NandGame – Build a computer from scratch

Love the game, and it inspired me to get a small FPGA dev board and make my own instruction set and soft-CPU for it. Not very practical, but a fun exercise.<p>I got an iCE40 board[1] as the open-source story was decent and price was low. There might be better options now.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digikey.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;detail&#x2F;lattice-semiconductor-corporation&#x2F;ICE40UP5K-B-EVN&#x2F;6596291" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digikey.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;detail&#x2F;lattice-semicondu...</a>

I played a similar game called Turing Complete and really enjoyed it! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;1444480&#x2F;Turing_Complete&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;1444480&#x2F;Turing_Complete&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s very similar to the Nand2Tetris book.

Related:<p><i>NandGame – Build a Computer from Scratch</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36862274">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36862274</a> - July 2023 (3 comments)<p><i>NandGame – Build a Computer from Scratch</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31055307">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31055307</a> - April 2022 (14 comments)<p><i>NandGame – Build a Computer from Scratch</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25282507">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25282507</a> - Dec 2020 (136 comments)<p><i>Show HN: Online challenge: Build a CPU from scratch</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17508151">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17508151</a> - July 2018 (60 comments)

Ugh, this just reminded me how far I&#x27;ve fallen. I did EE in college (&gt;20 years ago), specializing in computer architecture. Never did anything with it professionally; I ended up in software. I couldn&#x27;t remember how to do any of these. I managed to trial-and-error my way to the half-adder, at least.

I did both this and the Nand2Tetris course before realizing that they are implementing <i>the same computer</i> -- this is an interactive graphical version, while the original Nand2Tetris uses a textual HDL where you write down the connections between logic gates as text, instead of clicking and dragging to indicate them.<p>I found them both fun and educational, but I thought the NandGame was <i>more</i> fun. But it&#x27;s good to know about the connections, for example because there are more follow-on exercises that you can do from Nand2Tetris (working with higher layers of computer software) after you complete the NandGame. Or you can just be aware that you can talk about the experience and the substance with people who have done the other version!

Some food for thought:<p>Once you complete this (ignoring the first level where you actually build a NAND gate) you essentially get very much what looks like a Neural Network (since it takes 2 neurons to represent a NAND gate), n layers deep, with a lot of zeros in the weight matrices, and some storage.<p>Here is my question: given the input&#x2F;output semantics at the assembly level, is it possible to train a blank neural network to look like this? Backprop obviously wouldn&#x27;t work, but perhaps there is some form of directed search one could use?

I have zero experience with this, and I wish it explained what these components do. What does a relay do, what is the &quot;c&quot; and &quot;in&quot;? Why is there a separate power source, but if you hook up a &#x2F; b to it and flip it on, it gets power without it?

this is awesome, I recommend everyone to also peek into or play MHRD<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;576030&#x2F;MHRD&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;576030&#x2F;MHRD&#x2F;</a>

This looks awesome! I never finished working the book and I regret it. Can&#x27;t wait to try even more of this out.

How much time will pass until someone is playing Doom on this page?

Very nice! Related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;turingcomplete.game&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;turingcomplete.game&#x2F;</a>

Awesome! Will do this with my child.

Does a similar game but with neural networks exist?

I was thinking maybe they meant starting from sand

Reminds of the Turing Machine game from Steam

cant wait to waste a few hours later :3

Cool thx!

I wish there were more hints.<p>I have done this before in another version of this game but for the life of me cannot see how to get to a single output from all of the components I have placed on the screen.<p>It does look cool but without more directions or hints I am done for.