to be able to rationally constrain the activity of the mind. According to a realist position, the world is something distinct and independent from the mind. Idealists conceive of the world as partially or fully determined by the mind. Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism, for example, posits that the spatiotemporal structure of the world is imposed by the mind on reality but lacks independent existence otherwise. A more radical idealist conception of the world can be found in Berkeley's subjective idealism, which holds that the world as a whole, including all everyday objects like tables, cats, trees and ourselves, "consists of nothing but minds and ideas". Different theological positions hold different conceptions of the world based on its relation to God. Classical theism states that God is wholly distinct from the world. But the world depends for its existence on God, both because God created the world and because He maintains or conserves it. This is sometimes understood in analogy to how humans create and conserve ideas in their imagination, with the difference being that the divine mind is vastly more powerful. On such a view, God has absolute, ultimate reality in contrast to the lower ontological status ascribed to the world. God's involvement in the world is often understood along the lines of a personal, benevolent God who looks after and guides His creation. Deists agree with theists that God created the world but deny any subsequent, personal involvement in it. Pantheists reject the separation between God and world. Instead, they claim that the two are identical. This means that there is nothing to the world that does not belong to God and that there is nothing to God beyond what is found in the world. Panentheism constitutes a middle ground between theism and pantheism. Against theism, it holds that God and the world are interrelated and depend on each other. Against pantheism, it holds that there is no outright identity between the two. History of philosophy In philosophy, the term world has several possible meanings. In some contexts, it refers to everything that makes up reality or the physical universe. In others, it can mean have a specific ontological sense (see world disclosure). While clarifying the concept of world has arguably always been among the basic tasks of Western philosophy, this theme appears to have been raised explicitly only at the start of the twentieth century, Plato is well known for his theory of forms, which posits the existence of two different worlds: the sensible world and the intelligible world. The sensible world is the world we live in, filled with changing physical things we can see, touch and interact with. The intelligible world is the world of invisible, eternal, changeless forms like goodness, beauty, unity and sameness. Plato ascribes a lower ontological status to the sensible world, which only imitates the world of forms. This is due to the fact that physical things exist only to the extent that they participate in the forms that characterize them, while the forms themselves have an independent manner of existence. In this sense, the sensible world is a mere replication of the perfect exemplars found in the world of forms: it never lives up to the original. In the allegory of the cave, Plato compares the physical things we are familiar with to mere shadows of the real things. But not knowing the difference, the prisoners in the cave mistake the shadows for the real things. Two definitions that were both put forward in the 1920s, however, suggest the range of available opinion. "The world is everything that is the case", wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1921. Martin Heidegger, meanwhile, argued that "the surrounding world is different for each of us, and notwithstanding that we move about in a common world". "World" is one of the key terms in Eugen Fink's philosophy. He thinks that there is a misguided tendency in western philosophy to understand the world as one enormously big thing containing all the small everyday things we are familiar with. He sees this view as a form of forgetfulness of the world and tries to oppose it by what he calls the "cosmological difference": the difference between the world and the inner-worldly things it contains. On his view, the world is the totality of the inner-worldly things that transcends them. It is itself groundless but it provides a ground for things. It therefore cannot be identified with a mere container. Instead, the world gives appearance to inner-worldly things, it provides them with a place, a beginning and an end. One difficulty in investigating the world is that we never encounter it since it is not just one more thing that appears to us. This is why Fink uses the notion of play or playing to elucidate the nature of the world. He sees play as a symbol of the world that is both part of it and that represents it. Play usually comes with a form of imaginary play-world involving various things relevant to the play. But just like the play is more than the imaginary realities appearing in it so the world is more than the actual things appearing in it. The concept of worlds plays a central role in Nelson Goodman's late philosophy. He argues that we need to posit different worlds in order to account for the fact that there are different incompatible truths found in reality. Two truths are incompatible if they ascribe incompatible properties to the same thing. This happens, for example, when we assert both that the earth moves and that the earth is at rest. These incompatible truths correspond to two different ways of describing the world: heliocentrism and geocentrism. Goodman terms such descriptions "world versions". He holds a correspondence theory of truth: a world version is true if it corresponds to a world. Incompatible true world versions correspond to different worlds. It is common for theories of modality to posit the existence of a plurality of possible worlds. But Goodman's theory is different since it posits a plurality not of possible but of actual worlds. Such a position is in danger of involving a contradiction: there cannot be a plurality of actual worlds if worlds are defined as maximally inclusive wholes. This danger may be avoided by interpreting Goodman's world-concept not as maximally inclusive wholes in the absolute sense but in relation to its corresponding world-version: a world contains all and only the entities that its world-version describes. Religion Mythological cosmologies depict the world as centered on an axis mundi and delimited by a boundary such as a world ocean, a world serpent or similar. Hinduism constitutes a family of religious-philosophical views. These views present perspectives on the nature and role of the world. Samkhya philosophy, for example, is a metaphysical dualism that understands reality as comprising 2 parts: purusha and prakriti. The term "purusha" stands for the individual conscious self that each of "us" possesses. Prakriti, on the other hand, is the 1 world inhabited by all these selves. Samkhya understands this world as a world of matter governed by the law of cause and effect. The term "matter" is understood in a sense in this tradition including physical and mental aspects. This is reflected in the doctrine of tattvas, according to which prakriti is made up of 23 principles or elements of reality. These principles include physical elements, like water or earth, and mental aspects, like intelligence or sense-impressions. The relation between purusha and prakriti is conceived as 1 of observation: purusha is the conscious self aware of the world of prakriti and does not causally interact with it. A conception of the world is present in Advaita Vedanta, the monist school among the Vedanta schools. Unlike the realist position defended in Samkhya philosophy, Advaita Vedanta sees the world of multiplicity as an illusion, referred to as Maya. This illusion includes impression of existing as separate experiencing selfs called Jivas. Instead, Advaita Vedanta teaches that on the most fundamental level of reality, referred to as Brahman, there exists no plurality or difference. All there is is 1 all-encompassing self: Atman. Ignorance is seen as the source of this illusion, which results in bondage to the world of mere appearances. Liberation is possible in the course of overcoming this illusion by acquiring the knowledge of Brahman, according to Advaita Vedanta. Contemptus mundi is the name given to the belief that the world, in all its vanity, is nothing more than a futile attempt to hide from God by stifling our desire for the good and the holy. This view has been characterised as a "pastoral of fear" by historian Jean Delumeau. "The world, the flesh, and the devil" is a traditional division of the sources of temptation. Orbis Catholicus is a Latin phrase meaning "Catholic world", per the expression Urbi et Orbi, and refers to that area of Christendom under papal supremacy. In Islam, the term "dunya" is used for the world. Its meaning is derived from the root word "dana", a term for "near". It is associated with the temporal, sensory world and earthly concerns, i.e. with this world in contrast to the spiritual world. Religious teachings warn of a tendency to seek happiness in this world and advise a more ascetic lifestyle concerned with the afterlife. Other strands in Islam recommend a balanced approach. In Mandaean cosmology, the world or earthly realm is known as Tibil. It is separated from the World of Light (alma d-nhūra) above and the World of Darkness (alma d-hšuka) below by aether (ayar). Related terms and problems A worldview is a comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it. As a representation, it is a subjective perspective of the world and thereby different from the world it represents. All higher animals need to represent their environment in some way in order to navigate it. But it has been argued that only humans possess a representation encompassing enough to merit the term "worldview". Philosophers of worldviews commonly hold that the understanding of any object depends on a worldview constituting the background on which this understanding can take place. This may affect not just our intellectual understanding of the object in question but the experience of it in general. It is therefore impossible to assess one's worldview from a neutral perspective since this assessment already presupposes the worldview as its background. Some hold that each worldview is based on a single hypothesis that promises to solve all the problems of our existence we may encounter. On this interpretation, the term is closely associated to the worldviews given by different religions. Worldviews offer orientation not just in theoretical matters but also in practical matters. For this reason, they usually include answers to the question of the meaning of life and other evaluative components about what matters and how we should act. A worldview can be unique to one individual but worldviews are usually shared by many people within a certain culture or religion. The idea that there exist many different worlds is found in various fields. For example, theories of modality talk about a plurality of possible worlds and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics carries this reference even in its name. Talk of different worlds is also common in everyday language, for example, with reference to the world of music, the world of business, the world of football, the world of experience or the Asian world. But at the same time, worlds are usually defined as all-inclusive totalities. This seems to contradict the very idea of a plurality of worlds since if a world is total and all-inclusive then it cannot have anything outside itself. Understood this way, a world can neither have other worlds besides itself or be part of something bigger. One way to resolve this paradox while holding onto the notion of a plurality of worlds is to restrict the sense in which worlds are totalities. On this view, worlds are not totalities in an absolute sense. This might be even understood in the sense that, strictly speaking, there are no worlds at all. Another approach understands worlds in a schematic sense: as context-dependent expressions that stand for the current domain of discourse. So in the expression "Around the World in Eighty Days", the term "world" refers to the earth while in the colonial expression "the New World" it refers to the landmass of North and South America. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world. This includes both scientific cosmogony and creation myths found in various religions. The dominant theory in scientific cosmogony is the Big Bang theory, according to which both space, time and matter have their origin in one initial singularity occurring about 13.8 billion years ago. This singularity was followed by an expansion that allowed the universe to sufficiently cool down for the formation of subatomic particles and later atoms. These initial elements formed giant clouds, which would then coalesce into stars and galaxies. Non-scientific creation myths are found in many cultures and are often enacted in rituals expressing their symbolic meaning. They can be categorized concerning their contents. Types often found include creation from nothing, from chaos or from a cosmic egg. Eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. It is traditionally associated with religion, specifically with the Abrahamic religions. In this form, it may include teachings both of the end of each individual human life and of the end of the world as a whole. But it has been applied to other fields as well, for example, in the form of physical eschatology, which includes scientifically based speculations about the far future of the universe. According to some models, there will be a Big Crunch in which the whole universe collapses back into a singularity, possibly resulting in a second Big Bang afterward. But current astronomical evidence seems to suggest that our universe will continue to expand indefinitely. World history studies the world from a historical perspective. Unlike other approaches to history, it employs a global viewpoint. It deals less with individual nations and civilizations, which it usually approaches at a high level of abstraction. Instead, it concentrates on wider regions and zones of interaction, often interested in how people, goods and ideas move from one region to another. It includes comparisons of different societies and civilizations as well as considering wide-ranging developments with a long-term global impact like the process of industrialization. Contemporary world history is dominated by three main research paradigms determining the periodization into different epochs. One is based on productive relations between humans and nature. The two most important changes in history in this respect were the introduction of agriculture and husbandry concerning the production of food, which started around 10,000 to 8,000 BCE and is sometimes termed the Neolithic Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, which started around 1760 CE and involved the transition from manual to industrial manufacturing. Another paradigm, focusing on culture and religion instead, is based on Karl Jaspers' theories about the Axial Age, a time in which various new forms of religious and philosophical thoughts appeared in several separate parts of the world around the time between 800 and 200 BCE. A third periodization is based on the relations between civilizations and societies. According to this paradigm, history can be divided into three periods in relation to the dominant region in the world: Middle Eastern dominance before 500 BCE, Eurasian cultural balance until 1500 CE and Western dominance since 1500 CE. Big History employs an even wider framework than world history by putting human history into the context of the history of the universe as a whole. It starts with the Big Bang and traces the formation of galaxies, the Solar System, the Earth, its geological eras, the evolution of life and humans until the present day. World politics, also referred to as global politics or international relations, is the discipline of political science studying issues of interest to the world that transcend nations and continents. It aims to explain complex patterns found in the social world that are often related to the pursuit of power, order and justice, usually in the context of globalization. It focuses not just on the relations between nation-states but also considers other transnational actors, like multinational corporations, terrorist groups, or non-governmental organizations. For example, it tries to explain events such as the September 11 attacks, the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis. Various theories have been proposed in order to deal with the complexity involved in formulating such explanations. These theories are sometimes divided into realism, liberalism and constructivism. Realists see nation-states as the main actors in world politics. They constitute an anarchical international system without any overarching power to control their behavior. They are seen as sovereign agents that, determined by human nature, act according to their national self-interest. Military force may play an important role in the ensuing struggle for power between states, but diplomacy and cooperation are also key mechanisms for nations to achieve their goals. Liberalists acknowledge the importance of states but they also emphasize the role of transnational actors, like the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. They see humans as perfectible and stress the role of democracy in this process. The emergent order in world politics, on this perspective, is more complex than a mere balance of power since more different agents and interests are involved in its production. Constructivism ascribes more importance to the agency of individual humans than realism and liberalism. It understands the social world as a construction of the people living in it. This leads to an emphasis on the possibility of change. If the international system is an anarchy of nation-states, as the realists hold, then this is only so because we made it this way and may change since this is not prefigured by human nature, according to the constructivists. See also References External links Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania |
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Contents AI-complete In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), tasks that are hypothesized to require artificial general intelligence to solve are informally known as AI-complete or AI-hard. Calling a problem AI-complete reflects the belief that it cannot be solved by a simple specific algorithm. Prior to 2013, problems supposed to be AI-complete included computer vision, natural language understanding, and dealing with unexpected circumstances while solving any real-world problem. AI-complete tasks were notably considered useful for distinguishing humans from automated agents, as CAPTCHAs aim to do. History The term was coined by Fanya Montalvo by analogy with NP-complete and NP-hard in complexity theory, which formally describes the most famous class of difficult problems. Early uses of the term are in Erik Mueller's 1987 PhD dissertation and in Eric Raymond's 1991 Jargon File. Expert systems, that were popular in the 1980s, were able to solve very simple and/or restricted versions of AI-complete problems, but never in their full generality. When AI researchers attempted to "scale up" their systems to handle more complicated, real-world situations, the programs tended to become excessively brittle without commonsense knowledge or a rudimentary understanding of the situation: they would fail as unexpected circumstances outside of its original problem context would begin to appear. When human beings are dealing with new situations in the world, they are helped by their awareness of the general context: they know what the things around them are, why they are there, what they are likely to do and so on. They can recognize unusual situations and adjust accordingly. Expert systems lacked this adaptability and were brittle when facing new situations. DeepMind published a work in May 2022 in which they trained a single model to do several things at the same time. The model, named Gato, can "play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens." Similarly, some tasks once considered to be AI-complete, like machine translation, are among the capabilities of large language models. AI-complete problems AI-complete problems have been hypothesized to include: Formalization Computational complexity theory deals with the relative computational difficulty of computable functions. By definition, it does not cover problems whose solution is unknown or has not been characterized formally. Since many AI problems have no formalization yet, conventional complexity theory does not enable a formal definition of AI-completeness. Research Roman Yampolskiy suggests that a problem C {\displaystyle C} is AI-Complete if it has two properties: On the other hand, a problem H {\displaystyle H} is AI-Hard if and only if there is an AI-Complete problem C {\displaystyle C} that is polynomial time Turing-reducible to H {\displaystyle H} . This also gives as a consequence the existence of AI-Easy problems, that are solvable in polynomial time by a deterministic Turing machine with an oracle for some problem. Yampolskiy has also hypothesized that the Turing Test is a defining feature of AI-completeness. Groppe and Jain classify problems which require artificial general intelligence to reach human-level machine performance as AI-complete, while only restricted versions of AI-complete problems can be solved by the current AI systems. For Šekrst, getting a polynomial solution to AI-complete problems would not necessarily be equal to solving the issue of artificial general intelligence, while emphasizing the lack of computational complexity research being the limiting factor towards achieving artificial general intelligence. For Kwee-Bintoro and Velez, solving AI-complete problems would have strong repercussions on society. See also References |
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Contents World The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique, while others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some treat the world as one simple object, while others analyze the world as a complex made up of parts. In scientific cosmology, the world or universe is commonly defined as "the totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Theories of modality talk of possible worlds as complete and consistent ways how things could have been. Phenomenology, starting from the horizon of co-given objects present in the periphery of every experience, defines the world as the biggest horizon, or the "horizon of all horizons". In philosophy of mind, the world is contrasted with the mind as that which is represented by the mind. Theology conceptualizes the world in relation to God, for example, as God's creation, as identical to God, or as the two being interdependent. In religions, there is a tendency to downgrade the material or sensory world in favor of a spiritual world to be sought through religious practice. A comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it, as is found in religions, is known as a worldview. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world, while eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. In various contexts, the term "world" takes a more restricted meaning associated, for example, with the Earth and all life on it, with humanity as a whole, or with an international or intercontinental scope. In this sense, world history refers to the history of humanity as a whole, and world politics is the discipline of political science studying issues that transcend nations and continents. Other examples include terms such as "world religion", "world language", "world government", "world war", "world population", "world economy", or "world championship". Etymology The English word world comes from the Old English weorold. The Old English is a reflex of the Common Germanic *weraldiz, a compound of weraz 'man' and aldiz 'age', thus literally meaning roughly 'age of man'; this word led to Old Frisian warld, Old Saxon werold, Old Dutch werolt, Old High German weralt, and Old Norse verǫld. The corresponding word in Latin is mundus, literally 'clean, elegant', itself a loan translation of Greek cosmos 'orderly arrangement'. While the Germanic word thus reflects a mythological notion of a "domain of Man" (compare Midgard), presumably as opposed to the divine sphere on the one hand and the chthonic sphere of the underworld on the other, the Greco-Latin term expresses a notion of creation as an act of establishing order out of chaos. Conceptions Different fields often work with quite different conceptions of the essential features associated with the term "world". Some conceptions see the world as unique: there can be no more than one world. Others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some see worlds as complex things composed of many substances as their parts while others hold that worlds are simple in the sense that there is only one substance: the world as a whole. Some characterize worlds in terms of objective spacetime while others define them relative to the horizon present in each experience. These different characterizations are not always exclusive: it may be possible to combine some without leading to a contradiction. Most of them agree that worlds are unified totalities. Monism is a thesis about oneness: that only one thing exists in a certain sense. The denial of monism is pluralism, the thesis that, in a certain sense, more than one thing exists. There are many forms of monism and pluralism, but in relation to the world as a whole, two are of special interest: existence monism/pluralism and priority monism/pluralism. Existence monism states that the world is the only concrete object there is. This means that all the concrete "objects" we encounter in our daily lives, including apples, cars and ourselves, are not truly objects in a strict sense. Instead, they are just dependent aspects of the world-object. Such a world-object is simple in the sense that it does not have any genuine parts. For this reason, it has also been referred to as "blobject" since it lacks an internal structure like a blob. Priority monism allows that there are other concrete objects besides the world. But it holds that these objects do not have the most fundamental form of existence, that they somehow depend on the existence of the world. The corresponding forms of pluralism state that the world is complex in the sense that it is made up of concrete, independent objects. Scientific cosmology can be defined as the science of the universe as a whole. In it, the terms "universe" and "cosmos" are usually used as synonyms for the term "world". One common definition of the world/universe found in this field is as "[t]he totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". Some definitions emphasize that there are two other aspects to the universe besides spacetime: forms of energy or matter, like stars and particles, and laws of nature. World-conceptions in this field differ both concerning their notion of spacetime and of the contents of spacetime. The theory of relativity plays a central role in modern cosmology and its conception of space and time. A difference from its predecessors is that it conceives space and time not as distinct dimensions but as a single four-dimensional manifold called spacetime. This can be seen in special relativity in relation to the Minkowski metric, which includes both spatial and temporal components in its definition of distance. General relativity goes one step further by integrating the concept of mass into the concept of spacetime as its curvature. Quantum cosmology uses a classical notion of spacetime and conceives the whole world as one big wave function expressing the probability of finding particles in a given location. The world-concept plays a role in many modern theories of modality, sometimes in the form of possible worlds. A possible world is a complete and consistent way how things could have been. The actual world is a possible world since the way things are is a way things could have been. There are many other ways things could have been besides how they actually are. