Game Theory - STOP Punching Trees! (Minecraft)

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

There are a ton of interesting things in Minecraft, but one that stands out to me is the fact that to cut down a tree you PUNCH IT! You punch a tree! How does Steve not break his hand? Loyal Theorists, I want to find out if you can really cut down a tree with only your FISTS and not injure yourself... too bad. Don't try this at home Theorists, let me do it for you!

Welcome to Game Theory. The show that's been around since before Minecraft was released. Kind of. If you time travel back to the first ever game theory episode, which is coincidentally about the time travel game Chrono Trigger, you'll notice that the upload date is April 18th, 2011. More than half a year earlier than November 18th, 2011, the date of Minecraft's 1.0 release.

Now, of course, earlier developmental builds of classic Minecraft were released as early as 2009, so, you know, the show isn't that old, but still, we're old. We're older than dirt. Or at least Minecraft's 8-bit pixelated dirt. Anyway, the reason I'm waxing nostalgic about the early days of game theories is because today, we're going back to Game Theory Classic. Not in terms of the bad audio quality and awkward Photoshop slideshows of yesteryear, but in terms of subject matter.

Compared to where it first began, game theory has evolved a lot as a show, becoming much more about solving the mysteries of game lore, mostly because that's what you all told me that you like the best. And lately on the channel, that's what we've been doing with the Minecraft series. Unravel the mysteries of the Enderman, the lost discs, the origins of the wither, and connecting it all back to an ancient race of master builders But today, I wanted to do a throwback of sorts to that earlier period of game theory One that simply asks the question is that stupid, ridiculous video game thing actually possible in real life? And that, my friends, in the context of Minecraft is punching down a tree with your bare fists.

It's literally the first thing that pretty much every player does in Minecraft. They're brought into the world with nothing but the teal blue shirt on the backs and two meaty sticks for arms and you swing them at the nearest tree and you punch that tree until it gives you wood. Wood upon which you will build your empire. Unless of course a creeper blows it all sky high. But seriously, can a human actually punch down a tree? I mean, not me, obviously since my arms are about as strong as a flaccid noodle, but say, I don't know, a boxer. And not like those YouTube boxers either, heavy air quotes there, I mean the real men and women who have been professionally training in the sport for years. Or, you know, if they can't do it, maybe just Steve is superhuman. And if he is blessed with some level of superhuman punching strength, just how strong is he? Make sure that you stick around today, folks, you're not gonna want a leaf until you've seeded the end of this one. The themes of the show may have evolved, ladies and gentlemen, but, uh, the roots, the bad puns, those have never left.

As it turns out, we have internet videos that answer this question already. Like this video of a 10-year-old Russian girl smashing a tree to pieces. In Soviet Russia, we don't cut trees down. We bunch them down. Hey, that was pretty good! Best accent I've probably done on the show for years. Now, obviously, Evnikas Sadvacass here isn't really given us what we're asking about. The tree that we see in this video is obviously dead. More importantly, it's not just dead, it's been subject to dry rot. Form of wood decay that occurs when certain species of fungi start breaking down and digesting the parts of the tree that give the wood its strength and stiffness.

Dry rot is not something that affects still living trees, like the ones that were so fond of punching down in Minecraft, so if we're really hoping to replicate what we see Steve doing in the game, it's gonna take a lot Harder of a punch. So how hard would it be to actually damage a tree using a human punch? Well, hard is the operative word here. The amount of damage a tree takes from a punch is actually gonna depend on how hard it is and not all trees are created equally. For example, balsa wood is much softer than a hard maple tree and thus is gonna be much easier to punch through. Luckily in Minecraft, we know the exact types of wood that we're dealing with here. It's not just a world filled with generic trees, but instead we know that there are six different species of trees in the Minecraft universe. There's oak, spruce, acacia, birch, jungle tree, and dark oak, and each one in real life would have its own varying level of hardness.

Now if you've spent much time in the lumber section of a hardware store, which, believe it or not, I know many of you actually have. Shout out to all the loyal theorists who currently work at Home Depot! Seriously, that callout might seem random, but I meet more fans in Home Depot than almost anywhere else and there a lot. Anyway, you may have heard the terms hardwood and softwood before. All woods fall into one of those two categories. Now at first you might think that these terms refer to the hardness of various woods, right? Obvious answer is obvious. But actually these terms refer to the seeds that the trees grow from. If the seeds of the tree have some kind of covering when they fall from the tree, like say a fruit or a nut, then it's classified as a hardwood. But if it's a species of tree that just allows the seeds to fall naked without any covering, then that that's a fruit or a nut, then that's a species of tree that just allows the seeds to fall naked without any covering, then that's considered a softwood and while it is generally true that trees in the hardwood

category tend to be harder than trees in the softwood category this isn't always the case for instance balsa wood here is one of the softest woods on the planet so soft that even I can punch through it on the other hand incense cedar here which is most commonly used to make pencils is classified as a soft wood but I mean you can already tell it's a fair bit harder And I'm gonna have a bit harder time punching through that. So good! Such a softwood! On the other hand, the yew tree is classified as a softwood,

but, well, let's just say it's a little bit harder. So hardwoods can be soft and softwoods can be hard. It's confusing, right? We obviously are gonna need a more accurate way to measure the hardness of a wood if we want to have any hope of figuring out just how many punches it takes Steve to get to the center of that Tutsi roll log. Luckily, there's a test for that, existing specifically for the purpose of testing the hardness of wood. The Janka Hardness.

