Logic as Minecraft (Part 1)

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This blog post is intended to be the first in a series where I try out an alternative approach to teaching formal logic and proofs, using a crafting/resource management game as a vehicle. I will be taking liberal inspiration and examples from the wonderful Minecraft video game, a game that I enjoy ¹.

The reason I wanted to try something new is that, although I’ve always found logic fascinating, it has a reputation for being quite abstract and challenging in classroom settings. I came up with this Minecraft approach while preparing for a teaching demo talk I gave during my recent academic job interviews, which I had a lot of fun crafting (ha!). So I thought it would be fun to share it here. I hope it’ll make learning logic not only fun and intuitive through (literal) Minecraft gameplay, but also interactive by later incorporating a live coding environment called an interactive theorem prover ², which will allow us to play logic as a (surprisingly addictive) game with real-time feedback.

Solver-aided chorale composition

Sat, 11 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Composing music is hard: if you hit the keys on a piano randomly, chances are, it won’t sound great. A music theory aims to distill a musical syntax such that a syntactically correct composition will not sound “wrong.” Under this view, composition becomes a constraint satisfaction problem: given a background theory, find a sequence of composition actions that does not violate the theory’s syntax.

To illustrate this view, here’s a toy project called Choco that I built for composing music in the style of Baroque four-part chorales. It was originally developed as a course project for CS 292C - Computer Aided Reasoning for Software, and was motivated by my earlier memory of doing four-part voice leading in a music theory class. I felt at that time that the rules of four-part harmony were rigid enough, and the process mechanical enough, that it would be possible to automate the process of composing a chorale. Choco is my attempt at doing just that.

Logic on Junrui Liu

Logic as Minecraft (Part 1)

Introduction

Solver-aided chorale composition

Introduction