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US election, but she could have won. So there is a possible world in which she did. There is a vast number of possible worlds, one corresponding to each such difference, no matter how small or big, as long as no outright contradictions are introduced this way. Possible worlds are often conceived as abstract objects, for example, in terms of non-obtaining states of affairs or as maximally consistent sets of propositions. On such a view, they can even be seen as belonging to the actual world. Another way to conceive possible worlds, made famous by David Lewis, is as concrete entities. On this conception, there is no important difference between the actual world and possible worlds: both are conceived as concrete, inclusive and spatiotemporally connected. The only difference is that the actual world is the world we live in, while other possible worlds are not inhabited by us but by our counterparts. Everything within a world is spatiotemporally connected to everything else but the different worlds do not share a common spacetime: They are spatiotemporally isolated from each other. This is what makes them separate worlds. It has been suggested that, besides possible worlds, there are also impossible worlds. Possible worlds are ways things could have been, so impossible worlds are ways things could not have been. Such worlds involve a contradiction, like a world in which Hillary Clinton both won and lost the 2016 US election. Both possible and impossible worlds have in common the idea that they are totalities of their constituents. Within phenomenology, worlds are defined in terms of horizons of experiences. When we perceive an object, like a house, we do not just experience this object at the center of our attention but also various other objects surrounding it, given in the periphery. The term "horizon" refers to these co-given objects, which are usually experienced only in a vague, indeterminate manner. The perception of a house involves various horizons, corresponding to the neighborhood, the city, the country, the Earth, etc. In this context, the world is the biggest horizon or the "horizon of all horizons". It is common among phenomenologists to understand the world not just as a spatiotemporal collection of objects but as additionally incorporating various other relations between these objects. These relations include, for example, indication-relations that help us anticipate one object given the appearances of another object and means-end-relations or functional involvements relevant for practical concerns. In philosophy of mind, the term "world" is commonly used in contrast to the term "mind" as that which is represented by the mind. This is sometimes expressed by stating that there is a gap between mind and world and that this gap needs to be overcome for representation to be successful. One problem in philosophy of mind is to explain how the mind is able to bridge this gap and to enter into genuine mind-world-relations, for example, in the form of perception, knowledge or action. This is necessary for the world to be able to rationally constrain the activity of the mind. According to a realist position, the world is something distinct and independent from the mind. Idealists conceive of the world as partially or fully determined by the mind. Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism, for example, posits that the spatiotemporal structure of the world is imposed by the mind on reality but lacks independent existence otherwise. A more radical idealist conception of the world can be found in Berkeley's subjective idealism, which holds that the world as a whole, including all everyday objects like tables, cats, trees and ourselves, "consists of nothing but minds and ideas". Different theological positions hold different conceptions of the world based on its relation to God. Classical theism states that God is wholly distinct from the world. But the world depends for its existence on God, both because God created the world and because He maintains or conserves it. This is sometimes understood in analogy to how humans create and conserve ideas in their imagination, with the difference being that the divine mind is vastly more powerful. On such a view, God has absolute, ultimate reality in contrast to the lower ontological status ascribed to the world. God's involvement in the world is often understood along the lines of a personal, benevolent God who looks after and guides His creation. Deists agree with theists that God created the world but deny any subsequent, personal involvement in it. Pantheists reject the separation between God and world. Instead, they claim that the two are identical. This means that there is nothing to the world that does not belong to God and that there is nothing to God beyond what is found in the world. Panentheism constitutes a middle ground between theism and pantheism. Against theism, it holds that God and the world are interrelated and depend on each other. Against pantheism, it holds that there is no outright identity between the two. History of philosophy In philosophy, the term world has several possible meanings. In some contexts, it refers to everything that makes up reality or the physical universe. In others, it can mean have a specific ontological sense (see world disclosure). While clarifying the concept of world has arguably always been among the basic tasks of Western philosophy, this theme appears to have been raised explicitly only at the start of the twentieth century, Plato is well known for his theory of forms, which posits the existence of two different worlds: the sensible world and the intelligible world. The sensible world is the world we live in, filled with changing physical things we can see, touch and interact with. The intelligible world is the world of invisible, eternal, changeless forms like goodness, beauty, unity and sameness. Plato ascribes a lower ontological status to the sensible world, which only imitates the world of forms. This is due to the fact that physical things exist only to the extent that they participate in the forms that characterize them, while the forms themselves have an independent manner of existence. In this sense, the sensible world is a mere replication of the perfect exemplars found in the world of forms: it never lives up to the original. In the allegory of the cave, Plato compares the physical things we are familiar with to mere shadows of the real things. But not knowing the difference, the prisoners in the cave mistake the shadows for the real things. Two definitions that were both put forward in the 1920s, however, suggest the range of available opinion. "The world is everything that is the case", wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1921. Martin Heidegger, meanwhile, argued that "the surrounding world is different for each of us, and notwithstanding that we move about in a common world". "World" is one of the key terms in Eugen Fink's philosophy. He thinks that there is a misguided tendency in western philosophy to understand the world as one enormously big thing containing all the small everyday things we are familiar with. He sees this view as a form of forgetfulness of the world and tries to oppose it by what he calls the "cosmological difference": the difference between the world and the inner-worldly things it contains. On his view, the world is the totality of the inner-worldly things that transcends them. It is itself groundless but it provides a ground for things. It therefore cannot be identified with a mere container. Instead, the world gives appearance to inner-worldly things, it provides them with a place, a beginning and an end. One difficulty in investigating the world is that we never encounter it since it is not just one more thing that appears to us. This is why Fink uses the notion of play or playing to elucidate the nature of the world. He sees play as a symbol of the world that is both part of it and that represents it. Play usually comes with a form of imaginary play-world involving various things relevant to the play. But just like the play is more than the imaginary realities appearing in it so the world is more than the actual things appearing in it. The concept of worlds plays a central role in Nelson Goodman's late philosophy. He argues that we need to posit different worlds in order to account for the fact that there are different incompatible truths found in reality. Two truths are incompatible if they ascribe incompatible properties to the same thing. This happens, for example, when we assert both that the earth moves and that the earth is at rest. These incompatible truths correspond to two different ways of describing the world: heliocentrism and geocentrism. Goodman terms such descriptions "world versions". He holds a correspondence theory of truth: a world version is true if it corresponds to a world. Incompatible true world versions correspond to different worlds. It is common for theories of modality to posit the existence of a plurality of possible worlds. But Goodman's theory is different since it posits a plurality not of possible but of actual worlds. Such a position is in danger of involving a contradiction: there cannot be a plurality of actual worlds if worlds are defined as maximally inclusive wholes. This danger may be avoided by interpreting Goodman's world-concept not as maximally inclusive wholes in the absolute sense but in relation to its corresponding world-version: a world contains all and only the entities that its world-version describes. Religion Mythological cosmologies depict the world as centered on an axis mundi and delimited by a boundary such as a world ocean, a world serpent or similar. Hinduism constitutes a family of religious-philosophical views. These views present perspectives on the nature and role of the world. Samkhya philosophy, for example, is a metaphysical dualism that understands reality as comprising 2 parts: purusha and prakriti. The term "purusha" stands for the individual conscious self that each of "us" possesses. Prakriti, on the other hand, is the 1 world inhabited by all these selves. Samkhya understands this world as a world of matter governed by the law of cause and effect. The term "matter" is understood in a sense in this tradition including physical and mental aspects. This is reflected in the doctrine of tattvas, according to which prakriti is made up of 23 principles or elements of reality. These principles include physical elements, like water or earth, and mental aspects, like intelligence or sense-impressions. The relation between purusha and prakriti is conceived as 1 of observation: purusha is the conscious self aware of the world of prakriti and does not causally interact with it. A conception of the world is present in Advaita Vedanta, the monist school among the Vedanta schools. Unlike the realist position defended in Samkhya philosophy, Advaita Vedanta sees the world of multiplicity as an illusion, referred to as Maya. This illusion includes impression of existing as separate experiencing selfs called Jivas. Instead, Advaita Vedanta teaches that on the most fundamental level of reality, referred to as Brahman, there exists no plurality or difference. All there is is 1 all-encompassing self: Atman. Ignorance is seen as the source of this illusion, which results in bondage to the world of mere appearances. Liberation is possible in the course of overcoming this illusion by acquiring the knowledge of Brahman, according to Advaita Vedanta. Contemptus mundi is the name given to the belief that the world, in all its vanity, is nothing more than a futile attempt to hide from God by stifling our desire for the good and the holy. This view has been characterised as a "pastoral of fear" by historian Jean Delumeau. "The world, the flesh, and the devil" is a traditional division of the sources of temptation. Orbis Catholicus is a Latin phrase meaning "Catholic world", per the expression Urbi et Orbi, and refers to that area of Christendom under papal supremacy. In Islam, the term "dunya" is used for the world. Its meaning is derived from the root word "dana", a term for "near". It is associated with the temporal, sensory world and earthly concerns, i.e. with this world in contrast to the spiritual world. Religious teachings warn of a tendency to seek happiness in this world and advise a more ascetic lifestyle concerned with the afterlife. Other strands in Islam recommend a balanced approach. In Mandaean cosmology, the world or earthly realm is known as Tibil. It is separated from the World of Light (alma d-nhūra) above and the World of Darkness (alma d-hšuka) below by aether (ayar). Related terms and problems A worldview is a comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it. As a representation, it is a subjective perspective of the world and thereby different from the world it represents. All higher animals need to represent their environment in some way in order to navigate it. But it has been argued that only humans possess a representation encompassing enough to merit the term "worldview". Philosophers of worldviews commonly hold that the understanding of any object depends on a worldview constituting the background on which this understanding can take place. This may affect not just our intellectual understanding of the object in question but the experience of it in general. It is therefore impossible to assess one's worldview from a neutral perspective since this assessment already presupposes the worldview as its background. Some hold that each worldview is based on a single hypothesis that promises to solve all the problems of our existence we may encounter. On this interpretation, the term is closely associated to the worldviews given by different religions. Worldviews offer orientation not just in theoretical matters but also in practical matters. For this reason, they usually include answers to the question of the meaning of life and other evaluative components about what matters and how we should act. A worldview can be unique to one individual but worldviews are usually shared by many people within a certain culture or religion. The idea that there exist many different worlds is found in various fields. For example, theories of modality talk about a plurality of possible worlds and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics carries this reference even in its name. Talk of different worlds is also common in everyday language, for example, with reference to the world of music, the world of business, the world of football, the world of experience or the Asian world. But at the same time, worlds are usually defined as all-inclusive totalities. This seems to contradict the very idea of a plurality of worlds since if a world is total and all-inclusive then it cannot have anything outside itself. Understood this way, a world can neither have other worlds besides itself or be part of something bigger. One way to resolve this paradox while holding onto the notion of a plurality of worlds is to restrict the sense in which worlds are totalities. On this view, worlds are not totalities in an absolute sense. This might be even understood in the sense that, strictly speaking, there are no worlds at all. Another approach understands worlds in a schematic sense: as context-dependent expressions that stand for the current domain of discourse. So in the expression "Around the World in Eighty Days", the term "world" refers to the earth while in the colonial expression "the New World" it refers to the landmass of North and South America. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world. This includes both scientific cosmogony and creation myths found in various religions. The dominant theory in scientific cosmogony is the Big Bang theory, according to which both space, time and matter have their origin in one initial singularity occurring about 13.8 billion years ago. This singularity was followed by an expansion that allowed the universe to sufficiently cool down for the formation of subatomic particles and later atoms. These initial elements formed giant clouds, which would then coalesce into stars and galaxies. Non-scientific creation myths are found in many cultures and are often enacted in rituals expressing their symbolic meaning. They can be categorized concerning their contents. Types often found include creation from nothing, from chaos or from a cosmic egg. Eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or of the end of the world. It is traditionally associated with religion, specifically with the Abrahamic religions. In this form, it may include teachings both of the end of each individual human life and of the end of the world as a whole. But it has been applied to other fields as well, for example, in the form of physical eschatology, which includes scientifically based speculations about the far future of the universe. According to some models, there will be a Big Crunch in which the whole universe collapses back into a singularity, possibly resulting in a second Big Bang afterward. But current astronomical evidence seems to suggest that our universe will continue to expand indefinitely. World history studies the world from a historical perspective. Unlike other approaches to history, it employs a global viewpoint. It deals less with individual nations and civilizations, which it usually approaches at a high level of abstraction. Instead, it concentrates on wider regions and zones of interaction, often interested in how people, goods and ideas move from one region to another. It includes comparisons of different societies and civilizations as well as considering wide-ranging developments with a long-term global impact like the process of industrialization. Contemporary world history is dominated by three main research paradigms determining the periodization into different epochs. One is based on productive relations between humans and nature. The two most important changes in history in this respect were the introduction of agriculture and husbandry concerning the production of food, which started around 10,000 to 8,000 BCE and is sometimes termed the Neolithic Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, which started around 1760 CE and involved the transition from manual to industrial manufacturing. Another paradigm, focusing on culture and religion instead, is based on Karl Jaspers' theories about the Axial Age, a time in which various new forms of religious and philosophical thoughts appeared in several separate parts of the world around the time between 800 and 200 BCE. A third periodization is based on the relations between civilizations and societies. According to this paradigm, history can be divided into three periods in relation to the dominant region in the world: Middle Eastern dominance before 500 BCE, Eurasian cultural balance until 1500 CE and Western dominance since 1500 CE. Big History employs an even wider framework than world history by putting human history into the context of the history of the universe as a whole. It starts with the Big Bang and traces the formation of galaxies, the Solar System, the Earth, its geological eras, the evolution of life and humans until the present day. World politics, also referred to as global politics or international relations, is the discipline of political science studying issues of interest to the world that transcend nations and continents. It aims to explain complex patterns found in the social world that are often related to the pursuit of power, order and justice, usually in the context of globalization. It focuses not just on the relations between nation-states but also considers other transnational actors, like multinational corporations, terrorist groups, or non-governmental organizations. For example, it tries to explain events such as the September 11 attacks, the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis. Various theories have been proposed in order to deal with the complexity involved in formulating such explanations. These theories are sometimes divided into realism, liberalism and constructivism. Realists see nation-states as the main actors in world politics. They constitute an anarchical international system without any overarching power to control their behavior. They are seen as sovereign agents that, determined by human nature, act according to their national self-interest. Military force may play an important role in the ensuing struggle for power between states, but diplomacy and cooperation are also key mechanisms for nations to achieve their goals. Liberalists acknowledge the importance of states but they also emphasize the role of transnational actors, like the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. They see humans as perfectible and stress the role of democracy in this process. The emergent order in world politics, on this perspective, is more complex than a mere balance of power since more different agents and interests are involved in its production. Constructivism ascribes more importance to the agency of individual humans than realism and liberalism. It understands the social world as a construction of the people living in it. This leads to an emphasis on the possibility of change. If the international system is an anarchy of nation-states, as the realists hold, then this is only so because we made it this way and may change since this is not prefigured by human nature, according to the constructivists. See also References External links Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Afro-Eurasia Americas Eurasia Oceania |
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Contents Minecraft Minecraft is a sandbox game developed and published by Mojang Studios. Following its initial public alpha release in 2009, it was formally released in 2011 for personal computers. The game has since been ported to numerous platforms, including mobile devices and various video game consoles. In Minecraft, players explore a procedurally generated world with virtually infinite terrain made up of voxels (cubes). They can discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, build structures, fight hostile mobs, and cooperate with or compete against other players in multiplayer. The game's large community offers a wide variety of user-generated content, such as modifications, servers, player skins, texture packs, and custom maps, which add new game mechanics and possibilities. Originally created by Markus "Notch" Persson using the Java programming language, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten was handed control over the game's development following its full release. In 2014, Mojang and the Minecraft intellectual property were purchased by Microsoft for US$2.5 billion; Xbox Game Studios hold the publishing rights for the Bedrock Edition, the unified cross-platform version which evolved from the Pocket Edition codebase[i] and replaced the legacy console versions. Bedrock is updated concurrently with Mojang's original Java Edition, although with numerous, generally small, differences. Minecraft is the best-selling video game in history with over 350 million copies sold. It has received critical acclaim, winning several awards and being cited as one of the greatest video games of all time. Social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, and the annual Minecon conventions have played prominent roles in popularizing it. The wider Minecraft franchise includes several spin-off games, such as Minecraft: Story Mode, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft Legends. A film adaptation, titled A Minecraft Movie, was released in 2025 and became the second highest-grossing video game film of all time. Gameplay Minecraft is a 3D sandbox video game that has no required goals to accomplish, giving players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game. The game features an optional achievement system. Gameplay is in the first-person perspective by default, but players have the option of third-person perspectives. The game world is composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes, referred to as blocks—representing various materials, such as dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water, and lava. The core gameplay revolves around picking up and placing these objects. These blocks are arranged in a voxel grid, while players can move freely around the world. Players can break, or mine, blocks and then place them elsewhere, enabling them to build things. Very few blocks are affected by gravity, instead maintaining their voxel position in the air. Players can also craft a wide variety of items, such as armor, which mitigates damage from attacks; weapons (such as swords or bows and arrows), which allow monsters and animals to be killed more easily; and tools (such as pickaxes or shovels), which break certain types of blocks more quickly. Some items have multiple tiers depending on the material used to craft them, with higher-tier items being more effective and durable. They may also freely craft helpful blocks—such as furnaces which can cook food and smelt ores, and torches that produce light—or exchange items with villagers (NPC) through trading emeralds for different goods and vice versa. The game has an inventory system, allowing players to carry a limited number of items. The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, with one full cycle lasting for 20 real-time minutes. The game also contains a material called redstone, which can be used to make primitive mechanical devices, electrical circuits, and logic gates, allowing for the construction of many complex systems. New players are given a randomly selected default character skin out of nine possibilities, including Steve or Alex, but are able to create and upload their own skins. Players encounter various mobs (short for mobile entities) including animals, villagers, and hostile creatures. Passive mobs, such as cows, pigs, and chickens, spawn during the daytime and can be hunted for food and crafting materials, while hostile mobs—including large spiders, witches, skeletons, and zombies—spawn during nighttime or in dark places such as caves. Some hostile mobs, such as zombies and skeletons, burn under the sun if they have no headgear and are not standing in water. Other creatures unique to Minecraft include the creeper (an exploding creature that sneaks up on the player) and the enderman (a creature with the ability to teleport as well as pick up and place blocks). There are also variants of mobs that spawn in different conditions; for example, zombies have husk and drowned variants that spawn in deserts and oceans, respectively. The Minecraft environment is procedurally generated as players explore it using a map seed that is randomly chosen at the time of world creation (or manually specified by the player). Divided into biomes representing different environments with unique resources and structures, worlds are designed to be effectively infinite in traditional gameplay, though technical limits on the player have existed throughout development, both intentionally and not. Implementation of horizontally infinite generation initially resulted in a glitch termed the "Far Lands" at over 12 million blocks away from the world center, where terrain generated as wall-like, fissured patterns. The Far Lands and associated glitches were considered the effective edge of the world until they were resolved, with the current horizontal limit instead being a special impassable barrier called the world border, located 30 million blocks away. Vertical space is comparatively limited, with an unbreakable bedrock layer at the bottom and a building limit several hundred blocks into the sky. Minecraft features three independent dimensions accessible through portals and providing alternate game environments. The Overworld is the starting dimension and represents the real world, with a terrestrial surface setting including plains, mountains, forests, oceans, caves, and small sources of lava. The Nether is a hell-like underworld dimension accessed via an obsidian portal and composed mainly of lava. Mobs that populate the Nether include shrieking, fireball-shooting ghasts, alongside anthropomorphic pigs called piglins and their zombified counterparts. Piglins in particular have a bartering system, where players can give them gold ingots and receive items in return. Structures known as Nether Fortresses generate in the Nether, containing mobs such as wither skeletons and blazes, which can drop blaze rods needed to access the End dimension. The player can also choose to build an optional boss mob known as the Wither, using skulls obtained from wither skeletons and soul sand. The End can be reached through an end portal, consisting of twelve end portal frames. End portals are found in underground structures in the Overworld known as strongholds. To find strongholds, players must craft eyes of ender using an ender pearl and blaze powder. Eyes of ender can then be thrown, traveling in the direction of the stronghold. Once the player reaches the stronghold, they can place eyes of ender into each portal frame to activate the end portal. The dimension consists of islands floating in a dark, bottomless void. A boss enemy called the Ender Dragon guards the largest, central island. Killing the dragon opens access to an exit portal, which, when entered, cues the game's ending credits and the End Poem, a roughly 1,500-word work written by Irish novelist Julian Gough, which takes about nine minutes to scroll past, is the game's only narrative text, and the only text of significant length directed at the player.: 10–12 At the conclusion of the credits, the player is teleported back to their respawn point and may continue the game indefinitely. In Survival mode, players have to gather natural resources such as wood and stone found in the environment in order to craft certain blocks and items. Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn in darker areas outside a certain radius of the character, requiring players to build a shelter in order to survive at night. The mode also has a health bar which is depleted by attacks from mobs, falls, drowning, falling into lava, suffocation, starvation, and other events. Players also have a hunger bar, which must be periodically refilled by eating food in-game unless the player is playing on peaceful difficulty. If the hunger bar is empty, the player starves. Health replenishes when players have a full hunger bar or continuously on peaceful. Upon losing all health, players die. The items in the players' inventories are dropped unless the game is reconfigured not to do so. Players then re-spawn at their spawn point, which by default is where players first spawn in the game and can be changed by sleeping in a bed or using a respawn anchor. Dropped items can be recovered if players can reach them before they despawn after 5 minutes. Players may acquire experience points (commonly referred to as "xp" or "exp") by killing mobs and other players, mining, smelting ores, animal breeding, and cooking food. Experience can then be spent on enchanting tools, armor and weapons. Enchanted items are generally more powerful, last longer, or have other special effects. The game features two more game modes based on Survival, known as Hardcore mode and Adventure mode. Hardcore mode plays identically to Survival mode, but with the game's difficulty setting locked to "Hard" and with permadeath, forcing them to delete the world or explore it as a spectator after dying. Adventure mode was added to the game in a post-launch update, and prevents the player from directly modifying the game's world. It was designed primarily for use in custom maps, allowing map designers to let players experience it as intended. In Creative mode, players have access to an infinite number of all resources and items in the game through the inventory menu and can place or mine them instantly. Players can toggle the ability to fly freely around the game world at will, and their characters usually do not take any damage nor are affected by hunger. The game mode helps players focus on building and creating projects of any size without disturbance. Multiplayer in Minecraft enables multiple players to interact and communicate with each other on a single world. It is available through direct game-to-game multiplayer, local area network (LAN) play, local split screen (console-only), and servers (player-hosted and business-hosted). Players can run their own server by making a realm, using a host provider, hosting one themselves or connect directly to another player's game via Xbox Live, PlayStation Network or Nintendo Switch Online. Single-player worlds have LAN support, allowing players to join a world on locally interconnected computers without a server setup. Minecraft multiplayer servers are guided by server operators, who have access to server commands such as setting the time of day and teleporting players. Operators can also set up restrictions concerning which usernames or IP addresses are allowed or disallowed to enter the server. Multiplayer servers have a wide range of activities, with some servers having their own unique rules and customs. The largest and most popular server is Hypixel, which has been visited by over 14 million unique players. Player versus player combat (PvP) can be enabled to allow fighting between players. In 2013, Mojang announced Minecraft Realms, a server hosting service intended to enable players to run server multiplayer games easily and safely without having to set up their own. Unlike a standard server, only invited players can join Realms servers, and these servers do not use server addresses. Minecraft: Java Edition Realms server owners can invite up to twenty people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at a time. Minecraft Realms server owners can invite up to 3,000 people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at one time. The Minecraft: Java Edition Realms servers do not support user-made plugins, but players can play custom Minecraft maps. Minecraft Bedrock Realms servers support user-made add-ons, resource packs, behavior packs, and custom Minecraft maps. At Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016, support for cross-platform play between Windows 10, iOS, and Android platforms was added through Realms starting in June 2016, with Xbox One and Nintendo Switch support to come later in 2017, and support for virtual reality devices. On 31 July 2017, Mojang released the beta version of the update allowing cross-platform play. Nintendo Switch support for Realms was released in July 2018. The modding community consists of fans, users and third-party programmers. Using a variety of application program interfaces that have arisen over time, they have produced a wide variety of downloadable content for Minecraft, such as modifications, texture packs and custom maps. Modifications of the Minecraft code, called mods, add a variety of gameplay changes, ranging from new blocks, items, and mobs to entire arrays of mechanisms. The modding community is responsible for a substantial supply of mods from ones that enhance gameplay, such as mini-maps, waypoints, and durability counters, to ones that add to the game elements from other video games and media. While a variety of mod frameworks were independently developed by reverse engineering the code, Mojang has also enhanced vanilla Minecraft with official frameworks for modification, allowing the production of community-created resource packs, which alter certain game elements including textures and sounds. Players can also create their own "maps" (custom world save files) that often contain specific rules, challenges, puzzles and quests, and share them for others to play. Mojang added an adventure mode in August 2012 and "command blocks" in October 2012, which were created specially for custom maps in Java Edition. Data packs, introduced in version 1.13 of the Java Edition, allow further customization, including the ability to add new achievements, dimensions, functions, loot tables, predicates, recipes, structures, tags, and world generation. The Xbox 360 Edition supported downloadable content, which was available to purchase via the Xbox Games Store; these content packs usually contained additional character skins. It later received support for texture packs in its twelfth title update while introducing "mash-up packs", which combined texture packs with skin packs and changes to the game's sounds, music and user interface. The first mash-up pack (and by extension, the first texture pack) for the Xbox 360 Edition was released on 4 September 2013, and was themed after the Mass Effect franchise. Unlike Java Edition, however, the Xbox 360 Edition did not support player-made mods or custom maps. A cross-promotional resource pack based on the Super Mario franchise by Nintendo was released exclusively for the Wii U Edition worldwide on 17 May 2016, and later bundled free with the Nintendo Switch Edition at launch. Another based on Fallout was released on consoles that December, and for Windows and Mobile in April 2017. In April 2018, malware was discovered in several downloadable user-made Minecraft skins for use with the Java Edition of the game. Avast stated that nearly 50,000 accounts were infected, and when activated, the malware would attempt to reformat the user's hard drive. Mojang promptly patched the issue, and released a statement stating that "the code would not be run or read by the game itself", and would run only when the image containing the skin itself was opened. In June 2017, Mojang released the "1.1 Discovery Update" to the Pocket Edition of the game, which later became the Bedrock Edition. The update introduced the "Marketplace", a catalogue of purchasable user-generated content intended to give Minecraft creators "another way to make a living from the game". Various skins, maps, texture packs and add-ons from different creators can be bought with "Minecoins", a digital currency that is purchased with real money. Additionally, users can access specific content with a subscription service titled "Marketplace Pass". Alongside content from independent creators, the Marketplace also houses items published by Mojang and Microsoft themselves, as well as official collaborations between Minecraft and other intellectual properties. By 2022, the Marketplace had over 1.7 billion content downloads, generating over $500 million in revenue. Development Before creating Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson was a game developer at King, where he worked until March 2009. At King, he primarily developed browser games and learned several programming languages. During his free time, he prototyped his own games, often drawing inspiration from other titles, and was an active participant on the TIGSource forums for independent developers. One such project was "RubyDung", a base-building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but with an isometric, three-dimensional perspective similar to RollerCoaster Tycoon. Among the features in RubyDung that he explored was a first-person view similar to Dungeon Keeper, though he ultimately discarded this idea, feeling the graphics were too pixelated at the time. Around March 2009, Persson left King and joined jAlbum, while continuing to work on his prototypes. Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game first released in April 2009, inspired Persson's vision for RubyDung's future direction. Infiniminer heavily influenced the visual style of gameplay, including bringing back the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals. However, unlike Infiniminer, Persson wanted Minecraft to have RPG elements. The first public alpha build of Minecraft was released on 17 May 2009 on TIGSource. Over the years, Persson regularly released test builds that added new features, including tools, mobs, and entire new dimensions. In 2011, partly due to the game's rising popularity, Persson decided to release a full 1.0 version—a second part of the "Adventure Update"—on 18 November 2011. Shortly after, Persson stepped down from development, handing the project's lead to Jens "Jeb" Bergensten. On 15 September 2014, Microsoft, the developer behind the Microsoft Windows operating system and Xbox video game console, announced a $2.5 billion acquisition of Mojang, which included the Minecraft intellectual property. Persson had suggested the deal on Twitter, asking a corporation to buy his stake in the game after receiving criticism for enforcing terms in the game's end-user license agreement (EULA), which had been in place for the past three years. According to Persson, Mojang CEO Carl Manneh received a call from a Microsoft executive shortly after the tweet, asking if Persson was serious about a deal. Mojang was also approached by other companies including Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts. The deal with Microsoft was arbitrated on 6 November 2014 and led to Persson becoming one of Forbes' "World's Billionaires". After 2014, Minecraft's primary versions received usually annual major updates—free to players who have purchased the game— each primarily centered around a specific theme. For instance, version 1.13, the Update Aquatic, focused on ocean-related features, while version 1.16, the Nether Update, introduced significant changes to the Nether dimension. However, in late 2024, Mojang announced a shift in their update strategy; rather than releasing large updates annually, they opted for a more frequent release schedule with smaller, incremental updates, stating, "We know that you want new Minecraft content more often." The Bedrock Edition has also received regular updates, now matching the themes of the Java Edition updates. Other versions of the game, such as various console editions and the Pocket Edition, were either merged into Bedrock or discontinued and have not received further updates. On 7 May 2019, coinciding with Minecraft's 10th anniversary, a JavaScript recreation of an old 2009 Java Edition build named Minecraft Classic was made available to play online for free. On 16 April 2020, a Bedrock Edition-exclusive beta version of Minecraft, called Minecraft RTX, was released by Nvidia. It introduced physically-based rendering, real-time path tracing, and DLSS for RTX-enabled GPUs. The public release was made available on 8 December 2020. Path tracing can only be enabled in supported worlds, which can be downloaded for free via the in-game Minecraft Marketplace, with a texture pack from Nvidia's website, or with compatible third-party texture packs. It cannot be enabled by default with any texture pack on any world. Initially, Minecraft RTX was affected by many bugs, display errors, and instability issues. On 22 March 2025, a new visual mode called Vibrant Visuals, an optional graphical overhaul similar to Minecraft RTX, was announced. It promises modern rendering features—such as dynamic shadows, screen space reflections, volumetric fog, and bloom—without the need of RTX-capable hardware. Vibrant Visuals was released as a part of the Chase the Skies update on 17 June 2025 for Bedrock Edition and is planned to release on Java Edition at a later date. Development began for the original edition of Minecraft—then known as Cave Game, and now known as the Java Edition—in May 2009,[k] and ended on 13 May, when Persson released a test video on YouTube of an early version of the game, dubbed the "Cave game tech test" or the "Cave game tech demo". The game was named Minecraft: Order of the Stone the next day, after a suggestion made by a player. "Order of the Stone" came from the webcomic The Order of the Stick, and "Minecraft" was chosen "because it's a good name". The title was later shortened to just Minecraft, omitting the subtitle. Persson completed the game's base programming over a weekend in May 2009, and private testing began on TigIRC on 16 May. The first public release followed on 17 May 2009 as a developmental version shared on the TIGSource forums. Based on feedback from forum users, Persson continued updating the game. This initial public build later became known as Classic. Further developmental phases—dubbed Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev—were released throughout 2009 and 2010. The first major update, known as Alpha, was released on 30 June 2010. At the time, Persson was still working a day job at jAlbum but later resigned to focus on Minecraft full-time as sales of the alpha version surged. Updates were distributed automatically, introducing new blocks, items, mobs, and changes to game mechanics such as water flow. With revenue generated from the game, Persson founded Mojang, a video game studio, alongside former colleagues Jakob Porser and Carl Manneh. On 11 December 2010, Persson announced that Minecraft would enter its beta phase on 20 December. He assured players that bug fixes and all pre-release updates would remain free. As development progressed, Mojang expanded, hiring additional employees to work on the project. The game officially exited beta and launched in full on 18 November 2011. On 1 December 2011, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten took full creative control over Minecraft, replacing Persson as lead designer. On 28 February 2012, Mojang announced the hiring of the developers behind Bukkit, a popular developer API for Minecraft servers, to improve Minecraft's support of server modifications. This move included Mojang taking apparent ownership of the CraftBukkit server mod, though this apparent acquisition later became controversial, and its legitimacy was questioned due to CraftBukkit's open-source nature and licensing under the GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License. In August 2011, Minecraft: Pocket Edition was released as an early alpha for the Xperia Play via the Android Market, later expanding to other Android devices on 8 October 2011. The iOS version followed on 17 November 2011. A port was made available for Windows Phones shortly after Microsoft acquired Mojang. Unlike Java Edition, Pocket Edition initially focused on Minecraft's creative building and basic survival elements but lacked many features of the PC version. Bergensten confirmed on Twitter that the Pocket Edition was written in C++ rather than Java, as iOS does not support Java. On 10 December 2014, a port of Pocket Edition was released for Windows Phone 8.1. In July 2015, a port of the Pocket Edition to Windows 10 was released as the Windows 10 Edition, with full crossplay to other Pocket versions. In January 2017, Microsoft announced that it would no longer maintain the Windows Phone versions of Pocket Edition. On 20 September 2017, with the "Better Together Update", the Pocket Edition was ported to the Xbox One, and was renamed to the Bedrock Edition. The console versions of Minecraft debuted with the Xbox 360 edition, developed by 4J Studios and released on 9 May 2012. Announced as part of the Xbox Live Arcade NEXT promotion, this version introduced a redesigned crafting system, a new control interface, in-game tutorials, split-screen multiplayer, and online play via Xbox Live. Unlike the PC version, its worlds were finite, bordered by invisible walls. Initially, the Xbox 360 version resembled outdated PC versions but received updates to bring it closer to Java Edition before eventually being discontinued. The Xbox One version launched on 5 September 2014, featuring larger worlds and support for more players. Minecraft expanded to PlayStation platforms with PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 editions released on 17 December 2013 and 4 September 2014, respectively. Originally planned as a PS4 launch title, it was delayed before its eventual release. A PlayStation Vita version followed in October 2014. Like the Xbox versions, the PlayStation editions were developed by 4J Studios. Nintendo platforms received Minecraft: Wii U Edition on 17 December 2015, with a physical release in North America on 17 June 2016 and in Europe on 30 June. The Nintendo Switch version launched via the eShop on 11 May 2017. During a Nintendo Direct presentation on 13 September 2017, Nintendo announced that Minecraft: New Nintendo 3DS Edition, based on the Pocket Edition, would be available for download immediately after the livestream, and a physical copy available on a later date. The game is compatible only with the New Nintendo 3DS or New Nintendo 2DS XL systems and does not work with the original 3DS or 2DS systems. On 20 September 2017, the Better Together Update introduced Bedrock Edition across Xbox One, Windows 10, VR, and mobile platforms, enabling cross-play between these versions. Bedrock Edition later expanded to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, with the latter receiving the update in December 2019, allowing cross-platform play for users with a free Xbox Live account. The Bedrock Edition released a native version for PlayStation 5 on 22 October 2024, while the Xbox Series X/S version launched on 17 June 2025. On 18 December 2018, the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, and Wii U versions of Minecraft received their final update and would later become known as "Legacy Console Editions". On 15 January 2019, the New Nintendo 3DS version of Minecraft received its final update, effectively becoming discontinued as well. An educational version of Minecraft, designed for use in schools, launched on 1 November 2016. It is available on Android, ChromeOS, iPadOS, iOS, MacOS, and Windows. On 20 August 2018, Mojang announced that it would bring Education Edition to iPadOS in Autumn 2018. It was released to the App Store on 6 September 2018. On 27 March 2019, it was announced that it would be operated by JD.com in China. On 26 June 2020, a public beta for the Education Edition was made available to Google Play Store compatible Chromebooks. The full game was released to the Google Play Store for Chromebooks on 7 August 2020. On 20 May 2016, China Edition (also known as My World) was announced as a localized edition for China, where it was released under a licensing agreement between NetEase and Mojang. The PC edition was released for public testing on 8 August 2017. The iOS version was released on 15 September 2017, and the Android version was released on 12 October 2017. The PC edition is based on the original Java Edition, while the iOS and Android mobile versions are based on the Bedrock Edition. The edition is free-to-play and had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. This version of Bedrock Edition is exclusive to Microsoft's Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems. The beta release for Windows 10 launched on the Windows Store on 29 July 2015. After nearly a year and a half in beta, Microsoft fully released the version on 19 December 2016. Called the "Ender Update", this release implemented new features to this version of Minecraft like world templates and add-on packs. On 7 June 2022, the Java and Bedrock Editions of Minecraft were merged into a single bundle for purchase on Windows; those who owned one version would automatically gain access to the other version. Both game versions would otherwise remain separate. Around 2011, prior to Minecraft's full release, Mojang collaborated with The Lego Group to create a Lego brick-based Minecraft game called Brickcraft. This would have modified the base Minecraft game to use Lego bricks, which meant adapting the basic 1×1 block to account for larger pieces typically used in Lego sets. Persson worked on an early version called "Project Rex Kwon Do", named after the character of the same name from the film Napoleon Dynamite. Although Lego approved the project and Mojang assigned two developers for six months, it was canceled due to the Lego Group's demands, according to Mojang's Daniel Kaplan. Lego considered buying Mojang to complete the game, but when Microsoft offered over $2 billion for the company, Lego stepped back, unsure of Minecraft's potential. On 26 June 2025, a build of Brickcraft dated 28 June 2012 was published on a community archive website Omniarchive. Initially, Markus Persson planned to support the Oculus Rift with a Minecraft port. However, after Facebook acquired Oculus in 2013, he abruptly canceled the plans, stating, "Facebook creeps me out." In 2016, a community-made mod, Minecraft VR, added VR support for Java Edition, followed by Vivecraft for HTC Vive. Later that year, Microsoft introduced official Oculus Rift support for Windows 10 Edition, leading to the discontinuation of the Minecraft VR mod due to trademark complaints. Vivecraft was endorsed by Minecraft VR contributors for its Rift support. Also available is a Gear VR version, titled Minecraft: Gear VR Edition. Windows Mixed Reality support was added in 2017. On 7 September 2020, Mojang Studios announced that the PlayStation 4 Bedrock version would receive PlayStation VR support later that month. In September 2024, the Minecraft team announced they would no longer support PlayStation VR, which received its final update in March 2025. Music and sound design Minecraft's music and sound effects were produced by German musician Daniel Rosenfeld, better known as C418. To create the sound effects for the game, Rosenfeld made extensive use of Foley techniques. On learning the processes for the game, he remarked, "Foley's an interesting thing, and I had to learn its subtleties. Early on, I wasn't that knowledgeable about it. It's a whole trial-and-error process. You just make a sound and eventually you go, 'Oh my God, that's it! Get the microphone!' There's no set way of doing anything at all." He reminisced on creating the in-game sound for grass blocks, stating "It turns out that to make grass sounds you don't actually walk on grass and record it, because grass sounds like nothing. What you want to do is get a VHS, break it apart, and just lightly touch the tape." According to Rosenfeld, his favorite sound to design for the game was the hisses of spiders. He elaborates, "I like the spiders. Recording that was a whole day of me researching what a spider sounds like. Turns out, there are spiders that make little screeching sounds, so I think I got this recording of a fire hose, put it in a sampler, and just pitched it around until it sounded like a weird spider was talking to you." Many of the sound design decisions by Rosenfeld were done accidentally or spontaneously. The creeper notably lacks any specific noises apart from a loud fuse-like sound when about to explode; Rosenfeld later recalled "That was just a complete accident by Markus and me [sic]. We just put in a placeholder sound of burning a matchstick. It seemed to work hilariously well, so we kept it." On other sounds, such as those of the zombie, Rosenfeld remarked, "I actually never wanted the zombies so scary. I intentionally made them sound comical. It's nice to hear that they work so well [...]." Rosenfeld remarked that the sound engine was "terrible" to work with, remembering "If you had two song files at once, it [the game engine] would actually crash. There were so many more weird glitches like that the guys never really fixed because they were too busy with the actual game and not the sound engine." The background music in Minecraft consists of instrumental ambient music. To compose the music of Minecraft, Rosenfeld used the package from Ableton Live, along with several additional plug-ins. Speaking on them, Rosenfeld said "They can be pretty much everything from an effect to an entire orchestra. Additionally, I've got some synthesizers that are attached to the computer. Like a Moog Voyager, Dave Smith Prophet 08 and a Virus TI." On 4 March 2011, Rosenfeld released a soundtrack titled Minecraft – Volume Alpha; it includes most of the tracks featured in Minecraft, as well as other music not featured in the game. Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku chose the music in Minecraft as one of the best video game soundtracks of 2011. On 9 November 2013, Rosenfeld released the second official soundtrack, titled Minecraft – Volume Beta, which included the music that was added in a 2013 "Music Update" for the game. A physical release of Volume Alpha, consisting of CDs, black vinyl, and limited-edition transparent green vinyl LPs, was issued by indie electronic label Ghostly International on 21 August 2015. On 14 August 2020, Ghostly released Volume Beta on CD and vinyl, with alternate color LPs and lenticular cover pressings released in limited quantities. The final update Rosenfeld worked on was 2018's 1.13 Update Aquatic. His music remained the only music in the game until 2020's "Nether Update", introducing pieces from Lena Raine. Since then, other composers have made contributions, including Kumi Tanioka, Samuel Åberg, Aaron Cherof, and Amos Roddy, with Raine remaining as the new primary composer. Ownership of all music besides Rosenfeld's independently released albums has been retained by Microsoft, with their label publishing all of the other artists' releases. Gareth Coker also composed some of the music for the game's mini games from the Legacy Console editions. Rosenfeld had stated his intent to create a third album of music for the game in a 2015 interview with Fact, and confirmed its existence in a 2017 tweet, stating that his work on the record as of then had tallied up to be longer than the previous two albums combined, which in total clocks in at over 3 hours and 18 minutes. However, due to licensing issues with Microsoft, the third volume has since not seen release. On 8 January 2021, Rosenfeld was asked in an interview with Anthony Fantano whether or not there was still a third volume of his music intended for release. Rosenfeld responded, saying, "I have something—I consider it finished—but things have become complicated, especially as Minecraft is now a big property, so I don't know." Reception Minecraft has received critical acclaim, with praise for the creative freedom it grants players in-game, as well as the ease of enabling emergent gameplay. Critics have expressed enjoyment in Minecraft's complex crafting system, commenting that it is an important aspect of the game's open-ended gameplay. Most publications were impressed by the game's "blocky" graphics, with IGN describing them as "instantly memorable". Reviewers also liked the game's adventure elements, noting that the game creates a good balance between exploring and building. The game's multiplayer feature has been generally received favorably, with IGN commenting that "adventuring is always better with friends". Jaz McDougall of PC Gamer said Minecraft is "intuitively interesting and contagiously fun, with an unparalleled scope for creativity and memorable experiences". It has been regarded as having introduced millions of children to the digital world, insofar as its basic game mechanics are logically analogous to computer commands. IGN was disappointed about the troublesome steps needed to set up multiplayer servers, calling it a "hassle". Critics also said that visual glitches occur periodically. Despite its release out of beta in 2011, GameSpot said the game had an "unfinished feel", adding that some game elements seem "incomplete or thrown together in haste". A review of the alpha version, by Scott Munro of the Daily Record, called it "already something special" and urged readers to buy it. Jim Rossignol of Rock Paper Shotgun also recommended the alpha of the game, calling it "a kind of generative 8-bit Lego Stalker". On 17 September 2010, gaming webcomic Penny Arcade began a series of comics and news posts about the addictiveness of the game. The Xbox 360 version was generally received positively by critics, but did not receive as much praise as the PC version. Although reviewers were disappointed by the lack of features such as mod support and content from the PC version, they acclaimed the port's addition of a tutorial and in-game tips and crafting recipes, saying that they make the game more user-friendly. The Xbox One Edition was one of the best received ports, being praised for its relatively large worlds. The PlayStation 3 Edition also received generally favorable reviews, being compared to the Xbox 360 Edition and praised for its well-adapted controls. The PlayStation 4 edition was the best received port to date, being praised for having 36 times larger worlds than the PlayStation 3 edition and described as nearly identical to the Xbox One edition. The PlayStation Vita Edition received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for its technical limitations. The Wii U version received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for a lack of GamePad integration. The 3DS version received mixed reviews, being criticized for its high price, technical issues, and lack of cross-platform play. The Nintendo Switch Edition received fairly positive reviews from critics, being praised, like other modern ports, for its relatively larger worlds. Minecraft: Pocket Edition initially received mixed reviews from critics. Although reviewers appreciated the game's intuitive controls, they were disappointed by the lack of content. The inability to collect resources and craft items, as well as the limited types of blocks and lack of hostile mobs, were especially criticized. After updates added more content, Pocket Edition started receiving more positive reviews. Reviewers complimented the controls and the graphics, but still noted a lack of content. Minecraft surpassed over a million purchases less than a month after entering its beta phase in early 2011. At the same time, the game had no publisher backing and has never been commercially advertised except through word of mouth, and various unpaid references in popular media such as the Penny Arcade webcomic. By April 2011, Persson estimated that Minecraft had made €23 million (US$33 million) in revenue, with 800,000 sales of the alpha version of the game, and over 1 million sales of the beta version. In November 2011, prior to the game's full release, Minecraft beta surpassed 16 million registered users and 4 million purchases. By March 2012, Minecraft had become the 6th best-selling PC game of all time. As of 10 October 2014[update], the game had sold 17 million copies on PC, becoming the best-selling PC game of all time. On 25 February 2014, the game reached 100 million registered users. By May 2019, 180 million copies had been sold across all platforms, making it the single best-selling video game of all time. The free-to-play Minecraft China version had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. By 2023, the game had sold over 300 million copies. As of April 2025, Minecraft has sold over 350 million copies. The Xbox 360 version of Minecraft became profitable within the first day of the game's release in 2012, when the game broke the Xbox Live sales records with 400,000 players online. Within a week of being on the Xbox Live Marketplace, Minecraft sold a million copies. GameSpot announced in December 2012 that Minecraft sold over 4.48 million copies since the game debuted on Xbox Live Arcade in May 2012. In 2012, Minecraft was the most purchased title on Xbox Live Arcade; it was also the fourth most played title on Xbox Live based on average unique users per day. As of 4 April 2014[update], the Xbox 360 version has sold 12 million copies. In addition, Minecraft: Pocket Edition has reached a figure of 21 million in sales. The PlayStation 3 Edition sold one million copies in five weeks. The release of the game's PlayStation Vita version boosted Minecraft sales by 79%, outselling both PS3 and PS4 debut releases and becoming the largest Minecraft launch on a PlayStation console. The PS Vita version sold 100,000 digital copies in Japan within the first two months of release, according to an announcement by SCE Japan Asia. By January 2015, 500,000 digital copies of Minecraft were sold in Japan across all PlayStation platforms, with a surge in primary school children purchasing the PS Vita version. As of 2022, the Vita version has sold over 1.65 million physical copies in Japan, making it the best-selling Vita game in the country. Minecraft helped improve Microsoft's total first-party revenue by $63 million for the 2015 second quarter. The game, including all of its versions, had over 112 million monthly active players by September 2019. On its 11th anniversary in May 2020, the company announced that Minecraft had reached over 200 million copies sold across platforms with over 126 million monthly active players. By April 2021, the number of active monthly users had climbed to 140 million. In July 2010, PC Gamer listed Minecraft as the fourth-best game to play at work. In December of that year, Good Game selected Minecraft as their choice for Best Downloadable Game of 2010, Gamasutra named it the eighth best game of the year as well as the eighth best indie game of the year, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun named it the "game of the year". Indie DB awarded the game the 2010 Indie of the Year award as chosen by voters, in addition to two out of five Editor's Choice awards for Most Innovative and Best Singleplayer Indie. It was also awarded Game of the Year by PC Gamer UK. The game was nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Technical Excellence, and Excellence in Design awards at the March 2011 Independent Games Festival and won the Grand Prize and the community-voted Audience Award. At Game Developers Choice Awards 2011, Minecraft won awards in the categories for Best Debut Game, Best Downloadable Game and Innovation Award, winning every award for which it was nominated. It also won GameCity's video game arts award. On 5 May 2011, Minecraft was selected as one of the 80 games that would be displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of The Art of Video Games exhibit that opened on 16 March 2012. At the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards, Minecraft won the award for Best Independent Game and was nominated in the Best PC Game category. In 2012, at the British Academy Video Games Awards, Minecraft was nominated in the GAME Award of 2011 category and Persson received The Special Award. In 2012, Minecraft XBLA was awarded a Golden Joystick Award in the Best Downloadable Game category, and a TIGA Games Industry Award in the Best Arcade Game category. In 2013, it was nominated as the family game of the year at the British Academy Video Games Awards. During the 16th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences nominated the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft for "Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year". Minecraft Console Edition won the award for TIGA Game Of The Year in 2014. In 2015, the game placed 6th on USgamer's The 15 Best Games Since 2000 list. In 2016, Minecraft placed 6th on Time's The 50 Best Video Games of All Time list. Minecraft was nominated for the 2013 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite App, but lost to Temple Run. It was nominated for the 2014 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite Video Game, but lost to Just Dance 2014. The game later won the award for the Most Addicting Game at the 2015 Kids' Choice Awards. In addition, the Java Edition was nominated for "Favorite Video Game" at the 2018 Kids' Choice Awards, while the game itself won the "Still Playing" award at the 2019 Golden Joystick Awards, as well as the "Favorite Video Game" award at the 2020 Kids' Choice Awards. Minecraft also won "Stream Game of the Year" at inaugural Streamer Awards in 2021. The game later garnered a Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award nomination for Favorite Video Game in 2021, and won the same category in 2022 and 2023. At the Golden Joystick Awards 2025, it won the Still Playing Award - PC and Console. Minecraft has been subject to several notable controversies. In June 2014, Mojang announced that it would begin enforcing the portion of Minecraft's end-user license agreement (EULA) which prohibits servers from giving in-game advantages to players in exchange for donations or payments. Spokesperson Owen Hill stated that servers could still require players to pay a fee to access the server and could sell in-game cosmetic items. The change was supported by Persson, citing emails he received from parents of children who had spent hundreds of dollars on servers. The Minecraft community and server owners protested, arguing that the EULA's terms were more broad than Mojang was claiming, that the crackdown would force smaller servers to shut down for financial reasons, and that Mojang was suppressing competition for its own Minecraft Realms subscription service. The controversy contributed to Notch's decision to sell Mojang. In 2020, Mojang announced an eventual change to the Java Edition to require a login from a Microsoft account rather than a Mojang account, the latter of which would be sunsetted. This also required Java Edition players to create Xbox network Gamertags. Mojang defended the move to Microsoft accounts by saying that improved security could be offered, including two-factor authentication, blocking cyberbullies in chat, and improved parental controls. The community responded with intense backlash, citing various technical difficulties encountered in the process and how account migration would be mandatory, even for those who do not play on servers. As of 10 March 2022, Microsoft required that all players migrate in order to maintain access the Java Edition of Minecraft. Mojang announced a deadline of 19 September 2023 for account migration, after which all legacy Mojang accounts became inaccessible and unable to be migrated. In June 2022, Mojang added a player-reporting feature in Java Edition. Players could report other players on multiplayer servers for sending messages prohibited by the Xbox Live Code of Conduct; report categories included profane language,[l] substance abuse, hate speech, threats of violence, and nudity. If a player was found to be in violation of Xbox Community Standards, they would be banned from all servers for a specific period of time or permanently. The update containing the report feature (1.19.1) was released on 27 July 2022. Mojang received substantial backlash and protest from community members, one of the most common complaints being that banned players would be forbidden from joining any server, even private ones. Others took issue to what they saw as Microsoft increasing control over its player base and exercising censorship, leading some to start a hashtag #saveminecraft and dub the version "1.19.84", a reference to the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The "Mob Vote" was an online event organized by Mojang in which the Minecraft community voted between three original mob concepts; initially, the winning mob was to be implemented in a future update, while the losing mobs were scrapped, though after the first mob vote this was changed, and losing mobs would now have a chance to come to the game in the future. The first Mob Vote was held during Minecon Earth 2017 and became an annual event starting with Minecraft Live 2020. The Mob Vote was often criticized for forcing players to choose one mob instead of implementing all three, causing divisions and flaming within the community, and potentially allowing internet bots and Minecraft content creators with large fanbases to conduct vote brigading. The Mob Vote was also blamed for a perceived lack of new content added to Minecraft since Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang in 2014. The 2023 Mob Vote featured three passive mobs—the crab, the penguin, and the armadillo—with voting scheduled to start on 13 October. In response, a Change.org petition was created on 6 October, demanding that Mojang eliminate the Mob Vote and instead implement all three mobs going forward. The petition received approximately 445,000 signatures by 13 October and was joined by calls to boycott the Mob Vote, as well as a partially tongue-in-cheek "revolutionary" propaganda campaign in which sympathizers created anti-Mojang and pro-boycott posters in the vein of real 20th century propaganda posters. Mojang did not release an official response to the boycott, and the Mob Vote otherwise proceeded normally, with the armadillo winning the vote. In September 2024, as part of a blog post detailing their future plans for Minecraft's development, Mojang announced the Mob Vote would be retired. Cultural impact In September 2019, The Guardian classified Minecraft as the best video game of the 21st century to date, and in November 2019, Polygon called it the "most important game of the decade" in its 2010s "decade in review". In June 2020, Minecraft was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Minecraft is recognized as one of the first successful games to use an early access model to draw in sales prior to its full release version to help fund development. As Minecraft helped to bolster indie game development in the early 2010s, it also helped to popularize the use of the early access model in indie game development. Social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit have played a significant role in popularizing Minecraft. Research conducted by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania showed that one-third of Minecraft players learned about the game via Internet videos. In 2010, Minecraft-related videos began to gain influence on YouTube, often made by commentators. The videos usually contain screen-capture footage of the game and voice-overs. Common coverage in the videos includes creations made by players, walkthroughs of various tasks, and parodies of works in popular culture. By May 2012, over four million Minecraft-related YouTube videos had been uploaded. The game would go on to be a prominent fixture within YouTube's gaming scene during the entire 2010s; in 2014, it was the second-most searched term on the entire platform. By 2018, it was still YouTube's biggest game globally. Some popular commentators have received employment at Machinima, a now-defunct gaming video company that owned a highly watched entertainment channel on YouTube. The Yogscast is a British company that regularly produces Minecraft videos; their YouTube channel has attained billions of views, and their panel at Minecon 2011 had the highest attendance. Another well-known YouTube personality is Jordan Maron, known online as CaptainSparklez, who has also created many Minecraft music parodies, including "Revenge", a parody of Usher's "DJ Got Us Fallin' in Love". Minecraft's popularity on YouTube was described by Polygon as quietly dominant, although in 2019, thanks in part to PewDiePie's playthroughs of the game, Minecraft experienced a visible uptick in popularity on the platform. Longer-running series include Far Lands or Bust, dedicated to reaching the obsolete "Far Lands" glitch by foot on an older version of the game. YouTube announced that on 14 December 2021 that the total amount of Minecraft-related views on the website had exceeded one trillion. Minecraft has been referenced by other video games, such as Torchlight II, Team Fortress 2, Borderlands 2, Choplifter HD, Super Meat Boy, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Binding of Isaac, The Stanley Parable, and FTL: Faster Than Light. Minecraft is officially represented in downloadable content for the crossover fighter Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, with Steve as a playable character with a moveset including references to building, crafting, and redstone, alongside an Overworld-themed stage. It was also referenced by electronic music artist Deadmau5 in his performances. The game is also referenced heavily in "Informative Murder Porn", the second episode of the seventeenth season of the animated television series South Park. In 2025, A Minecraft Movie was released. It made $313 million in the box office in the first week, a record-breaking opening for a video game adaptation. Minecraft has been noted as a cultural touchstone for Generation Z, as many of the generation's members played the game at a young age. The possible applications of Minecraft have been discussed extensively, especially in the fields of computer-aided design (CAD) and education. In a panel at Minecon 2011, a Swedish developer discussed the possibility of using the game to redesign public buildings and parks, stating that rendering using Minecraft was much more user-friendly for the community, making it easier to envision the functionality of new buildings and parks. In 2012, a member of the Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab, Cody Sumter, said: "Notch hasn't just built a game. He's tricked 40 million people into learning to use a CAD program." Various software has been developed to allow virtual designs to be printed using professional 3D printers or personal printers such as MakerBot and RepRap. In September 2012, Mojang began the Block by Block project in cooperation with UN Habitat to create real-world environments in Minecraft. The project allows young people who live in those environments to participate in designing the changes they would like to see. Using Minecraft, the community has helped reconstruct the areas of concern, and citizens are invited to enter the Minecraft servers and modify their own neighborhood. Carl Manneh, Mojang's managing director, called the game "the perfect tool to facilitate this process", adding "The three-year partnership will support UN-Habitat's Sustainable Urban Development Network to upgrade 300 public spaces by 2016." Mojang signed Minecraft building community, FyreUK, to help render the environments into Minecraft. The first pilot project began in Kibera, one of Nairobi's informal settlements and is in the planning phase. The Block by Block project is based on an earlier initiative started in October 2011, Mina Kvarter (My Block), which gave young people in Swedish communities a tool to visualize how they wanted to change their part of town. According to Manneh, the project was a helpful way to visualize urban planning ideas without necessarily having a training in architecture. The ideas presented by the citizens were a template for political decisions. In April 2014, the Danish Geodata Agency generated all of Denmark in fullscale in Minecraft based on their own geodata. This is possible because Denmark is one of the flattest countries with the highest point at 171 meters (ranking as the country with the 30th smallest elevation span), where the limit in default Minecraft was around 192 meters above in-game sea level when the project was completed. Taking advantage of the game's accessibility where other websites are censored, the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders has used an open Minecraft server to create the Uncensored Library, a repository within the game of journalism by authors from countries (including Egypt, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam) who have been censored and arrested, such as Jamal Khashoggi. The neoclassical virtual building was created over about 250 hours by an international team of 24 people. Despite its unpredictable nature, Minecraft speedrunning, where players time themselves from spawning into a new world to reaching The End and defeating the Ender Dragon boss, is popular. Some speedrunners use a combination of mods, external programs, and debug menus, while other runners play the game in a more vanilla or more consistency-oriented way. Minecraft has been used in educational settings through initiatives such as MinecraftEdu, founded in 2011 to make the game affordable and accessible for schools in collaboration with Mojang. MinecraftEdu provided features allowing teachers to monitor student progress, including screenshot submissions as evidence of lesson completion, and by 2012 reported that approximately 250,000 students worldwide had access to the platform. Mojang also developed Minecraft: Education Edition with pre-built lesson plans for up to 30 students in a closed environment. Educators have used Minecraft to teach subjects such as history, language arts, and science through custom-built environments, including reconstructions of historical landmarks and large-scale models of biological structures such as animal cells. The introduction of redstone blocks enabled the construction of functional virtual machines such as a hard drive and an 8-bit computer. Mods have been created to use these mechanics for teaching programming. In 2014, the British Museum announced a project to reproduce its building and exhibits in Minecraft in collaboration with the public. Microsoft and Code.org have offered Minecraft-based tutorials and activities designed to teach programming, reporting by 2018 that more than 85 million children had used their resources. In 2025, the Musée de Minéralogie in Paris held a temporary exhibition titled "Minerals in Minecraft." Following the initial surge in popularity of Minecraft in 2010, other video games were criticised for having various similarities to Minecraft, and some were described as being "clones", often due to a direct inspiration from Minecraft, or a superficial similarity. Examples include Ace of Spades, CastleMiner, CraftWorld, FortressCraft, Terraria, BlockWorld 3D, Total Miner, and Luanti (formerly Minetest). David Frampton, designer of The Blockheads, reported that one failure of his 2D game was the "low resolution pixel art" that too closely resembled the art in Minecraft, which resulted in "some resistance" from fans. A homebrew adaptation of the alpha version of Minecraft for the Nintendo DS, titled DScraft, has been released; it has been noted for its similarity to the original game considering the technical limitations of the system. In response to Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang and their Minecraft IP, various developers announced further clone titles developed specifically for Nintendo's consoles, as they were the only major platforms not to officially receive Minecraft at the time. These clone titles include UCraft (Nexis Games), Cube Life: Island Survival (Cypronia), Discovery (Noowanda), Battleminer (Wobbly Tooth Games), Cube Creator 3D (Big John Games), and Stone Shire (Finger Gun Games). Despite this, the fears of fans were unfounded, with official Minecraft releases on Nintendo consoles eventually resuming. Markus Persson made another similar game, Minicraft, for a Ludum Dare competition in 2011. In 2025, Persson announced through a poll on his X account that he was considering developing a spiritual successor to Minecraft. He later clarified that he was "100% serious", and that he had "basically announced Minecraft 2". Within days, however, Persson cancelled the plans after speaking to his team. In November 2024, artificial intelligence companies Decart and Etched released Oasis, an artificially generated version of Minecraft, as a proof of concept. Every in-game element is completely AI-generated in real time and the model does not store world data, leading to "hallucinations" such as items and blocks appearing that were not there before. In January 2026, indie game developer Unomelon announced that their voxel sandbox game Allumeria would be playable in Steam Next Fest that year. On 10 February, Mojang issued a DMCA takedown of Allumeria on Steam through Valve, alleging the game was infringing on Minecraft's copyright. Some reports suggested that the takedown may have used an automatic AI copyright claiming service. The DMCA was later withdrawn. Minecon was an annual official fan convention dedicated to Minecraft. The first full Minecon was held in November 2011 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The event included the official launch of Minecraft; keynote speeches, including one by Persson; building and costume contests; Minecraft-themed breakout classes; exhibits by leading gaming and Minecraft-related companies; commemorative merchandise; and autograph and picture times with Mojang employees and well-known contributors from the Minecraft community. In 2016, Minecon was held in-person for the last time, with the following years featuring annual "Minecon Earth" livestreams on minecraft.net and YouTube instead. These livestreams, later rebranded to "Minecraft Live", included the mob/biome votes, and announcements of new game updates. In 2025, "Minecraft Live" became a biannual event as part of Minecraft's changing update schedule.[citation needed] Notes References External links |
