User:DrifAssault/High Cactus



Tall Cacti Finding, abbreviated as TCF, or known as slang cacti staccing, is an effort to find abnormally tall cacti generated in Minecraft. The cacti generated must be in the normal vanilla version, meaning it can be generated in normal Minecraft generation. Cacti is defined to be cactus blocks consecutively on top of each other. 3 variables define cacti's location: Minecraft's version, the world seed, and coordinates. The height of cacti, which can be considered to be noticeable, depends on how advanced the seed-finding technology at the time is. As of October 2020, cacti ranging from 19-21 block tall is considered to be normal. However, it depends on the method to "manipulate" the cactus.

Cacti generation in Minecraft
A cactus is a plant block that generates naturally in dry areas. They can only spawn on sand, red sand or other cacti blocks. Cactus blocks is naturally occured in desert and badlands biomes (twice more common in desert than in badlands). They generate as one block tall with $$\frac{11}{18}$$ chance, two with $$\frac{5}{18}$$ chance, or three with $$\frac{2}{18}$$ chance.

Potted cacti
A potted cactus can also be found in an igloo with a basement. Potted cacti and 3 block cacti are also found in some desert village buildings. However, potted cacti cannot be used to make high cacti, as they are not cactus blocks. They are defined as a variation of pot item in Minecraft; therefore, it cannot be called as a cacti and will not count as a stack of cacti.

Chunk-bound cacti
Taller cacti can be created if Minecraft chooses to generate another cactus on top of one already generated cactus. In this specfic example, the chance of 2 cacti in the same chunk "stacc", is $$\frac{1}{256}$$.

High cacti finding methods
Although it is not impossible to find high cacti in gameplay, it is regarded as very inefficient. Instead, high cacti finding is done by copying Minecraft's cacti generation into a code, reducing unnecessary threads and operations. High cacti finding is usually done in a minimal, efficient programming language to increase efficiency, such as CUDA or C++.

GPU implementation
As the high cacti finding algorithm only uses basic numerical operations, it is possible to put them to be run on GPUs or imported to BOINC, which is insanely faster compared to CPUs. CUDA is chosen to write the high cacti program, as they are fast, low-level language and can extract the full power Nvidia's GPUs. However, in some implementations, to make it more appealing to BOINC users, these programs were rewritten in OpenCL.

History
The word stacc originated by the methods of finding high cactus is not passively finding them, but rather actively "manipulate" the cacti in a way that filters a lot of failed population seed out, speeding up the cactus hunt.