The mere thought of 1:1 replicas of anything big in Minecraft always sounds crazy, but recreating Manhattan? NYU's PhD candidate, Christopher Mitchell is just about to do that.
He's using a combination of data from Google Earth, Here.com, and even Microsoft's Bing. If you zoom in, you can see right now it looks more like a Commodore 64 port of satellite images (with a few, detailed exceptions) rather than those shiny Minecraft castles.
So what's the point? Mitchell told Ars Technica that he "wants to complete the map as an expression of raw computer power." According to him, the current version requires a server cluster of 300 cores and 200GB of RAM to just render the map, so yeah, he's getting there.
Manhattan: The quest to make a full-size city of Minecraft blocks [Ars Technica, via BoingBoing]
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