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Contents Minecraft Minecraft is a sandbox game developed and published by Mojang Studios. Following its initial public alpha release in 2009, it was formally released in 2011 for personal computers. The game has since been ported to numerous platforms, including mobile devices and various video game consoles. In Minecraft, players explore a procedurally generated world with virtually infinite terrain made up of voxels (cubes). They can discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, build structures, fight hostile mobs, and cooperate with or compete against other players in multiplayer. The game's large community offers a wide variety of user-generated content, such as modifications, servers, player skins, texture packs, and custom maps, which add new game mechanics and possibilities. Originally created by Markus "Notch" Persson using the Java programming language, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten was handed control over the game's development following its full release. In 2014, Mojang and the Minecraft intellectual property were purchased by Microsoft for US$2.5 billion; Xbox Game Studios hold the publishing rights for the Bedrock Edition, the unified cross-platform version which evolved from the Pocket Edition codebase[i] and replaced the legacy console versions. Bedrock is updated concurrently with Mojang's original Java Edition, although with numerous, generally small, differences. Minecraft is the best-selling video game in history with over 350 million copies sold. It has received critical acclaim, winning several awards and being cited as one of the greatest video games of all time. Social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, and the annual Minecon conventions have played prominent roles in popularizing it. The wider Minecraft franchise includes several spin-off games, such as Minecraft: Story Mode, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft Legends. A film adaptation, titled A Minecraft Movie, was released in 2025 and became the second highest-grossing video game film of all time. Gameplay Minecraft is a 3D sandbox video game that has no required goals to accomplish, giving players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game. The game features an optional achievement system. Gameplay is in the first-person perspective by default, but players have the option of third-person perspectives. The game world is composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes, referred to as blocks—representing various materials, such as dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water, and lava. The core gameplay revolves around picking up and placing these objects. These blocks are arranged in a voxel grid, while players can move freely around the world. Players can break, or mine, blocks and then place them elsewhere, enabling them to build things. Very few blocks are affected by gravity, instead maintaining their voxel position in the air. Players can also craft a wide variety of items, such as armor, which mitigates damage from attacks; weapons (such as swords or bows and arrows), which allow monsters and animals to be killed more easily; and tools (such as pickaxes or shovels), which break certain types of blocks more quickly. Some items have multiple tiers depending on the material used to craft them, with higher-tier items being more effective and durable. They may also freely craft helpful blocks—such as furnaces which can cook food and smelt ores, and torches that produce light—or exchange items with villagers (NPC) through trading emeralds for different goods and vice versa. The game has an inventory system, allowing players to carry a limited number of items. The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, with one full cycle lasting for 20 real-time minutes. The game also contains a material called redstone, which can be used to make primitive mechanical devices, electrical circuits, and logic gates, allowing for the construction of many complex systems. New players are given a randomly selected default character skin out of nine possibilities, including Steve or Alex, but are able to create and upload their own skins. Players encounter various mobs (short for mobile entities) including animals, villagers, and hostile creatures. Passive mobs, such as cows, pigs, and chickens, spawn during the daytime and can be hunted for food and crafting materials, while hostile mobs—including large spiders, witches, skeletons, and zombies—spawn during nighttime or in dark places such as caves. Some hostile mobs, such as zombies and skeletons, burn under the sun if they have no headgear and are not standing in water. Other creatures unique to Minecraft include the creeper (an exploding creature that sneaks up on the player) and the enderman (a creature with the ability to teleport as well as pick up and place blocks). There are also variants of mobs that spawn in different conditions; for example, zombies have husk and drowned variants that spawn in deserts and oceans, respectively. The Minecraft environment is procedurally generated as players explore it using a map seed that is randomly chosen at the time of world creation (or manually specified by the player). Divided into biomes representing different environments with unique resources and structures, worlds are designed to be effectively infinite in traditional gameplay, though technical limits on the player have existed throughout development, both intentionally and not. Implementation of horizontally infinite generation initially resulted in a glitch termed the "Far Lands" at over 12 million blocks away from the world center, where terrain generated as wall-like, fissured patterns. The Far Lands and associated glitches were considered the effective edge of the world until they were resolved, with the current horizontal limit instead being a special impassable barrier called the world border, located 30 million blocks away. Vertical space is comparatively limited, with an unbreakable bedrock layer at the bottom and a building limit several hundred blocks into the sky. Minecraft features three independent dimensions accessible through portals and providing alternate game environments. The Overworld is the starting dimension and represents the real world, with a terrestrial surface setting including plains, mountains, forests, oceans, caves, and small sources of lava. The Nether is a hell-like underworld dimension accessed via an obsidian portal and composed mainly of lava. Mobs that populate the Nether include shrieking, fireball-shooting ghasts, alongside anthropomorphic pigs called piglins and their zombified counterparts. Piglins in particular have a bartering system, where players can give them gold ingots and receive items in return. Structures known as Nether Fortresses generate in the Nether, containing mobs such as wither skeletons and blazes, which can drop blaze rods needed to access the End dimension. The player can also choose to build an optional boss mob known as the Wither, using skulls obtained from wither skeletons and soul sand. The End can be reached through an end portal, consisting of twelve end portal frames. End portals are found in underground structures in the Overworld known as strongholds. To find strongholds, players must craft eyes of ender using an ender pearl and blaze powder. Eyes of ender can then be thrown, traveling in the direction of the stronghold. Once the player reaches the stronghold, they can place eyes of ender into each portal frame to activate the end portal. The dimension consists of islands floating in a dark, bottomless void. A boss enemy called the Ender Dragon guards the largest, central island. Killing the dragon opens access to an exit portal, which, when entered, cues the game's ending credits and the End Poem, a roughly 1,500-word work written by Irish novelist Julian Gough, which takes about nine minutes to scroll past, is the game's only narrative text, and the only text of significant length directed at the player.: 10–12 At the conclusion of the credits, the player is teleported back to their respawn point and may continue the game indefinitely. In Survival mode, players have to gather natural resources such as wood and stone found in the environment in order to craft certain blocks and items. Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn in darker areas outside a certain radius of the character, requiring players to build a shelter in order to survive at night. The mode also has a health bar which is depleted by attacks from mobs, falls, drowning, falling into lava, suffocation, starvation, and other events. Players also have a hunger bar, which must be periodically refilled by eating food in-game unless the player is playing on peaceful difficulty. If the hunger bar is empty, the player starves. Health replenishes when players have a full hunger bar or continuously on peaceful. Upon losing all health, players die. The items in the players' inventories are dropped unless the game is reconfigured not to do so. Players then re-spawn at their spawn point, which by default is where players first spawn in the game and can be changed by sleeping in a bed or using a respawn anchor. Dropped items can be recovered if players can reach them before they despawn after 5 minutes. Players may acquire experience points (commonly referred to as "xp" or "exp") by killing mobs and other players, mining, smelting ores, animal breeding, and cooking food. Experience can then be spent on enchanting tools, armor and weapons. Enchanted items are generally more powerful, last longer, or have other special effects. The game features two more game modes based on Survival, known as Hardcore mode and Adventure mode. Hardcore mode plays identically to Survival mode, but with the game's difficulty setting locked to "Hard" and with permadeath, forcing them to delete the world or explore it as a spectator after dying. Adventure mode was added to the game in a post-launch update, and prevents the player from directly modifying the game's world. It was designed primarily for use in custom maps, allowing map designers to let players experience it as intended. In Creative mode, players have access to an infinite number of all resources and items in the game through the inventory menu and can place or mine them instantly. Players can toggle the ability to fly freely around the game world at will, and their characters usually do not take any damage nor are affected by hunger. The game mode helps players focus on building and creating projects of any size without disturbance. Multiplayer in Minecraft enables multiple players to interact and communicate with each other on a single world. It is available through direct game-to-game multiplayer, local area network (LAN) play, local split screen (console-only), and servers (player-hosted and business-hosted). Players can run their own server by making a realm, using a host provider, hosting one themselves or connect directly to another player's game via Xbox Live, PlayStation Network or Nintendo Switch Online. Single-player worlds have LAN support, allowing players to join a world on locally interconnected computers without a server setup. Minecraft multiplayer servers are guided by server operators, who have access to server commands such as setting the time of day and teleporting players. Operators can also set up restrictions concerning which usernames or IP addresses are allowed or disallowed to enter the server. Multiplayer servers have a wide range of activities, with some servers having their own unique rules and customs. The largest and most popular server is Hypixel, which has been visited by over 14 million unique players. Player versus player combat (PvP) can be enabled to allow fighting between players. In 2013, Mojang announced Minecraft Realms, a server hosting service intended to enable players to run server multiplayer games easily and safely without having to set up their own. Unlike a standard server, only invited players can join Realms servers, and these servers do not use server addresses. Minecraft: Java Edition Realms server owners can invite up to twenty people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at a time. Minecraft Realms server owners can invite up to 3,000 people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at one time. The Minecraft: Java Edition Realms servers do not support user-made plugins, but players can play custom Minecraft maps. Minecraft Bedrock Realms servers support user-made add-ons, resource packs, behavior packs, and custom Minecraft maps. At Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016, support for cross-platform play between Windows 10, iOS, and Android platforms was added through Realms starting in June 2016, with Xbox One and Nintendo Switch support to come later in 2017, and support for virtual reality devices. On 31 July 2017, Mojang released the beta version of the update allowing cross-platform play. Nintendo Switch support for Realms was released in July 2018. The modding community consists of fans, users and third-party programmers. Using a variety of application program interfaces that have arisen over time, they have produced a wide variety of downloadable content for Minecraft, such as modifications, texture packs and custom maps. Modifications of the Minecraft code, called mods, add a variety of gameplay changes, ranging from new blocks, items, and mobs to entire arrays of mechanisms. The modding community is responsible for a substantial supply of mods from ones that enhance gameplay, such as mini-maps, waypoints, and durability counters, to ones that add to the game elements from other video games and media. While a variety of mod frameworks were independently developed by reverse engineering the code, Mojang has also enhanced vanilla Minecraft with official frameworks for modification, allowing the production of community-created resource packs, which alter certain game elements including textures and sounds. Players can also create their own "maps" (custom world save files) that often contain specific rules, challenges, puzzles and quests, and share them for others to play. Mojang added an adventure mode in August 2012 and "command blocks" in October 2012, which were created specially for custom maps in Java Edition. Data packs, introduced in version 1.13 of the Java Edition, allow further customization, including the ability to add new achievements, dimensions, functions, loot tables, predicates, recipes, structures, tags, and world generation. The Xbox 360 Edition supported downloadable content, which was available to purchase via the Xbox Games Store; these content packs usually contained additional character skins. It later received support for texture packs in its twelfth title update while introducing "mash-up packs", which combined texture packs with skin packs and changes to the game's sounds, music and user interface. The first mash-up pack (and by extension, the first texture pack) for the Xbox 360 Edition was released on 4 September 2013, and was themed after the Mass Effect franchise. Unlike Java Edition, however, the Xbox 360 Edition did not support player-made mods or custom maps. A cross-promotional resource pack based on the Super Mario franchise by Nintendo was released exclusively for the Wii U Edition worldwide on 17 May 2016, and later bundled free with the Nintendo Switch Edition at launch. Another based on Fallout was released on consoles that December, and for Windows and Mobile in April 2017. In April 2018, malware was discovered in several downloadable user-made Minecraft skins for use with the Java Edition of the game. Avast stated that nearly 50,000 accounts were infected, and when activated, the malware would attempt to reformat the user's hard drive. Mojang promptly patched the issue, and released a statement stating that "the code would not be run or read by the game itself", and would run only when the image containing the skin itself was opened. In June 2017, Mojang released the "1.1 Discovery Update" to the Pocket Edition of the game, which later became the Bedrock Edition. The update introduced the "Marketplace", a catalogue of purchasable user-generated content intended to give Minecraft creators "another way to make a living from the game". Various skins, maps, texture packs and add-ons from different creators can be bought with "Minecoins", a digital currency that is purchased with real money. Additionally, users can access specific content with a subscription service titled "Marketplace Pass". Alongside content from independent creators, the Marketplace also houses items published by Mojang and Microsoft themselves, as well as official collaborations between Minecraft and other intellectual properties. By 2022, the Marketplace had over 1.7 billion content downloads, generating over $500 million in revenue. Development Before creating Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson was a game developer at King, where he worked until March 2009. At King, he primarily developed browser games and learned several programming languages. During his free time, he prototyped his own games, often drawing inspiration from other titles, and was an active participant on the TIGSource forums for independent developers. One such project was "RubyDung", a base-building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but with an isometric, three-dimensional perspective similar to RollerCoaster Tycoon. Among the features in RubyDung that he explored was a first-person view similar to Dungeon Keeper, though he ultimately discarded this idea, feeling the graphics were too pixelated at the time. Around March 2009, Persson left King and joined jAlbum, while continuing to work on his prototypes. Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game first released in April 2009, inspired Persson's vision for RubyDung's future direction. Infiniminer heavily influenced the visual style of gameplay, including bringing back the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals. However, unlike Infiniminer, Persson wanted Minecraft to have RPG elements. The first public alpha build of Minecraft was released on 17 May 2009 on TIGSource. Over the years, Persson regularly released test builds that added new features, including tools, mobs, and entire new dimensions. In 2011, partly due to the game's rising popularity, Persson decided to release a full 1.0 version—a second part of the "Adventure Update"—on 18 November 2011. Shortly after, Persson stepped down from development, handing the project's lead to Jens "Jeb" Bergensten. On 15 September 2014, Microsoft, the developer behind the Microsoft Windows operating system and Xbox video game console, announced a $2.5 billion acquisition of Mojang, which included the Minecraft intellectual property. Persson had suggested the deal on Twitter, asking a corporation to buy his stake in the game after receiving criticism for enforcing terms in the game's end-user license agreement (EULA), which had been in place for the past three years. According to Persson, Mojang CEO Carl Manneh received a call from a Microsoft executive shortly after the tweet, asking if Persson was serious about a deal. Mojang was also approached by other companies including Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts. The deal with Microsoft was arbitrated on 6 November 2014 and led to Persson becoming one of Forbes' "World's Billionaires". After 2014, Minecraft's primary versions received usually annual major updates—free to players who have purchased the game— each primarily centered around a specific theme. For instance, version 1.13, the Update Aquatic, focused on ocean-related features, while version 1.16, the Nether Update, introduced significant changes to the Nether dimension. However, in late 2024, Mojang announced a shift in their update strategy; rather than releasing large updates annually, they opted for a more frequent release schedule with smaller, incremental updates, stating, "We know that you want new Minecraft content more often." The Bedrock Edition has also received regular updates, now matching the themes of the Java Edition updates. Other versions of the game, such as various console editions and the Pocket Edition, were either merged into Bedrock or discontinued and have not received further updates. On 7 May 2019, coinciding with Minecraft's 10th anniversary, a JavaScript recreation of an old 2009 Java Edition build named Minecraft Classic was made available to play online for free. On 16 April 2020, a Bedrock Edition-exclusive beta version of Minecraft, called Minecraft RTX, was released by Nvidia. It introduced physically-based rendering, real-time path tracing, and DLSS for RTX-enabled GPUs. The public release was made available on 8 December 2020. Path tracing can only be enabled in supported worlds, which can be downloaded for free via the in-game Minecraft Marketplace, with a texture pack from Nvidia's website, or with compatible third-party texture packs. It cannot be enabled by default with any texture pack on any world. Initially, Minecraft RTX was affected by many bugs, display errors, and instability issues. On 22 March 2025, a new visual mode called Vibrant Visuals, an optional graphical overhaul similar to Minecraft RTX, was announced. It promises modern rendering features—such as dynamic shadows, screen space reflections, volumetric fog, and bloom—without the need of RTX-capable hardware. Vibrant Visuals was released as a part of the Chase the Skies update on 17 June 2025 for Bedrock Edition and is planned to release on Java Edition at a later date. Development began for the original edition of Minecraft—then known as Cave Game, and now known as the Java Edition—in May 2009,[k] and ended on 13 May, when Persson released a test video on YouTube of an early version of the game, dubbed the "Cave game tech test" or the "Cave game tech demo". The game was named Minecraft: Order of the Stone the next day, after a suggestion made by a player. "Order of the Stone" came from the webcomic The Order of the Stick, and "Minecraft" was chosen "because it's a good name". The title was later shortened to just Minecraft, omitting the subtitle. Persson completed the game's base programming over a weekend in May 2009, and private testing began on TigIRC on 16 May. The first public release followed on 17 May 2009 as a developmental version shared on the TIGSource forums. Based on feedback from forum users, Persson continued updating the game. This initial public build later became known as Classic. Further developmental phases—dubbed Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev—were released throughout 2009 and 2010. The first major update, known as Alpha, was released on 30 June 2010. At the time, Persson was still working a day job at jAlbum but later resigned to focus on Minecraft full-time as sales of the alpha version surged. Updates were distributed automatically, introducing new blocks, items, mobs, and changes to game mechanics such as water flow. With revenue generated from the game, Persson founded Mojang, a video game studio, alongside former colleagues Jakob Porser and Carl Manneh. On 11 December 2010, Persson announced that Minecraft would enter its beta phase on 20 December. He assured players that bug fixes and all pre-release updates would remain free. As development progressed, Mojang expanded, hiring additional employees to work on the project. The game officially exited beta and launched in full on 18 November 2011. On 1 December 2011, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten took full creative control over Minecraft, replacing Persson as lead designer. On 28 February 2012, Mojang announced the hiring of the developers behind Bukkit, a popular developer API for Minecraft servers, to improve Minecraft's support of server modifications. This move included Mojang taking apparent ownership of the CraftBukkit server mod, though this apparent acquisition later became controversial, and its legitimacy was questioned due to CraftBukkit's open-source nature and licensing under the GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License. In August 2011, Minecraft: Pocket Edition was released as an early alpha for the Xperia Play via the Android Market, later expanding to other Android devices on 8 October 2011. The iOS version followed on 17 November 2011. A port was made available for Windows Phones shortly after Microsoft acquired Mojang. Unlike Java Edition, Pocket Edition initially focused on Minecraft's creative building and basic survival elements but lacked many features of the PC version. Bergensten confirmed on Twitter that the Pocket Edition was written in C++ rather than Java, as iOS does not support Java. On 10 December 2014, a port of Pocket Edition was released for Windows Phone 8.1. In July 2015, a port of the Pocket Edition to Windows 10 was released as the Windows 10 Edition, with full crossplay to other Pocket versions. In January 2017, Microsoft announced that it would no longer maintain the Windows Phone versions of Pocket Edition. On 20 September 2017, with the "Better Together Update", the Pocket Edition was ported to the Xbox One, and was renamed to the Bedrock Edition. The console versions of Minecraft debuted with the Xbox 360 edition, developed by 4J Studios and released on 9 May 2012. Announced as part of the Xbox Live Arcade NEXT promotion, this version introduced a redesigned crafting system, a new control interface, in-game tutorials, split-screen multiplayer, and online play via Xbox Live. Unlike the PC version, its worlds were finite, bordered by invisible walls. Initially, the Xbox 360 version resembled outdated PC versions but received updates to bring it closer to Java Edition before eventually being discontinued. The Xbox One version launched on 5 September 2014, featuring larger worlds and support for more players. Minecraft expanded to PlayStation platforms with PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 editions released on 17 December 2013 and 4 September 2014, respectively. Originally planned as a PS4 launch title, it was delayed before its eventual release. A PlayStation Vita version followed in October 2014. Like the Xbox versions, the PlayStation editions were developed by 4J Studios. Nintendo platforms received Minecraft: Wii U Edition on 17 December 2015, with a physical release in North America on 17 June 2016 and in Europe on 30 June. The Nintendo Switch version launched via the eShop on 11 May 2017. During a Nintendo Direct presentation on 13 September 2017, Nintendo announced that Minecraft: New Nintendo 3DS Edition, based on the Pocket Edition, would be available for download immediately after the livestream, and a physical copy available on a later date. The game is compatible only with the New Nintendo 3DS or New Nintendo 2DS XL systems and does not work with the original 3DS or 2DS systems. On 20 September 2017, the Better Together Update introduced Bedrock Edition across Xbox One, Windows 10, VR, and mobile platforms, enabling cross-play between these versions. Bedrock Edition later expanded to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, with the latter receiving the update in December 2019, allowing cross-platform play for users with a free Xbox Live account. The Bedrock Edition released a native version for PlayStation 5 on 22 October 2024, while the Xbox Series X/S version launched on 17 June 2025. On 18 December 2018, the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, and Wii U versions of Minecraft received their final update and would later become known as "Legacy Console Editions". On 15 January 2019, the New Nintendo 3DS version of Minecraft received its final update, effectively becoming discontinued as well. An educational version of Minecraft, designed for use in schools, launched on 1 November 2016. It is available on Android, ChromeOS, iPadOS, iOS, MacOS, and Windows. On 20 August 2018, Mojang announced that it would bring Education Edition to iPadOS in Autumn 2018. It was released to the App Store on 6 September 2018. On 27 March 2019, it was announced that it would be operated by JD.com in China. On 26 June 2020, a public beta for the Education Edition was made available to Google Play Store compatible Chromebooks. The full game was released to the Google Play Store for Chromebooks on 7 August 2020. On 20 May 2016, China Edition (also known as My World) was announced as a localized edition for China, where it was released under a licensing agreement between NetEase and Mojang. The PC edition was released for public testing on 8 August 2017. The iOS version was released on 15 September 2017, and the Android version was released on 12 October 2017. The PC edition is based on the original Java Edition, while the iOS and Android mobile versions are based on the Bedrock Edition. The edition is free-to-play and had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. This version of Bedrock Edition is exclusive to Microsoft's Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems. The beta release for Windows 10 launched on the Windows Store on 29 July 2015. After nearly a year and a half in beta, Microsoft fully released the version on 19 December 2016. Called the "Ender Update", this release implemented new features to this version of Minecraft like world templates and add-on packs. On 7 June 2022, the Java and Bedrock Editions of Minecraft were merged into a single bundle for purchase on Windows; those who owned one version would automatically gain access to the other version. Both game versions would otherwise remain separate. Around 2011, prior to Minecraft's full release, Mojang collaborated with The Lego Group to create a Lego brick-based Minecraft game called Brickcraft. This would have modified the base Minecraft game to use Lego bricks, which meant adapting the basic 1×1 block to account for larger pieces typically used in Lego sets. Persson worked on an early version called "Project Rex Kwon Do", named after the character of the same name from the film Napoleon Dynamite. Although Lego approved the project and Mojang assigned two developers for six months, it was canceled due to the Lego Group's demands, according to Mojang's Daniel Kaplan. Lego considered buying Mojang to complete the game, but when Microsoft offered over $2 billion for the company, Lego stepped back, unsure of Minecraft's potential. On 26 June 2025, a build of Brickcraft dated 28 June 2012 was published on a community archive website Omniarchive. Initially, Markus Persson planned to support the Oculus Rift with a Minecraft port. However, after Facebook acquired Oculus in 2013, he abruptly canceled the plans, stating, "Facebook creeps me out." In 2016, a community-made mod, Minecraft VR, added VR support for Java Edition, followed by Vivecraft for HTC Vive. Later that year, Microsoft introduced official Oculus Rift support for Windows 10 Edition, leading to the discontinuation of the Minecraft VR mod due to trademark complaints. Vivecraft was endorsed by Minecraft VR contributors for its Rift support. Also available is a Gear VR version, titled Minecraft: Gear VR Edition. Windows Mixed Reality support was added in 2017. On 7 September 2020, Mojang Studios announced that the PlayStation 4 Bedrock version would receive PlayStation VR support later that month. In September 2024, the Minecraft team announced they would no longer support PlayStation VR, which received its final update in March 2025. Music and sound design Minecraft's music and sound effects were produced by German musician Daniel Rosenfeld, better known as C418. To create the sound effects for the game, Rosenfeld made extensive use of Foley techniques. On learning the processes for the game, he remarked, "Foley's an interesting thing, and I had to learn its subtleties. Early on, I wasn't that knowledgeable about it. It's a whole trial-and-error process. You just make a sound and eventually you go, 'Oh my God, that's it! Get the microphone!' There's no set way of doing anything at all." He reminisced on creating the in-game sound for grass blocks, stating "It turns out that to make grass sounds you don't actually walk on grass and record it, because grass sounds like nothing. What you want to do is get a VHS, break it apart, and just lightly touch the tape." According to Rosenfeld, his favorite sound to design for the game was the hisses of spiders. He elaborates, "I like the spiders. Recording that was a whole day of me researching what a spider sounds like. Turns out, there are spiders that make little screeching sounds, so I think I got this recording of a fire hose, put it in a sampler, and just pitched it around until it sounded like a weird spider was talking to you." Many of the sound design decisions by Rosenfeld were done accidentally or spontaneously. The creeper notably lacks any specific noises apart from a loud fuse-like sound when about to explode; Rosenfeld later recalled "That was just a complete accident by Markus and me [sic]. We just put in a placeholder sound of burning a matchstick. It seemed to work hilariously well, so we kept it." On other sounds, such as those of the zombie, Rosenfeld remarked, "I actually never wanted the zombies so scary. I intentionally made them sound comical. It's nice to hear that they work so well [...]." Rosenfeld remarked that the sound engine was "terrible" to work with, remembering "If you had two song files at once, it [the game engine] would actually crash. There were so many more weird glitches like that the guys never really fixed because they were too busy with the actual game and not the sound engine." The background music in Minecraft consists of instrumental ambient music. To compose the music of Minecraft, Rosenfeld used the package from Ableton Live, along with several additional plug-ins. Speaking on them, Rosenfeld said "They can be pretty much everything from an effect to an entire orchestra. Additionally, I've got some synthesizers that are attached to the computer. Like a Moog Voyager, Dave Smith Prophet 08 and a Virus TI." On 4 March 2011, Rosenfeld released a soundtrack titled Minecraft – Volume Alpha; it includes most of the tracks featured in Minecraft, as well as other music not featured in the game. Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku chose the music in Minecraft as one of the best video game soundtracks of 2011. On 9 November 2013, Rosenfeld released the second official soundtrack, titled Minecraft – Volume Beta, which included the music that was added in a 2013 "Music Update" for the game. A physical release of Volume Alpha, consisting of CDs, black vinyl, and limited-edition transparent green vinyl LPs, was issued by indie electronic label Ghostly International on 21 August 2015. On 14 August 2020, Ghostly released Volume Beta on CD and vinyl, with alternate color LPs and lenticular cover pressings released in limited quantities. The final update Rosenfeld worked on was 2018's 1.13 Update Aquatic. His music remained the only music in the game until 2020's "Nether Update", introducing pieces from Lena Raine. Since then, other composers have made contributions, including Kumi Tanioka, Samuel Åberg, Aaron Cherof, and Amos Roddy, with Raine remaining as the new primary composer. Ownership of all music besides Rosenfeld's independently released albums has been retained by Microsoft, with their label publishing all of the other artists' releases. Gareth Coker also composed some of the music for the game's mini games from the Legacy Console editions. Rosenfeld had stated his intent to create a third album of music for the game in a 2015 interview with Fact, and confirmed its existence in a 2017 tweet, stating that his work on the record as of then had tallied up to be longer than the previous two albums combined, which in total clocks in at over 3 hours and 18 minutes. However, due to licensing issues with Microsoft, the third volume has since not seen release. On 8 January 2021, Rosenfeld was asked in an interview with Anthony Fantano whether or not there was still a third volume of his music intended for release. Rosenfeld responded, saying, "I have something—I consider it finished—but things have become complicated, especially as Minecraft is now a big property, so I don't know." Reception Minecraft has received critical acclaim, with praise for the creative freedom it grants players in-game, as well as the ease of enabling emergent gameplay. Critics have expressed enjoyment in Minecraft's complex crafting system, commenting that it is an important aspect of the game's open-ended gameplay. Most publications were impressed by the game's "blocky" graphics, with IGN describing them as "instantly memorable". Reviewers also liked the game's adventure elements, noting that the game creates a good balance between exploring and building. The game's multiplayer feature has been generally received favorably, with IGN commenting that "adventuring is always better with friends". Jaz McDougall of PC Gamer said Minecraft is "intuitively interesting and contagiously fun, with an unparalleled scope for creativity and memorable experiences". It has been regarded as having introduced millions of children to the digital world, insofar as its basic game mechanics are logically analogous to computer commands. IGN was disappointed about the troublesome steps needed to set up multiplayer servers, calling it a "hassle". Critics also said that visual glitches occur periodically. Despite its release out of beta in 2011, GameSpot said the game had an "unfinished feel", adding that some game elements seem "incomplete or thrown together in haste". A review of the alpha version, by Scott Munro of the Daily Record, called it "already something special" and urged readers to buy it. Jim Rossignol of Rock Paper Shotgun also recommended the alpha of the game, calling it "a kind of generative 8-bit Lego Stalker". On 17 September 2010, gaming webcomic Penny Arcade began a series of comics and news posts about the addictiveness of the game. The Xbox 360 version was generally received positively by critics, but did not receive as much praise as the PC version. Although reviewers were disappointed by the lack of features such as mod support and content from the PC version, they acclaimed the port's addition of a tutorial and in-game tips and crafting recipes, saying that they make the game more user-friendly. The Xbox One Edition was one of the best received ports, being praised for its relatively large worlds. The PlayStation 3 Edition also received generally favorable reviews, being compared to the Xbox 360 Edition and praised for its well-adapted controls. The PlayStation 4 edition was the best received port to date, being praised for having 36 times larger worlds than the PlayStation 3 edition and described as nearly identical to the Xbox One edition. The PlayStation Vita Edition received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for its technical limitations. The Wii U version received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for a lack of GamePad integration. The 3DS version received mixed reviews, being criticized for its high price, technical issues, and lack of cross-platform play. The Nintendo Switch Edition received fairly positive reviews from critics, being praised, like other modern ports, for its relatively larger worlds. Minecraft: Pocket Edition initially received mixed reviews from critics. Although reviewers appreciated the game's intuitive controls, they were disappointed by the lack of content. The inability to collect resources and craft items, as well as the limited types of blocks and lack of hostile mobs, were especially criticized. After updates added more content, Pocket Edition started receiving more positive reviews. Reviewers complimented the controls and the graphics, but still noted a lack of content. Minecraft surpassed over a million purchases less than a month after entering its beta phase in early 2011. At the same time, the game had no publisher backing and has never been commercially advertised except through word of mouth, and various unpaid references in popular media such as the Penny Arcade webcomic. By April 2011, Persson estimated that Minecraft had made €23 million (US$33 million) in revenue, with 800,000 sales of the alpha version of the game, and over 1 million sales of the beta version. In November 2011, prior to the game's full release, Minecraft beta surpassed 16 million registered users and 4 million purchases. By March 2012, Minecraft had become the 6th best-selling PC game of all time. As of 10 October 2014[update], the game had sold 17 million copies on PC, becoming the best-selling PC game of all time. On 25 February 2014, the game reached 100 million registered users. By May 2019, 180 million copies had been sold across all platforms, making it the single best-selling video game of all time. The free-to-play Minecraft China version had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. By 2023, the game had sold over 300 million copies. As of April 2025, Minecraft has sold over 350 million copies. The Xbox 360 version of Minecraft became profitable within the first day of the game's release in 2012, when the game broke the Xbox Live sales records with 400,000 players online. Within a week of being on the Xbox Live Marketplace, Minecraft sold a million copies. GameSpot announced in December 2012 that Minecraft sold over 4.48 million copies since the game debuted on Xbox Live Arcade in May 2012. In 2012, Minecraft was the most purchased title on Xbox Live Arcade; it was also the fourth most played title on Xbox Live based on average unique users per day. As of 4 April 2014[update], the Xbox 360 version has sold 12 million copies. In addition, Minecraft: Pocket Edition has reached a figure of 21 million in sales. The PlayStation 3 Edition sold one million copies in five weeks. The release of the game's PlayStation Vita version boosted Minecraft sales by 79%, outselling both PS3 and PS4 debut releases and becoming the largest Minecraft launch on a PlayStation console. The PS Vita version sold 100,000 digital copies in Japan within the first two months of release, according to an announcement by SCE Japan Asia. By January 2015, 500,000 digital copies of Minecraft were sold in Japan across all PlayStation platforms, with a surge in primary school children purchasing the PS Vita version. As of 2022, the Vita version has sold over 1.65 million physical copies in Japan, making it the best-selling Vita game in the country. Minecraft helped improve Microsoft's total first-party revenue by $63 million for the 2015 second quarter. The game, including all of its versions, had over 112 million monthly active players by September 2019. On its 11th anniversary in May 2020, the company announced that Minecraft had reached over 200 million copies sold across platforms with over 126 million monthly active players. By April 2021, the number of active monthly users had climbed to 140 million. In July 2010, PC Gamer listed Minecraft as the fourth-best game to play at work. In December of that year, Good Game selected Minecraft as their choice for Best Downloadable Game of 2010, Gamasutra named it the eighth best game of the year as well as the eighth best indie game of the year, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun named it the "game of the year". Indie DB awarded the game the 2010 Indie of the Year award as chosen by voters, in addition to two out of five Editor's Choice awards for Most Innovative and Best Singleplayer Indie. It was also awarded Game of the Year by PC Gamer UK. The game was nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Technical Excellence, and Excellence in Design awards at the March 2011 Independent Games Festival and won the Grand Prize and the community-voted Audience Award. At Game Developers Choice Awards 2011, Minecraft won awards in the categories for Best Debut Game, Best Downloadable Game and Innovation Award, winning every award for which it was nominated. It also won GameCity's video game arts award. On 5 May 2011, Minecraft was selected as one of the 80 games that would be displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of The Art of Video Games exhibit that opened on 16 March 2012. At the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards, Minecraft won the award for Best Independent Game and was nominated in the Best PC Game category. In 2012, at the British Academy Video Games Awards, Minecraft was nominated in the GAME Award of 2011 category and Persson received The Special Award. In 2012, Minecraft XBLA was awarded a Golden Joystick Award in the Best Downloadable Game category, and a TIGA Games Industry Award in the Best Arcade Game category. In 2013, it was nominated as the family game of the year at the British Academy Video Games Awards. During the 16th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences nominated the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft for "Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year". Minecraft Console Edition won the award for TIGA Game Of The Year in 2014. In 2015, the game placed 6th on USgamer's The 15 Best Games Since 2000 list. In 2016, Minecraft placed 6th on Time's The 50 Best Video Games of All Time list. Minecraft was nominated for the 2013 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite App, but lost to Temple Run. It was nominated for the 2014 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite Video Game, but lost to Just Dance 2014. The game later won the award for the Most Addicting Game at the 2015 Kids' Choice Awards. In addition, the Java Edition was nominated for "Favorite Video Game" at the 2018 Kids' Choice Awards, while the game itself won the "Still Playing" award at the 2019 Golden Joystick Awards, as well as the "Favorite Video Game" award at the 2020 Kids' Choice Awards. Minecraft also won "Stream Game of the Year" at inaugural Streamer Awards in 2021. The game later garnered a Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award nomination for Favorite Video Game in 2021, and won the same category in 2022 and 2023. At the Golden Joystick Awards 2025, it won the Still Playing Award - PC and Console. Minecraft has been subject to several notable controversies. In June 2014, Mojang announced that it would begin enforcing the portion of Minecraft's end-user license agreement (EULA) which prohibits servers from giving in-game advantages to players in exchange for donations or payments. Spokesperson Owen Hill stated that servers could still require players to pay a fee to access the server and could sell in-game cosmetic items. The change was supported by Persson, citing emails he received from parents of children who had spent hundreds of dollars on servers. The Minecraft community and server owners protested, arguing that the EULA's terms were more broad than Mojang was claiming, that the crackdown would force smaller servers to shut down for financial reasons, and that Mojang was suppressing competition for its own Minecraft Realms subscription service. The controversy contributed to Notch's decision to sell Mojang. In 2020, Mojang announced an eventual change to the Java Edition to require a login from a Microsoft account rather than a Mojang account, the latter of which would be sunsetted. This also required Java Edition players to create Xbox network Gamertags. Mojang defended the move to Microsoft accounts by saying that improved security could be offered, including two-factor authentication, blocking cyberbullies in chat, and improved parental controls. The community responded with intense backlash, citing various technical difficulties encountered in the process and how account migration would be mandatory, even for those who do not play on servers. As of 10 March 2022, Microsoft required that all players migrate in order to maintain access the Java Edition of Minecraft. Mojang announced a deadline of 19 September 2023 for account migration, after which all legacy Mojang accounts became inaccessible and unable to be migrated. In June 2022, Mojang added a player-reporting feature in Java Edition. Players could report other players on multiplayer servers for sending messages prohibited by the Xbox Live Code of Conduct; report categories included profane language,[l] substance abuse, hate speech, threats of violence, and nudity. If a player was found to be in violation of Xbox Community Standards, they would be banned from all servers for a specific period of time or permanently. The update containing the report feature (1.19.1) was released on 27 July 2022. Mojang received substantial backlash and protest from community members, one of the most common complaints being that banned players would be forbidden from joining any server, even private ones. Others took issue to what they saw as Microsoft increasing control over its player base and exercising censorship, leading some to start a hashtag #saveminecraft and dub the version "1.19.84", a reference to the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The "Mob Vote" was an online event organized by Mojang in which the Minecraft community voted between three original mob concepts; initially, the winning mob was to be implemented in a future update, while the losing mobs were scrapped, though after the first mob vote this was changed, and losing mobs would now have a chance to come to the game in the future. The first Mob Vote was held during Minecon Earth 2017 and became an annual event starting with Minecraft Live 2020. The Mob Vote was often criticized for forcing players to choose one mob instead of implementing all three, causing divisions and flaming within the community, and potentially allowing internet bots and Minecraft content creators with large fanbases to conduct vote brigading. The Mob Vote was also blamed for a perceived lack of new content added to Minecraft since Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang in 2014. The 2023 Mob Vote featured three passive mobs—the crab, the penguin, and the armadillo—with voting scheduled to start on 13 October. In response, a Change.org petition was created on 6 October, demanding that Mojang eliminate the Mob Vote and instead implement all three mobs going forward. The petition received approximately 445,000 signatures by 13 October and was joined by calls to boycott the Mob Vote, as well as a partially tongue-in-cheek "revolutionary" propaganda campaign in which sympathizers created anti-Mojang and pro-boycott posters in the vein of real 20th century propaganda posters. Mojang did not release an official response to the boycott, and the Mob Vote otherwise proceeded normally, with the armadillo winning the vote. In September 2024, as part of a blog post detailing their future plans for Minecraft's development, Mojang announced the Mob Vote would be retired. Cultural impact In September 2019, The Guardian classified Minecraft as the best video game of the 21st century to date, and in November 2019, Polygon called it the "most important game of the decade" in its 2010s "decade in review". In June 2020, Minecraft was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Minecraft is recognized as one of the first successful games to use an early access model to draw in sales prior to its full release version to help fund development. As Minecraft helped to bolster indie game development in the early 2010s, it also helped to popularize the use of the early access model in indie game development. Social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit have played a significant role in popularizing Minecraft. Research conducted by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania showed that one-third of Minecraft players learned about the game via Internet videos. In 2010, Minecraft-related videos began to gain influence on YouTube, often made by commentators. The videos usually contain screen-capture footage of the game and voice-overs. Common coverage in the videos includes creations made by players, walkthroughs of various tasks, and parodies of works in popular culture. By May 2012, over four million Minecraft-related YouTube videos had been uploaded. The game would go on to be a prominent fixture within YouTube's gaming scene during the entire 2010s; in 2014, it was the second-most searched term on the entire platform. By 2018, it was still YouTube's biggest game globally. Some popular commentators have received employment at Machinima, a now-defunct gaming video company that owned a highly watched entertainment channel on YouTube. The Yogscast is a British company that regularly produces Minecraft videos; their YouTube channel has attained billions of views, and their panel at Minecon 2011 had the highest attendance. Another well-known YouTube personality is Jordan Maron, known online as CaptainSparklez, who has also created many Minecraft music parodies, including "Revenge", a parody of Usher's "DJ Got Us Fallin' in Love". Minecraft's popularity on YouTube was described by Polygon as quietly dominant, although in 2019, thanks in part to PewDiePie's playthroughs of the game, Minecraft experienced a visible uptick in popularity on the platform. Longer-running series include Far Lands or Bust, dedicated to reaching the obsolete "Far Lands" glitch by foot on an older version of the game. YouTube announced that on 14 December 2021 that the total amount of Minecraft-related views on the website had exceeded one trillion. Minecraft has been referenced by other video games, such as Torchlight II, Team Fortress 2, Borderlands 2, Choplifter HD, Super Meat Boy, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Binding of Isaac, The Stanley Parable, and FTL: Faster Than Light. Minecraft is officially represented in downloadable content for the crossover fighter Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, with Steve as a playable character with a moveset including references to building, crafting, and redstone, alongside an Overworld-themed stage. It was also referenced by electronic music artist Deadmau5 in his performances. The game is also referenced heavily in "Informative Murder Porn", the second episode of the seventeenth season of the animated television series South Park. In 2025, A Minecraft Movie was released. It made $313 million in the box office in the first week, a record-breaking opening for a video game adaptation. Minecraft has been noted as a cultural touchstone for Generation Z, as many of the generation's members played the game at a young age. The possible applications of Minecraft have been discussed extensively, especially in the fields of computer-aided design (CAD) and education. In a panel at Minecon 2011, a Swedish developer discussed the possibility of using the game to redesign public buildings and parks, stating that rendering using Minecraft was much more user-friendly for the community, making it easier to envision the functionality of new buildings and parks. In 2012, a member of the Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab, Cody Sumter, said: "Notch hasn't just built a game. He's tricked 40 million people into learning to use a CAD program." Various software has been developed to allow virtual designs to be printed using professional 3D printers or personal printers such as MakerBot and RepRap. In September 2012, Mojang began the Block by Block project in cooperation with UN Habitat to create real-world environments in Minecraft. The project allows young people who live in those environments to participate in designing the changes they would like to see. Using Minecraft, the community has helped reconstruct the areas of concern, and citizens are invited to enter the Minecraft servers and modify their own neighborhood. Carl Manneh, Mojang's managing director, called the game "the perfect tool to facilitate this process", adding "The three-year partnership will support UN-Habitat's Sustainable Urban Development Network to upgrade 300 public spaces by 2016." Mojang signed Minecraft building community, FyreUK, to help render the environments into Minecraft. The first pilot project began in Kibera, one of Nairobi's informal settlements and is in the planning phase. The Block by Block project is based on an earlier initiative started in October 2011, Mina Kvarter (My Block), which gave young people in Swedish communities a tool to visualize how they wanted to change their part of town. According to Manneh, the project was a helpful way to visualize urban planning ideas without necessarily having a training in architecture. The ideas presented by the citizens were a template for political decisions. In April 2014, the Danish Geodata Agency generated all of Denmark in fullscale in Minecraft based on their own geodata. This is possible because Denmark is one of the flattest countries with the highest point at 171 meters (ranking as the country with the 30th smallest elevation span), where the limit in default Minecraft was around 192 meters above in-game sea level when the project was completed. Taking advantage of the game's accessibility where other websites are censored, the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders has used an open Minecraft server to create the Uncensored Library, a repository within the game of journalism by authors from countries (including Egypt, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam) who have been censored and arrested, such as Jamal Khashoggi. The neoclassical virtual building was created over about 250 hours by an international team of 24 people. Despite its unpredictable nature, Minecraft speedrunning, where players time themselves from spawning into a new world to reaching The End and defeating the Ender Dragon boss, is popular. Some speedrunners use a combination of mods, external programs, and debug menus, while other runners play the game in a more vanilla or more consistency-oriented way. Minecraft has been used in educational settings through initiatives such as MinecraftEdu, founded in 2011 to make the game affordable and accessible for schools in collaboration with Mojang. MinecraftEdu provided features allowing teachers to monitor student progress, including screenshot submissions as evidence of lesson completion, and by 2012 reported that approximately 250,000 students worldwide had access to the platform. Mojang also developed Minecraft: Education Edition with pre-built lesson plans for up to 30 students in a closed environment. Educators have used Minecraft to teach subjects such as history, language arts, and science through custom-built environments, including reconstructions of historical landmarks and large-scale models of biological structures such as animal cells. The introduction of redstone blocks enabled the construction of functional virtual machines such as a hard drive and an 8-bit computer. Mods have been created to use these mechanics for teaching programming. In 2014, the British Museum announced a project to reproduce its building and exhibits in Minecraft in collaboration with the public. Microsoft and Code.org have offered Minecraft-based tutorials and activities designed to teach programming, reporting by 2018 that more than 85 million children had used their resources. In 2025, the Musée de Minéralogie in Paris held a temporary exhibition titled "Minerals in Minecraft." Following the initial surge in popularity of Minecraft in 2010, other video games were criticised for having various similarities to Minecraft, and some were described as being "clones", often due to a direct inspiration from Minecraft, or a superficial similarity. Examples include Ace of Spades, CastleMiner, CraftWorld, FortressCraft, Terraria, BlockWorld 3D, Total Miner, and Luanti (formerly Minetest). David Frampton, designer of The Blockheads, reported that one failure of his 2D game was the "low resolution pixel art" that too closely resembled the art in Minecraft, which resulted in "some resistance" from fans. A homebrew adaptation of the alpha version of Minecraft for the Nintendo DS, titled DScraft, has been released; it has been noted for its similarity to the original game considering the technical limitations of the system. In response to Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang and their Minecraft IP, various developers announced further clone titles developed specifically for Nintendo's consoles, as they were the only major platforms not to officially receive Minecraft at the time. These clone titles include UCraft (Nexis Games), Cube Life: Island Survival (Cypronia), Discovery (Noowanda), Battleminer (Wobbly Tooth Games), Cube Creator 3D (Big John Games), and Stone Shire (Finger Gun Games). Despite this, the fears of fans were unfounded, with official Minecraft releases on Nintendo consoles eventually resuming. Markus Persson made another similar game, Minicraft, for a Ludum Dare competition in 2011. In 2025, Persson announced through a poll on his X account that he was considering developing a spiritual successor to Minecraft. He later clarified that he was "100% serious", and that he had "basically announced Minecraft 2". Within days, however, Persson cancelled the plans after speaking to his team. In November 2024, artificial intelligence companies Decart and Etched released Oasis, an artificially generated version of Minecraft, as a proof of concept. Every in-game element is completely AI-generated in real time and the model does not store world data, leading to "hallucinations" such as items and blocks appearing that were not there before. In January 2026, indie game developer Unomelon announced that their voxel sandbox game Allumeria would be playable in Steam Next Fest that year. On 10 February, Mojang issued a DMCA takedown of Allumeria on Steam through Valve, alleging the game was infringing on Minecraft's copyright. Some reports suggested that the takedown may have used an automatic AI copyright claiming service. The DMCA was later withdrawn. Minecon was an annual official fan convention dedicated to Minecraft. The first full Minecon was held in November 2011 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The event included the official launch of Minecraft; keynote speeches, including one by Persson; building and costume contests; Minecraft-themed breakout classes; exhibits by leading gaming and Minecraft-related companies; commemorative merchandise; and autograph and picture times with Mojang employees and well-known contributors from the Minecraft community. In 2016, Minecon was held in-person for the last time, with the following years featuring annual "Minecon Earth" livestreams on minecraft.net and YouTube instead. These livestreams, later rebranded to "Minecraft Live", included the mob/biome votes, and announcements of new game updates. In 2025, "Minecraft Live" became a biannual event as part of Minecraft's changing update schedule.[citation needed] Notes References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://www.bbc.com/korean] | [TOKENS: 1762] |
BBC News, 코리아 - 홈 주요 뉴스 미 연방대법원이 트럼프 관세에 위법 판결을 내리며 한국에 부과한 15% 상호관세도 법적 근거를 잃게 된 가운데, 한국 정부는 기존 합의대로 대미투자 등 협의를 지속한다고 밝혔다. 전문가들은 가공식품에 첨가되는 유화제 같은 성분들이 장내 건강에 좋지 않다는 증거가 속속 발견되고 있다며 가공식품을 적게 먹을 것을 경고한다 BBC 퓨처의 토머스 저메인 기자는 간단한 방법을 통해 챗GPT와 구글 제미나이가 자신에 관한 허위 답변을 하도록 실험해 성공했다. 도널드 트럼프 미국 대통령이 연방대법원이 위법 판결로 무효화한 기존 관세를 대체하기 위해 전 세계를 대상으로 한 새로운 10% 관세를 부과한다고 밝혔다. 앤드루 마운트배튼-윈저는 현대 영국사에서 체포된 최초의 고위 왕족이다. 데드풀을 비롯한 영화 속 인물들의 클립 영상이 등장하면서 할리우드에서는 저작권 침해에 대한 경각심이 커지고 있다. 저커버그 CEO는 13세 미만 사용자를 식별하는 데 더 신속히 진전을 이루지 못한 것을 “늘” 후회하고 있다고 말했다. 올해 최고의 히트곡에는 로제와 브루노 마스의 ‘APT', ‘케이팝 데몬 헌터스’의 수록곡 등이 선정됐다. 19일 서울중앙지법 형사합의25부(재판장 지귀연)는 윤 전 대통령의 내란 우두머리 혐의 사건 1심에서 무기징역을 선고했다. 캐롤라인 레빗 백악관 대변인은 “이란을 타격해야 할 이유와 논거는 많다”고 했다. 현재 런던에서는 다양한 인종 배경의 갱단들이 소녀 및 젊은 여성들을 착취하고 있는 것으로 드러났다. 10대 때부터 신체이형장애를 겪어온 이들의 경험과 극복 과정을 들어봤다. BBC 코리아 라디오 한반도와 세계 곳곳의 다양한 소식을 공정하고 객관적으로 전달해 드립니다. 이 시간 이슈 BBC는 스토킹 피해자와 교제 살인 사건 유족과의 인터뷰, 판결문 및 수사기록을 토대로, 비극이 반복되는 이유를 심층 취재했다. 이번 대회에서 가장 먼저 시상대에 오르는 한국 선수는 한국 스포츠 사상 400번째 올림픽 메달 주인공이 된다. 일본 자민당의 총선 대승으로 정치적 안정과 정책 추진력이 강화된 가운데, 헌법 개정과 방위력 강화 공약이 한국 안보와 한일 관계에 어떤 영향을 미칠지 관심이 쏠리고 있다. BBC 코리아는 한국에 거주하는 세 이란 여성으로부터 현 반정부 시위 상황에 대한 그들의 심경과 생각을 들어봤다. 미국이 한국을 다시 환율 관찰 대상국으로 지정했다. 환율 관찰 대상국이란 무엇이며, 현시점에서 재지정의 의미는 무엇일까? 도널드 트럼프 미국 대통령이 한국 국회가 한미 무역합의 이행을 위한 법적 절차를 진행하지 않았다며 관세 인상을 경고했다. 그렇다면 한국 내 법적 절차는 실제로 지연되고 있을까? 미국과 관세협상을 진행한 다른 나라들은 어떤 상황일까? 한국 통일부가 지난해 하반기 '탈북민'에 대한 대체 용어를 들고 나왔다. 바로 '북향민'이다. 차별과 배제를 떠난 "중립적 호칭이 될 것"이라 밝혔지만 탈북 사회에서는 꽤 반발이 심한 모양새다. 한국 과학기술정보통신부는 '인공지능 발전과 신뢰 기반 조성 등에 관한 기본법(인공지능기본법)'이 22일부터 시행된다고 밝혔다. 세계 최초로 전면 시행되는 인공지능기본법은 어떤 내용을 담고 있고, 이제는 AI와 분리될 수 없는 일상에 어떤 영향을 미칠까? 비디오 공감 뉴스 깊이 읽기 BBC 코리아 소셜 미디어 채널 많이 본 뉴스 © 2026 BBC. BBC는 외부 사이트 및 타사 콘텐츠에 대한 책임을 지지 않습니다 외부 링크에 대한 본사 정책 보기 |
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[SOURCE: https://www.bbc.com/kyrgyz] | [TOKENS: 2024] |
BBC News, Кыргыз КызMATы - Башталгыч бет Башкы кабарлар Беш жылдан ашык созулган тандем аяктап, президент Садыр Жапаров эң жакын саясий өнөктөшү, досу Камчыбек Ташиевди бийлик сересинен четтетти. Он күндүн ичинде атайын кызматта иштен алуу жана камоолор орун алды. Парламенттин төрагасы алмашты. Айрым министрлер кызматтан кетти. Республикалык макамдагы Ош шаарынын мэри да ордун бошотуп берди. 10-февралдан бери Кыргызстанда болгон окуяларды кантип чечмелесе болот? Чүй облусунда жана Бишкекте катуу шамал болуп, бир катар турак жайлар менен социалдык объектилер жабыркады. Бул тууралуу ӨКМ билдирди. АКШнын Жогорку Соту президент Дональд Трамп импорт тарифтерин киргизүүдө өзүнүн ыйгарым укуктарынан аша чапкан деп чечим чыгарды. Көпчүлүгү Трамптын колдоочуларынан турган соттун чечими жаңы глобалдык тариф киргизүүнү чечкен президентти ачуулантты. Ал бардык өлкөлөргө 10% тарифтерди киргизүү боюнча жарлыкка кол койду. Президент Садыр Жапаров "Кабар" маалымат агенттигине маек берип, күч түзүмдөрүндө ири реформалар жүргүзүлөрүн билдирди. АКШ президенти Дональд Трамп түптөгөн “Тынчтык Кеңешинин” алгачкы саммитине дүйнөнүн булуң-бурчунан жыйырмадан ашык лидерлер чогулушту. Бул жаңы глобалдуу саясий түзүмдү Трамп БУУнун Коопсуздук Кеңешине альтернатива катары көргүсү келет же, жок дегенде, анын ишине көзөмөл кылгысы келет. Күндүн видеосу Жабдыгыңыз медианын бул түрүн ойнотууга ылайыктуу эмес. Би-Би-Синин WhatsApp каналына катталыңыз Биздин каналдан дүйнөдөгү жана Кыргызстандагы күндүн башкы жаңылыктарын жана Би-Би-Синин эксклюзивдүү баяндарын биринчилерден болуп окуңуз Редактордун тандоосу 19-февралда Маданият, маалымат, спорт жана жаштар саясаты министринин орун басары Марат Тагаев ТикТок социалдык тармагын бөгөттөө тууралуу чечимди кайра карап чыгуу зарылдыгын билдирди. Анын айтымында, Маалыматтык чөйрөнү изилдөө борбору жоюлган, учурда өлкөдө маалыматтык платформалар жана социалдык тармактар менен системалуу иш алып барган орган жок. Курсан Асановдун адвокаты айыпталуучу азыр аялын өлтүрүүгө шектелип кармалган милиция кызматкери менен бир камерада отурганына тынчсызданып жатканын билдирди. Бул тууралуу ал Би-Би-Сиге берген маегинде айтты. Өткөн айда Токионун Уэно зоопаркында миңдеген жапон күйөрмандары Сяо Сяо жана Лэй Лэй аттуу пандаларды көз жаш менен Кытайга узатышты. Пандалар Кытай менен Жапониянын ортосундагы начарлап бараткан мамилелердин символу болуп калды. Кыргызстандын Министрлер кабинети "Жогорку Нарын ГЭС каскады" боюнча Орусия менен болгон сүйлөшүүлөргө Алексей Ширшов катышканын ырастады. Бул тууралуу Министрлер кабинетинин төрагасынын биринчи орун басары Данияр Амангелдиевге шилтеме берип "Азаттык" жазды. Би-Би-Си ТВ жаңылыктары Би-Би-Си Кыргыз кызматынын эл аралык жаңылыктарын көрүңүз. Кыргызстан Дүйнө Дүйнө айымдары Биздин баракчаларыбызга дагы көз салыңыз Көп окулгандар © 2026 BBC. Би-Би-Си сырткы интернет сайттардын мазмуну үчүн жооптуу эмес. Башка интернет сайттардын мазмуну боюнча биздин позиция. |
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[SOURCE: https://www.fast.ai/posts/2021-07-15-fastconda.html] | [TOKENS: 2045] |
fastchan, a new conda mini-distribution Jeremy Howard July 15, 2021 On this page Summary: today we’re announcing fastchan, a new conda mini-distribution with a focus on the PyTorch ecosystem. Using fastchan, installation and updates of libraries such as PyTorch and RAPIDS is faster, easier, and more reliable. This detailed blog post by the brilliant Aman Arora of Weights and Biases provides a great overview of what fastchan is for, how it relates to other parts of the ecosystem, and how it makes life easier in practice. What you need to know If you use Anaconda, you can now install Python software like fastai, RAPIDS, timm, OpenCV, and Hugging Face Transformers with a single unified command: conda install -c fastchan. The same approach can also be used to upgrade any software you’ve installed from fastchan. Software on fastchan has been tested to install successfully on Mac, Linux, and Windows, on all recent versions of Python. A full list of available packages is available here. We’ve been testing fastchan for the last few months, and have switched the official installation source for fastai to use fastchan. According to Anaconda, it’s already nearly as popular as the PyTorch channel itself! Background conda is one of my favorite pieces of software. It allows me to install a huge range of software, such as Rust, GCC, CUDA Toolkit, Python, graphviz, and thousands more, without even requiring root access. It installs executables, C libraries, Python modules, and just about anything else you can think of. It also handles installing any needed dependencies automatically. If you’ve used a Linux package manager like apt (Ubuntu) or yum (Fedora) then that will sound pretty familiar – conda is, basically, just another package manager. But rather than being used to install system packages that are used as part of the operating system, it’s used for installing your own personal software. That means that you can’t accidentally break your OS if you use conda. It also can create separate self-contained environments with totally isolated software installations. That means I can create a quick throwaway environment to test some new software, without breaking my base environment, or even keep separate environments for different projects, which might require (for instance) different versions of Python or libraries. Some people conflate conda with pip and virtualenv. However, these are just used for managing python packages. They can not manage executables, C libraries, and so forth. conda installs software from channels, which are repositories of installation packages. The most widely used channels are defaults, which is used automatically by Anaconda, the most popular conda system installer, and conda-forge, a community repository to which thousands of developers have contributed conda packages. Many organizations maintain their own channels, such as fastai, nvidia, and pytorch. The distribution problem You have likely heard the term distribution, as used in the Linux world. Distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora provide scheduled releases of sets of software packages which have been tested to work correctly together. They also provide repositories where new versions of software are made available, after testing the software to ensure it works correctly as part of that distribution. Anaconda and the defaults channel are also a distribution. On a regular basis, Anaconda release a new version of their main installer, along with a set of packages that have been tested to work correctly together. Furthermore, they continue to test new versions of packages between software releases, adding them to the defaults channel when they are ready. Many of the packages in the defaults channel are sourced from conda-forge. conda-forge is not a distribution itself, but a repository for any user to upload “recipes” to build software, and to make available the results of those builds. Anaconda takes a subset of these packages, along with software they package themselves, and software packaged by other partners, does additional integration testing of the combination of these packages, and then makes them available in their distribution. This system works very well in many situations. Those needing cutting-edge versions of software or packages not available in the defaults channel can install them directly from conda-forge, and those needing the convenience and confidence of a distribution can just install software from defaults. However, many Python libraries are not in the defaults or conda-forge channels, or are not available in any channel at all. Furthermore, conda-forge is now so large (thanks to its great success!) that I’ve had to wait over two days for conda to figure out the dependencies when trying to install software that uses conda-forge. (There is a much faster conda replacement called mamba, but it is not yet feature complete, and can not currently install PyTorch correctly.) Libraries which use the GPU are a particular issue, since conda-forge does not yet have facilities for building and testing GPU-enabled software. Furthermore, GPU libraries are particularly difficult to package correctly, needing to work with many combinations of versions of CUDA, cudnn, Python, and OS. There is a large ecosystem of software that depends on PyTorch, and the PyTorch team has set up a large number of integration tests that are run before each release. PyTorch also has its own custom framework for building the software, resulting in packages that automatically identifies the correct installer for each user. These issues result in complex commands to install packages in this ecosystem, such as this command that’s currently required for installing NVIDIA’s powerful RAPIDS software: As Aman Arora eloquently explains, running this command creates a new environment that doesn’t include any of the other software that we’ve previously installed, and provides no mechanism for keeping the software up to date. Adding other packages to the environment becomes complex, since version mismatches are very common when combining multiple channels in this way. I wanted to create packages that depend on RAPIDS, but there’s no real way to make it easy for users to install and update such a package. I hear a lot of developers telling data scientists that they should create new docker or conda environments for every separate project, and that that’s the correct way to avoid these problems. However, that’s like telling people to install a new operating system for each application they want to use. Imagine if you couldn’t run Chrome and vscode at the same time, but had to switch to a new environment for each! We need to be able to install all the software and libraries we need to do our work, in the same place, at the same time. We need to be able to use them together, and maintain them. The solution: a new distribution To avoid these problems we created a new channel and distribution called fastchan. fastchan contains all the dependencies needed to install fastai, PyTorch, RAPIDS, and much more. We use the official PyTorch build of PyTorch, the official NVIDIA build of RAPIDS and CUDA Toolkit, and so forth. The developers of these packages have spent considerable time packaging their software in a way that works best, so we think it’s best to use their work, instead of starting from scratch. For libraries and dependencies that are only available on conda-forge, we copy those into the fastchan channel. We use a little-known, but very useful, Anaconda command called copy that copies packages across channels. fastchan uses conda’s own dependency solver to figure out recursively all the dependencies that are needed. We only include dependencies that are not already available in the defaults channel. That’s because defaults is already used by default in Anaconda, so there is no need for us to duplicate what’s already there. In addition, we package some software that’s currently only available as pip packages on pypi. We use a couple of methods to do this. One is using the terrific setuptools-conda software by fellow Aussie Chris Billington. The other is a new build.py program we wrote, which is used for compiled software such as sentencepiece and OpenCV. The packages are built and copied automatically twice every day thanks to these GitHub Actions workflows. The result The result of all this is that you rely just on the defaults and fastchan channels to install nearly everything you need, especially if you’re working with software in the PyTorch and Hugging Face ecosystems. Even more important than installation is updates – you can now update all your packages at once with a single command! To have this all handled automatically, create a file ~/.condarc containing the following: Then you can just use conda install and conda upgrade without needing to even pass -c fastchan. If you run conda upgrade --all your entire environment will be brought fully up to date (similar to using sudo apt upgrade to keeping a Ubuntu installation up to date). Future work I hope that fastchan will be a useful starting point for folks thinking about Python packaging and deployment. There’s a lot more that could be added to make it better. For instance, currently the only guarantee made by fastchan is that the packages provided can be installed correctly together. It doesn’t actually check that they work correctly. Ideally, integration tests would be run on both CPU and GPU to ensure that code that uses the libraries together gives the expected results. It would also be great if there were a community-driven way for anyone to request packages get added to fastchan, and also to add their own integration tests. Integration tests are particularly important to ensure that no-one adds or changes a package which causes breakage on dependent packages (or at least to ensure that broken downstream packages are clearly marked as such). fast.ai, with the mission of making deep learning more accessible, isn’t an obvious home for a conda distribution. We created fastchan because we needed it for ourselves and our users. Hopefully in the future the key players such as PyTorch, NVIDIA, Anaconda, and conda-forge will solve the distribution problem together, and make fastchan obsolete! |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson#cite_note-31] | [TOKENS: 3525] |
Contents Markus Persson Markus Alexej Persson (/ˈpɪərsən/ ⓘ PEER-sən, Swedish: [ˈmǎrːkɵs ˈpæ̌ːʂɔn] ⓘ; born 1 June 1979), known by the pseudonym Notch, is a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He is the creator of Minecraft, the best-selling video game in history. He founded the video game development company Mojang Studios in 2009. Persson began developing video games at an early age. His commercial success began after he published an early version of Minecraft in 2009. Prior to the game's official retail release in 2011, it had sold over four million copies. After this point Persson stood down as the lead designer and transferred his creative authority to Jens Bergensten. In September 2014 Persson announced his intention to leave Mojang, and in November of that year the company was sold to Microsoft reportedly for US$2.5 billion, which made him a billionaire. Since 2016 several of Persson's posts on Twitter regarding feminism, race, and transgender rights have caused public controversies. He has been described as "an increasingly polarizing figure, tweeting offensive statements regarding race, the LGBTQ community, gender, and other topics." In an effort to distance itself from Persson, Microsoft removed mentions of his name from Minecraft (excluding one instance in the game's end credits) and did not invite him to the game's tenth anniversary celebration. In 2015 he co-founded a separate game studio called Rubberbrain, which was relaunched in 2024 as Bitshift Entertainment. Early life Markus Alexej Persson was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to a Finnish mother, Ritva, and a Swedish father, Birger, on 1 June 1979. He has one sister. He grew up in Edsbyn until he was seven years old, when his family moved back to Stockholm. In Edsbyn, Persson's father worked for the railroad, and his mother was a nurse. He spent much time outdoors in Edsbyn, exploring the woods with his friends. When Persson was about seven years old, his parents divorced, and he and his sister lived with their mother. His father moved to a cabin in the countryside. Persson said in an interview that they experienced food insecurity around once a month. Persson lost contact with his father for several years after the divorce. According to Persson, his father suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and medication abuse, and went to jail for robberies. While his father had somewhat recovered during Persson's early life, his father relapsed, contributing to the divorce. His sister also experimented with drugs and ran away from home. He had gained interest in video games at an early age. His father was "a really big nerd", who built his own modem and taught Persson to use the family's Commodore 128. On it, Persson played bootleg games and loaded in various type-in programs from computer magazines with the help of his sister. The first game he purchased with his own money was The Bard's Tale. He began programming on his father's Commodore 128 home computer at the age of seven. He produced his first game at the age of eight, a text-based adventure game. By 1994 Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18. Persson, although introverted, was well-liked by his peers, but after entering secondary school was a "loner" and reportedly had only one friend. He spent most of his spare time with games and programming at home. He managed to reverse-engineer the Doom engine, which he continued to take great pride in as of 2014[update]. He never finished high school, but was reportedly a good student. Career Persson started his career working as a web designer. He later found employment at Game Federation, where he met Rolf Jansson. The pair worked in their spare time to build the 2006 video game Wurm Online. The game was released through a new entity, "Mojang Specifications AB". Persson left the project in late 2007. As Persson wanted to reuse the name "Mojang", Jansson agreed to rename the company to Onetoofree AB. Between 2004 and 2009 Persson worked as a game developer for Midasplayer (later known as King). There, he worked as a programmer, mostly building browser games made in Flash. He later worked as a programmer for jAlbum. Prior to creating Minecraft, Persson developed multiple, small games. He also entered a number of game design competitions and participated in discussions on the TIGSource forums, a web forum for independent game developers. One of Persson's more notable personal projects was called RubyDung, an isometric three-dimensional base-building game like RollerCoaster Tycoon and Dwarf Fortress. While working on RubyDung, Persson experimented with a first-person view mode similar to that found in Dungeon Keeper. However, he felt the graphics were too pixelated and omitted this mode. In 2009 Persson found inspiration in Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game. Infiniminer heavily influenced his future work on RubyDung, and was behind Persson's reasoning for returning the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals to the game. RubyDung is the earliest known Minecraft prototype created by Persson. On 17 May 2009 Persson released the original edition (later called "Classic version") of Minecraft on the TIGSource forums. He regularly updated the game based on feedback from TIGSource users. Persson released several new versions of Minecraft throughout 2009 and 2010, going through several phases of development including Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev. On 30 June 2010 Persson released the game's Alpha version. While working on the pre-Alpha version of Minecraft, Persson continued working at jAlbum. In 2010, after the release and subsequent success of Minecraft's Alpha version, Persson moved from a full-time role to a part-time role at jAlbum. He left jAlbum later that same year. In September 2010 Persson travelled to Valve Corporation's headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, United States, where he took part in a programming exercise and met Gabe Newell. Persson was subsequently offered a job at Valve, which he turned down in order to continue work on Minecraft. On 20 December 2010 Minecraft moved into its beta phase and began expanding to other platforms, including mobile. In January 2011 Minecraft reached one million registered accounts. Six months afterwards, it reached ten million. The game has sold over four million copies by 7 November 2011. Mojang held the first Minecon from 18 to 19 November 2011 to celebrate its full release, and subsequently made it an annual event. Following this, on 11 December 2011, Persson transferred creative control of Minecraft to Jens Bergensten and began working on another game title, 0x10c, although he reportedly abandoned the project around 2013. In 2013 Mojang recorded revenues of $330 million and profits of $129 million. Persson has stated that, due to the intense media attention and public pressure, he became exhausted with running Minecraft and Mojang. In a September 2014 blog post he shared his realization that he "didn't have the connection to my fans I thought I had", that he had "become a symbol", and that he did not wish to be responsible for Mojang's increasingly large operation. In June 2014 Persson tweeted "Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig", reportedly partly as a joke. Persson controlled a 71% stake in Mojang at the time. The offer attracted significant interest from Activision Blizzard, EA, and Microsoft. Forbes later reported that Microsoft wanted to purchase the game as a "tax dodge" to turn their taxable excess liquid cash into other assets. In September 2014 Microsoft agreed to purchase Mojang for $2.5 billion, making Persson a billionaire. He then left the company after the deal was finalised in November. Since leaving Mojang, Persson has worked on several small projects. On 23 June 2014 he founded a company with Porsér called Rubberbrain AB; the company had no games by 2021, despite spending SEK 60 million. The company was relaunched as Bitshift Entertainment, LLC on 28 March 2024. Persson expressed interest in creating a new video game studio in 2020, and in developing virtual reality games. He has also since created a series of narrative-driven immersive events called ".party()", which uses extensive visual effects and has been hosted in multiple cities. At the beginning of 2025 Persson decided to create a spiritual successor to Minecraft, referred to as "Minecraft 2", in response to the results of a poll on X. However, after speaking to his team, he shortly went against this in favour of developing the other choice on his Twitter poll, a roguelike titled Levers and Chests. Games Persson's most popular creation is the survival sandbox game Minecraft, which was first publicly available on 17 May 2009 and fully released on 18 November 2011. Persson left his job as a game developer to work on Minecraft full-time until completion. In early 2011, Mojang AB sold the one millionth copy of the game, several months later their second, and several more their third. Mojang hired several new staff members for the Minecraft team, while Persson passed the lead developer role to Jens Bergensten. He stopped working on Minecraft after a deal with Microsoft to sell Mojang for $2.5 billion. This brought his net worth to US$1.5 billion. Persson and Jakob Porsér came up with the idea for Scrolls including elements from board games and collectible card games. Persson noted that he will not be actively involved in development of the game and that Porsér will be developing it. Persson revealed on his Tumblr blog on 5 August 2011 that he was being sued by a Swedish law firm representing Bethesda Softworks over the trademarked name of Scrolls, claiming that it conflicted with their The Elder Scrolls series of games. On 17 August 2011 Persson challenged Bethesda to a Quake 3 tournament to decide the outcome of the naming dispute. On 27 September 2011 Persson confirmed that the lawsuit was going to court. ZeniMax Media, owner of Bethesda Softworks, announced the lawsuit's settlement in March 2012. The settlement allowed Mojang to continue using the Scrolls trademark. In 2018, Scrolls was made available free of charge and renamed to Caller's Bane. Cliffhorse is a humorous game programmed in two hours using the Unity game engine and free assets. The game took inspiration from Skyrim's physics engine, "the more embarrassing minimum-effort Greenlight games", Goat Simulator, and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. The game was released to Microsoft Windows systems as an early access and honourware game on the first day of E3 2014, instructing users to donate Dogecoin to "buy" the game before downloading it. The game accumulated over 280,000 dogecoins. Following the end to his involvement with Minecraft, Persson began pre-production of an alternate reality space game set in the distant future in March 2012. On April Fools' Day Mojang launched a satirical website for Mars Effect (parody of Mass Effect), citing the lawsuit with Bethesda as an inspiration. However, the gameplay elements remained true and on 4 April, Mojang revealed 0x10c (pronounced "Ten to the C") as a space sandbox title. Persson officially halted game production in August 2013. However, C418, the composer of the game's soundtrack (as well as that of Minecraft), released an album of the work he had made for the game. In 2013, Persson made a free game called Shambles in the Unity game engine. Persson has also participated in several Ludum Dare 48-hour game making competitions. Personal life In 2011 Persson married Elin Zetterstrand, whom he had dated for four years before. Zetterstrand was a former moderator on the Minecraft forums. They had a daughter together, but by mid-2012, he began to see little of her. On 15 August 2012 he announced that he and his wife had filed for divorce. The divorce was finalised later that year. On 14 December 2011 Persson's father committed suicide with a handgun after drinking heavily. In an interview with The New Yorker, Persson said of his father: When I decided I wanted to quit my day job and work on my own games, he was the only person who supported my decision. He was proud of me and made sure I knew. When I added the monsters to Minecraft, he told me that the dark caves became too scary for him. But I think that was the only true criticism I ever heard from him. Persson later admitted that he himself suffered from depression and various highs and lows in his mood. Persson has criticised the stance of large game companies on piracy. He once stated that "piracy is not theft", viewing unauthorised downloads as potential future customers. Persson stated himself to be a member of the Pirate Party of Sweden in 2011. He is also a member of Mensa. He has donated to numerous charities, including Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Under his direction, Mojang spent a week developing Catacomb Snatch for the Humble Indie Bundle and raised US$458,248 for charity. He also donated $250,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2012. In 2011 he gave $3 million in dividends back to Mojang employees. According to Forbes, his net worth in 2023 was around $1.2 billion. In 2014 Persson was one of the biggest taxpayers in Sweden. Around 2014, he lived in a multi-level penthouse in Östermalm, Stockholm, an area he described as "where the rich people live". In December 2014 Persson purchased a home in Trousdale Estates, a neighbourhood in Beverly Hills, California, in the United States, for $70 million, a record sales price for Beverly Hills at the time. Persson reportedly outbid Beyoncé and Jay-Z for the property. Persson began receiving criticism for political and social opinions he expressed on social media as early as 2016. November 30, 2017 In 2017, he proposed a heterosexual pride holiday, and wrote that those who opposed the idea "deserve to be shot." After facing backlash, he deleted the tweets and rescinded his statements, writing, "So yeah, it's about pride of daring to express, not about pride of being who you are. I get it now." Later in the year, he wrote that feminism is a "social disease" and called the video game developer and feminist Zoë Quinn a "cunt", although he was generally critical of the GamerGate movement. He has described intersectional feminism as a "framework for bigotry" and the use of the word mansplaining as being sexist. Also in 2017, Persson tweeted that "It's okay to be white". Later that year, he stated that he believed in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. In 2019, he tweeted referencing QAnon, saying "Q is legit. Don't trust the media." Later in 2019, he tweeted in response to a pro-transgender internet meme that, "You are absolutely evil if you want to encourage delusion. What happened to not stigmatizing mental illness?" He then also promoted claims that people were fined for "using the wrong pronoun". However, after facing backlash, he tweeted a day afterwards that he had "no idea what [being trans is] like of course, but it's inspiring as hell when people open up and choose to actually be who they know themselves as. Not because it's a cool choice, because it's a big step. I gues [sic] that's actually cool nvm". Later that year, Microsoft removed two mentions of Persson's name in the "19w13a" snapshot of Minecraft and did not invite him to the 10-year anniversary celebration of the game. A spokesperson for Microsoft stated that his views "do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang". He is still mentioned in the End Poem ("a flat, infinite world created by a man called Markus").[citation needed] Awards References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://www.bbc.com/marathi] | [TOKENS: 3776] |
BBC News, मराठी - बातम्या मोठ्या बातम्या अँड्र्यू माउंटबॅटन-विंडसर यांनी यापूर्वी एपस्टिनशी संबंधित कोणतेही गैरकृत्य केल्याचा आरोप नाकारला आहे. मात्र, जानेवारी 2026 मध्ये जेफ्री एपस्टिनशी संबंधित लाखो फाइल्स जाहीर झाल्यानंतर त्या ठोस आरोपांवर बीबीसीने विचारलेल्या प्रश्नांना अद्याप त्यांनी कोणतेही उत्तर दिलेले नाही. इराणवर मर्यादित लष्करी हल्ल्याचा विचार करत असल्याचे अमेरिकेचे राष्ट्राध्यक्ष डोनाल्ड ट्रम्प यांनी म्हटलं आहे. हा हल्ला इराणच्या नेत्यांवर दबाव आणण्यासाठी असेल, जेणेकरून ते त्यांचा अणु कार्यक्रम रोखण्यासाठीचा करार करण्यास तयार होतील. पुणे जिल्ह्यातील अडाचीवाडी या गावात दररोज सायंकाळी 7 ते 9 या वेळेत स्मशानभूमीत अभ्यासिका भरते अमेरिकेच्या सर्वोच्च न्यायालयानं राष्ट्राध्यक्ष डोनाल्ड ट्रम्प यांनी गेल्या वर्षी लागू केलेले जागतिक टॅरिफ रद्द करण्याचा निर्णय दिला आहे. भारताला ग्रेट निकोबार बेटावर हाँगकाँग आणि सिंगापूरसारखं एक मोठं बंदर उभारायचं आहे छत्रपती शिवाजी महाराजांनी सुरतेची दोनदा लूट केली. या दोन्ही स्वाऱ्यांमधून शिवाजी महाराजांच्या सैन्याने लाखो रुपयांची लूट केली. पण तुम्हाला माहिती आहे का, की या दोन्ही स्वाऱ्यांमध्ये ते सुरतमधील इंग्रजांना मात्र लुटू शकले नाहीत? बांगलादेशात तारिक रहमान यांनी पंतप्रधानपदाची शपथ घेऊन फक्त तीनच दिवस झाले आहेत. मात्र मोहम्मद युनूस यांच्या हंगामी सरकारमध्ये सल्लागार राहिलेल्या नाहिद इस्लाम यांनी आताच प्रश्न उपस्थित करण्यास सुरुवात केली आहे. केंद्रीय निवडणूक आयोगाने महाराष्ट्रासहित देशभरातील 22 राज्ये आणि केंद्रशासित प्रदेशांना 'एसआयआर'ची मोहिम राबवण्यासाठीची तयारी करण्याचे निर्देश गुरुवारी (19 फेब्रुवारी) दिलेले आहेत. शेतीच्या जमिनीवर घर किंवा इतर कुठले बांधकाम करायचे असेल, तर आता त्यासाठी जिल्हाधिकाऱ्यांकडून अकृषिक वापरासाठीची म्हणजे NA परवानगी घेण्याची अट रद्द करण्यात आलीय. शॉर्ट व्हीडिओ मीडिया प्लेबॅक आपल्या डिव्हाइसवर असमर्थित आहे व्हीडिओ आणि ऑडिओ राष्ट्रवादी काँग्रेस शरद पवार गटाचे आमदार रोहित पवार यांनी बारामतीत अपघात झालेल्या विमानाच्या ब्लॅक बॉक्सबद्दल प्रश्न उपस्थित केले आहेत. बीबीसी ISWOTY अवॉर्डसाठी क्रिडा राज्यमंत्री रक्षा खडसे उपस्थित होत्या. AI मुळे गेले काही दिवस जगभरातल्या शेअरबाजारांत उलथापालथ होतेय. अँथ्रोपिक या AI कंपनीने एक AI टूल लाँच केलं आणि जगभरातल्या सॉफ्टवेअर आणि IT कंपन्या, लीगल रिसर्च फर्म्सचे स्टॉक्स घसरले. फेब्रुवारीच्या सुरुवातीला जी घसरण झाली त्याला SaaSpocalypse म्हटलं गेलं. अंजली भागवत या माजी वर्ल्ड नंबर वन नेमबाज आणि नेमबाजी प्रशिक्षक आहेत. मुलुंड (पश्चिम) येथील एलबीएस रोडवर जॉन्सन अँड जॉन्सन कंपनीजवळ शुक्रवारी दुपारी मेट्रोच्या पुलाचा काही भाग कोसळल्याची घटना घडली. वर्ल्ड चॅम्पियन गुकेश असो किंवा वर्ल्डकप विजेती दिव्या देशमुख असो, अलीकडच्या काळात भारतीय बुद्धिबळपटूंनी जगात ठसा उमटवलाय. दिवसभरातल्या घडामोडींचा आढावा. महत्त्वाच्या विषयाचं सोप्या भाषेत विश्लेषण. आंतरराष्ट्रीय घडामोडींचा आढावा घेणारं, विश्लेषण करणारं बीबीसी न्यूज मराठीचं जागतिक पॉडकास्ट. बीबीसी मराठी व्हॉट्सॲपवर महाराष्ट्र भारत जगभरात बीबीसी मराठी स्पेशल 'माझ्या बायकोचा रोबोट' या नाटकाच्या निमित्ताने सेक्स ही जैविक कृती बाईच्या दृष्टीकोनातून पाहण्याचा प्रयत्न लेखिकेने केला आहे. 1982 साली प्रदर्शित झालेला 'उंबरठा' सिनेमा आजही महत्वाचा आहे. वयाच्या अवघ्या 31 व्या वर्षी काळाच्या पडद्याआड गेलेल्या स्मिता पाटील यांनी ज्या भूमिका साकारल्या त्यात 'उंबरठा'मधली सुलभा महाजन खास होती. अरुण साधूंची कथा, विजय तेंडुलकरांची पटकथा अन् जब्बार पटेलांचं दिग्दर्शन अशा दिग्गजांच्या स्पर्शानं सोनं झालेला हा चित्रपट कदाचित त्यामुळंच आजही अगदी ताजा वाटणारा असा आहे. शिवसेना (उद्धव बाळासाहेब ठाकरे) पक्ष प्रमुख उद्धव ठाकरे आणि मनसे प्रमुख राज ठाकरे यांच्यातील भेटीगाठी वाढत आहेत. ऑक्टोबर मध्ये उद्धव ठाकरे आणि राज ठाकरे हे दोन वेळा भेटले आहेत. आशेचे किरण सोपी गोष्ट लोकप्रिय बीबीसीसाठी कलेक्टिव्ह न्यूजरूमचं प्रकाशन © 2026 BBC. बीबीसी बाह्य इंटरनेट साइट्सच्या सामग्रीसाठी बीबीसी जबाबदार नाही. बाह्य लिंक्सबद्दल आम्हाल काय वाटतं? इथे वाचा. बाह्य लिंक्सबद्दल आम्हाल काय वाटतं? इथे वाचा. |
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[SOURCE: https://www.bbc.com/nepali] | [TOKENS: 3531] |
BBC News, नेपाली - होमपेज मुख्य समाचार अमेरिकी सर्वोच्च अदालतको फैसलाले विश्वव्यापी व्यापारमा नयाँ अनिश्चय थपेको बताइएको छ। सर्वसाधारण मतदातामा चुनावबारे खासै चासो देखिँदैन। तर पनि चुनाव भयो भने मतदान गर्न चाहिँ जाने सोचाइ रहेको मतदाताहरू बताउँछन्। भारतीय विश्लेषकहरूले दिल्लीको नेपालप्रतिको नीति फेरिने सम्भावना नदेखिएपनि यस पटक चुनावमार्फत् नेपालको शक्ति सन्तुलनमा फेरबदल हुन सक्ने अवस्था देखिरहेको टिप्पणी गरेका छन्। दलका घोषणापत्रमा सुशासन, युवाको राजनीतिक सहभागिता र रोजगारी सिर्जना प्राथमिकतामा परेको देखिए पनि ती लक्ष्यहरू कसरी हासिल गरिन्छन् भन्ने प्रश्न मुख्य रहेको कतिपय जेन जी अगुवाहरूले बताएका छन्। प्रतिनिधिसभाका लागि आसन्न निर्वाचनमा मतदातालाई आकर्षित गर्न प्रमुख दलहरूले अनेकथरी वाचा गरेका छन्। घोषणापत्रमार्फत् विभिन्न विषयमा दलहरूले व्यक्त गरेका प्रतिबद्धताको तुलनात्मक समीक्षा। ओसाकाका मेअरले त्यति परिमाणमा दान प्राप्त भएकोमा आफू निःशब्द भएको बताएका छन्। दुई दशकभन्दा बढी समययताको प्रयासपछि यसै साता काठमाण्डूमा दुई देशबीच फौजदारी विषयमा पारस्परिक कानुनी सहायतासम्बन्धी सम्झौता भएको छ। यसबाट के फाइदा हुन्छ? नेपाल निर्वाचन २०८२ आसन्न प्रतिनिधिसभा चुनावलाई स्वतन्त्र, निष्पक्ष, भयरहित र शान्तिपूर्ण रूपमा सम्पन्न गराउने दिशामा देशभरि रहेका निजी हतियार सङ्कलन गर्न थालिएको गृह मन्त्रालयका अधिकारीहरूले बताएका छन्। धेरैजसो पुरानै मुद्दा त कतिपय जेन जीपछिका परिवेशको लेखाजोखा गरिएका चुनावी मुद्दाले तराई-मधेशकेन्द्रित मुख्य दलहरूलाई के फरक पार्छ? नेपालको समग्र जनसङ्ख्यामा पुरुषभन्दा महिला बढी भए पनि मतदाता सूचीमा पुरुष बढी छन्। समानुपातिक प्रणालीमा पुरुषभन्दा महिला उम्मेदवारको सङ्ख्या बढी छ तर प्रत्यक्ष प्रणालीमा यो हिस्सा नगण्य छ। निर्वाचन प्रचारप्रसार सोमवारबाट खुला हुँदै गर्दा आचारसंहिताले भोट खसाल्न जाने मतदाताहरूलाई पनि विभिन्न नियममा बाँधेको छ। प्रमुख राजनीतिक दलहरूले विगतमा भन्दा यसपालि आफूहरूले गर्ने प्रचारप्रसार केही फरक हुने बताएका छन्। कसको चुनावी रणनीति कस्तो छ? रोचक भिडिओ तपाईंको उपकरणमा मिडिया प्लेब्याक सपोर्ट छैन अनि यो पनि यो गेममा तपाईँ अन्तर्राष्ट्रिय क्रिकेट खेलाडीहरूबीच तुलना गरेर क्रिकेटसम्बन्धी आफ्नो ज्ञान जाँच्न सक्नुहुन्छ। तोस्यालाई पहिला अर्कै एक व्यक्तिले पालेको थियो। तर उसले दुर्व्यवहार गरेको देखेपछि लिओनिडले तोस्यालाई उद्धार गरेका थिए। सम्पत्ति शुद्धीकरणका विषयलाई लिएर नेपाल अन्तर्राष्ट्रिय समुदायको सूक्ष्म निगरानीको सूची 'ग्रे लिस्ट'मा रहेकै अवस्थामा अमेरिका पठाउने भन्दै मोटो रकम असुलिएको यस मुद्दालाई देशबाहिरबाट समेत चासोपूर्वक हेरिने प्रहरी अधिकारीहरू बताउँछन्। ग्रीनल्यान्ड खरिद गर्ने ट्रम्पको चाहना प्रतिबिम्बित गर्ने नजिर अमेरिकी इतिहासमा पाइन्छन्, जसका कारण उसको सिमाना विस्तार भएको थियो। विज्ञहरूले कति व्यायाम गर्ने भन्ने कुरा महत्त्वपूर्ण रहेको भन्दै आफूलाई रमाइलो लाग्ने विभिन्न अभ्यासहरू मिलाएर गर्दा त्यसले धेरै फाइदा पुग्न सक्ने बताएका छन्। थप समाचार बीबीसी विशेष विज्ञान तथा प्रविधि पृथ्वीमा कुनै कालखण्डमा आकाश नीलो थिएन। वैज्ञानिकहरूका अनुसार यसको रङ्ग फेरि पनि फेरिन सक्छ। वैज्ञानिकहरूको विश्वासमा अन्दाजी साढे चार अर्ब वर्षअघि एउटा रहस्यमय ग्रह 'थीआ' पृथ्वीसँग ठोक्किएपछि यसमै गाभिएको थियो। सन् २०२५ को ज्यानुअरी २५ मा 'नोर्दन लाइट'बारेअध्ययन गर्न प्रक्षेपण गरिएको एउटा नर्वेली रकेटलाई रुसले भुलवश आफूतर्फ सोझै आइरहेको परमाणु क्षेप्यास्त्र भन्ठानेको थियो। वैज्ञानिकहरूका अनुसार 'फोस्केइआ पेलेन्डोनम' नाम दिइएको उक्त डाइनसोर २५-३० सेन्टिमिटर अग्लो थियो। सुनिता विलियम्सले कसरी अन्तरिक्षले द्वन्द्व र मानवताबारेको उनको दृष्टिकोणलाई नयाँ बनायो भन्नेबारे बीबीसीलाई बताएकी छन्। अरू भाषाका समाचार पाउनुहोस्। धेरै रुचाइएको © 2026 बीबीसी। अन्य वेबसाइटका सामग्रीहरूका लागि बीबीसी जिम्मेवार छैन। बाह्य वेबसाइटको लिङ्क प्रयोग सम्बन्धमा हाम्रो नीति पढ्नुहोस्। |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_word] | [TOKENS: 827] |
Contents Stop word Stop words are the words in a stop list (or stoplist or negative dictionary) which are filtered out ("stopped") before or after processing of natural language data (i.e. text) because they are deemed to have little semantic value or are otherwise insignificant for the task at hand. There is no single universal list of stop words used by all natural language processing (NLP) tools, nor any agreed upon rules for identifying stop words, and indeed not all tools even use such a list. Therefore, any group of words can be chosen as the stop words for a given purpose. The "general trend in [information retrieval] systems over time has been from standard use of quite large stop lists (200–300 terms) to very small stop lists (7–12 terms) to no stop list whatsoever". History of stop words A predecessor concept was used in creating some concordances. For example, the first Hebrew concordance, Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus's Me’ir Nativ, contained a one-page list of unindexed words, with nonsubstantive prepositions and conjunctions which are similar to common modern stop words. Hans Peter Luhn, one of the pioneers in information retrieval, is credited with coining the phrase and using the concept when introducing his Key Word in Context automatic indexing process. The phrase "stop word", which is not in Luhn's 1959 presentation, and the associated terms "stop list" and "stoplist" appear in the literature shortly afterward. Although it is commonly assumed that stop lists include only the most frequent words in a language, it was C.J. Van Rijsbergen who proposed the first standardized list which was not based on word frequency information. The "Van list" included 250 English words. Martin Porter's word stemming program developed in the 1980s built on the Van list, and the Porter list is now commonly used as a default stop list in a variety of software applications. In 1990, Christopher Fox proposed the first general stop list based on empirical word frequency information derived from the Brown Corpus: This paper reports an exercise in generating a stop list for general text based on the Brown corpus of 1,014,000 words drawn from a broad range of literature in English. We start with a list of tokens occurring more than 300 times in the Brown corpus. From this list of 278 words, 32 are culled on the grounds that they are too important as potential index terms. Twenty-six words are then added to the list in the belief that they may occur very frequently in certain kinds of literature. Finally, 149 words are added to the list because the finite state machine based filter in which this list is intended to be used is able to filter them at almost no cost. The final product is a list of 421 stop words that should be maximally efficient and effective in filtering the most frequently occurring and semantically neutral words in general literature in English. In SEO terminology, stop words are the most common words that many search engines used to avoid for the purposes of saving space and time in processing of large data during crawling or indexing. For some search engines, these are some of the most common, short function words, such as the, is, at, which, and on. In this case, stop words can cause problems when searching for phrases that include them, particularly in names such as "The Who", "The The", or "Take That". Other search engines remove some of the most common words—including lexical words, such as "want"—from a query in order to improve performance. In recent years the SEO best practices around stop words have evolved along with the fields of machine learning and NLP. In February 2021, John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, tweeted "I wouldn't worry about stop words at all; write naturally. Search engines look at much, much more than individual words. 'To be or not to be' just is a collection of stop words, but stop words alone don't do it any justice." See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_understanding] | [TOKENS: 1580] |
Contents Natural language understanding Natural language understanding (NLU) or natural language interpretation (NLI) is a subset of natural language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension. NLU has been considered an AI-hard problem. There is considerable commercial interest in the field because of its application to automated reasoning, machine translation, question answering, news-gathering, text categorization, voice-activation, archiving, and large-scale content analysis. History The program STUDENT, written in 1964 by Daniel Bobrow for his PhD dissertation at MIT, is one of the earliest known attempts at NLU by a computer. Eight years after John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence, Bobrow's dissertation (titled Natural Language Input for a Computer Problem Solving System) showed how a computer could understand simple natural language input to solve algebra word problems. A year later, in 1965, Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT wrote ELIZA, an interactive program that carried on a dialogue in English on any topic, the most popular being psychotherapy. ELIZA worked by simple parsing and substitution of key words into canned phrases and Weizenbaum sidestepped the problem of giving the program a database of real-world knowledge or a rich lexicon. Yet ELIZA gained surprising popularity as a toy project and can be seen as a very early precursor to current commercial systems such as those used by Ask.com. In 1969, Roger Schank at Stanford University introduced the conceptual dependency theory for NLU. This model, partially influenced by the work of Sydney Lamb, was extensively used by Schank's students at Yale University, such as Robert Wilensky, Wendy Lehnert, and Janet Kolodner. In 1970, William A. Woods introduced the augmented transition network (ATN) to represent natural language input. Instead of phrase structure rules ATNs used an equivalent set of finite-state automata that were called recursively. ATNs and their more general format called "generalized ATNs" continued to be used for a number of years. In 1971, Terry Winograd finished writing SHRDLU for his PhD thesis at MIT. SHRDLU could understand simple English sentences in a restricted world of children's blocks to direct a robotic arm to move items. The successful demonstration of SHRDLU provided significant momentum for continued research in the field. Winograd continued to be a major influence in the field with the publication of his book Language as a Cognitive Process. At Stanford, Winograd would later advise Larry Page, who co-founded Google. In the 1970s and 1980s, the natural language processing group at SRI International continued research and development in the field. A number of commercial efforts based on the research were undertaken, e.g., in 1982 Gary Hendrix formed Symantec Corporation originally as a company for developing a natural language interface for database queries on personal computers. However, with the advent of mouse-driven graphical user interfaces, Symantec changed direction. A number of other commercial efforts were started around the same time, e.g., Larry R. Harris at the Artificial Intelligence Corporation and Roger Schank and his students at Cognitive Systems Corp. In 1983, Michael Dyer developed the BORIS system at Yale which bore similarities to the work of Roger Schank and W. G. Lehnert. The third millennium saw the introduction of systems using machine learning for text classification, such as the IBM Watson. However, experts debate how much "understanding" such systems demonstrate: e.g., according to John Searle, Watson did not even understand the questions. John Ball, cognitive scientist and inventor of the Patom Theory, supports this assessment. Natural language processing has made inroads for applications to support human productivity in service and e-commerce, but this has largely been made possible by narrowing the scope of the application. There are thousands of ways to request something in a human language that still defies conventional natural language processing.[citation needed] According to Wibe Wagemans, "To have a meaningful conversation with machines is only possible when we match every word to the correct meaning based on the meanings of the other words in the sentence – just like a 3-year-old does without guesswork." Scope and context The umbrella term "natural language understanding" can be applied to a diverse set of computer applications, ranging from small, relatively simple tasks such as short commands issued to robots, to highly complex endeavors such as the full comprehension of newspaper articles or poetry passages. Many real-world applications fall between the two extremes, for instance text classification for the automatic analysis of emails and their routing to a suitable department in a corporation does not require an in-depth understanding of the text, but needs to deal with a much larger vocabulary and more diverse syntax than the management of simple queries to database tables with fixed schemata. Throughout the years various attempts at processing natural language or English-like sentences presented to computers have taken place at varying degrees of complexity. Some attempts have not resulted in systems with deep understanding, but have helped overall system usability. For example, Wayne Ratliff originally developed the Vulcan program with an English-like syntax to mimic the English speaking computer in Star Trek. Vulcan later became the dBase system whose easy-to-use syntax effectively launched the personal computer database industry. Systems with an easy to use or English-like syntax are, however, quite distinct from systems that use a rich lexicon and include an internal representation (often as first order logic) of the semantics of natural language sentences. Hence the breadth and depth of "understanding" aimed at by a system determine both the complexity of the system (and the implied challenges) and the types of applications it can deal with. The "breadth" of a system is measured by the sizes of its vocabulary and grammar. The "depth" is measured by the degree to which its understanding approximates that of a fluent native speaker. At the narrowest and shallowest, English-like command interpreters require minimal complexity, but have a small range of applications. Narrow but deep systems explore and model mechanisms of understanding, but they still have limited application. Systems that attempt to understand the contents of a document such as a news release beyond simple keyword matching and to judge its suitability for a user are broader and require significant complexity, but they are still somewhat shallow. Systems that are both very broad and very deep are beyond the current state of the art. Components and architecture Regardless of the approach used, most NLU systems share some common components. The system needs a lexicon of the language and a parser and grammar rules to break sentences into an internal representation. The construction of a rich lexicon with a suitable ontology requires significant effort, e.g., the Wordnet lexicon required many person-years of effort. The system also needs theory from semantics to guide the comprehension. The interpretation capabilities of a language-understanding system depend on the semantic theory it uses. Competing semantic theories of language have specific trade-offs in their suitability as the basis of computer-automated semantic interpretation. These range from naive semantics or stochastic semantic analysis to the use of pragmatics to derive meaning from context. Semantic parsers convert natural-language texts into formal meaning representations. Advanced applications of NLU also attempt to incorporate logical inference within their framework. This is generally achieved by mapping the derived meaning into a set of assertions in predicate logic, then using logical deduction to arrive at conclusions. Therefore, systems based on functional languages such as Lisp need to include a subsystem to represent logical assertions, while logic-oriented systems such as those using the language Prolog generally rely on an extension of the built-in logical representation framework. The management of context in NLU can present special challenges. A large variety of examples and counter examples have resulted in multiple approaches to the formal modeling of context, each with specific strengths and weaknesses. See also Notes |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_processing] | [TOKENS: 685] |
Contents Text processing In computing, the term text processing refers to the theory and practice of automating the creation or manipulation of electronic text. Text usually refers to all the alphanumeric characters specified on the keyboard of the person engaging the practice, but in general text means the abstraction layer immediately above the standard character encoding of the target text. The term processing refers to automated (or mechanized) processing, as opposed to the same manipulation done manually. Text processing involves computer commands which invoke content, content changes, and cursor movement, for example to The text processing of a regular expression is a virtual editing machine, having a primitive programming language that has named registers (identifiers), and named positions in the sequence of characters comprising the text. Using these, the "text processor" can, for example, mark a region of text, and then move it. The text processing of a utility is a filter program, or filter. These two mechanisms comprise text processing. Definition Since the standardized markup such as ANSI escape codes are generally invisible to the editor, they comprise a set of transitory properties that become at times indistinguishable from word processing. But the definite distinctions from word processing are that text processing proper: In this way markup such as font and color are not really a distinguishing factor, because the character sequences that affect font and color are simply standard characters inserted automatically by a background text processing mode, made to work transparently by compliant text editors, yet becoming otherwise visible as text processing commands when that mode is not in effect. So text processing is defined most basically (but not entirely) around the visual characters (or graphemes) rather than the standard, yet invisible characters. History The development of computer text processing started in earnest with Kleene's formalizing what is a regular language. Such regular expressions could then become a mini-program, complete with a compilation process, available to perform any edit, once that language was extended. Similarly, filters are extended by evolving particular options. Basic concepts An editor essentially invokes an input stream and directs it to the text processing environment, which is either a command shell or a text editor. The resulting output is applicable to further text processing, the final result of which is comparable to a single application of an algorithm applied once by a more sophisticated and structured computer program. Text processing is, unlike an algorithm, a manually administered sequence of simpler macros that are the pattern-action expressions and filtering mechanisms. In either case the programmer's intention is impressed indirectly upon a given set of textual characters in the act of text processing. The results of a text processing step are sometimes only hopeful, and the attempted mechanism is often subject to multiple drafts through visual feedback, until the regular expression or markup language details, or until the utility options, are fully mastered. Text processing is concerned mostly with producing textual characters at the highest level of computing, where its activities are just below the practical uses of computing—the manual transmission of information. Ultimately all computing is text processing, from the self-compiling textual characters of an assembler, through the automated programming language generated to handle a blob of graphical data, and finally to the metacharacters of regular expressions which groom existing text documents. Text processing is its own automation. Textual characters come in standardized character sets containing also control characters such as newline characters, which arrange text. Other types of control characters arrange the transmission, define the character sets, and perform other housekeeping tasks. See also External links |
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[SOURCE: https://www.fast.ai/posts/2021-05-24-aihub.html] | [TOKENS: 412] |
20 Years of Tech Startup Experiences in One Hour Jeremy Howard May 26, 2021 I’ve just returned to Australia to live, after a decade as an entrepreneur in San Francisco. For my first in-person talk in Australia, I shared my thoughts on how to build a successful tech startup nearly anywhere in the world. I spent nearly three months researching and preparing for this talk, interviewing dozens of entrepreneurs, investors, and academics. I also drew from my 20+ years of experience as an entrepreneur — ten years in Australia, and ten years in the US. Creating a tech startup in the San Francisco Bay Area (i.e. San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Oakland) is easier than most other parts of the world (except, perhaps, for a couple of startup hubs such as Israel). When I got to San Francisco I found myself in the midst of a bustling ecosystem of technically sophisticated cashed-up investors, bold founders with big ambitions and a real desire to help each other, entrepreneurial academics who often had multiple startups they were advising and were common destinations for their students for internships and employment, and big forward-thinking customers with innovation labs in the heart of San Francisco. In Australia, things couldn’t be more different. More is invested in tech startups in a day in the US than in a year in Australia. Short-termism is rife at all levels. Entrepreneurs have to deal with pointless roadblocks put in their way by bureaucratic institutions. And yet, Australia is full of brilliant talent, just waiting to be unleashed on the world. I believe that there are ways for potential Aussie founders to create successful global startups. And I believe that these lessons are equally valuable for founders in many other parts of the world, where the startup ecosystem is weak, and industry is conservative and slow moving. For more, see my talk: Or alternatively, read this summary of my talk from Aman Arora, who flew all the way from Sydney to Brisbane to attend, and was kind enough to write up his takeaways in a thoughtful article. |
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