Hardness Test created by Gabrielle Janka which measures the amount of force needed to embed a small steel ball into a piece of wood of a Specific size cut and moisture level because all of that matters when we're talking about the subject of wood hardness Balsa wood the softest wood rates a mere 70 pounds of force on the Janka Hardness test You can just push that thing in with your own thumb well an Australian species of ironwood tree is among the hardest of woods Rating a whopping 5,060 pounds of force because in Australia even the trees are hardcore. And yeah, ironwood trees aren't just a fantasy term that George R.R. Martin invented. It's an actual family of plants.

So the more you know, in Soviet Australia, trees aren't wood, they're iron. So obviously we're talking about a pretty huge range here. 70 pounds of forest to over 5,000 pounds of forest. It's really important for us to figure out which woods we're specifically working with. So all we have to do is take all six of those Minecraft tree types I mentioned earlier, look them up on the Janka Hardness Test performed on the woods at the same type, and we know the hardness. Simple and clean, right? Well, not exactly. Yes, Minecraft calls each of its six different tree types species, but that's not actually accurate.

Oak, for instance, is not actually a species, it's an entire genus. That includes many different tree varieties, including white oak, red oak, Tasmanian oak, and English oak. Same thing for spruce trees, same thing for birch trees, and acacia. So for each one of those categories, we're actually going to use the design of each tree in Minecraft, using especially the bark and branch designs that we see, and then choose the most accurate, real world equivalent for each of those categories. Dark oak, our fifth Minecraft tree variety, isn't a real thing either, but it seems pretty darn close to the black oak in real life, so we're just gonna use that one. And finally, jungle tree? Yeah, that's obviously not a real thing, so I'm just gonna choose a tree that's commonly found in jungles that looks roughly like our game's jungle trees. Doing all that, we get ourselves the following list. Oak is really live oak. Spruce is technically white spruce. Birch is really gonna be a gray birch. Acacia is largely facacia. Jungle tree is Amazon Rosewood. and dark oak is really black oak. Feel free to add those to your Minecraft Wiki trivia sections guys.

All units that you see present in that chart are measured in pounds of force. With our jungle tree being the hardest at 2,700 pounds of force and our white spruce being the softest at the very low 480. Since it's hard to envision what those numbers mean, let me give you some context here. A study of boxers found that they can punch with an average strength of 776 pounds of force. With the strongest boxers, close to 1,300 pounds of force. Meaning that four of our six different tree types

are indeed weaker than the average punch of a really strong boxer. In other words, it's looking totally possible for a human to be able to punch down two thirds of these trees. Now obviously, not all punches are created equally, right? You're gonna wanna aim these punches carefully. If you're punching directly into the tree,

you're just gonna end up condensing the fibers of the tree into each other and thus create a denser, harder tree. So, not only do we have to think about the strength, of Steve's punches here, but we also have to think about the boxing technique that you're gonna use. Steve just limply waving his arm at the trunk of a tree, not gonna cut it, literally. But a hook of a punch could easily knock off a good chunk of wood, allowing you to, chunk by chunk, cut through the wood with your very own band.

So, knowing that it's now possible for a highly trained boxer to punch down a tree, the next question is, how many punches would it take to recreate what we see Steve doing in the game? It's well established that one block in Minecraft is one cubic meter. So, let's say, take our acacia tree as an example. The janka hardness rating that we found earlier represents how much forces needed to eliminate 751.5 cubic millimeters of wood from the tree. For example, a large leaf acacia tree has a janka hardness of 1,100 pounds force, which means that a 1,100 pound punch is going to take off that 751.5 cubic millimeters of wood that we just talked about. So, to gradually chip away at an entire one meter by one meter by one meter

cube, 751 cubic millimeters at a time, it would take you a whopping, drum roll please, 1,330,700 punches. That is gonna be one long and painful and quite frankly boring game of Minecraft. Over one million punches to get rid of one block of tree. That is crazy, but it's also a bit misleading. That number is only if you want to pulverize that entire one cubic meter block of wood, to pull. I don't know why you'd want to do that. Maybe you want just a pile of really ineffectual wood chips. Maybe you have a repressed rage that you really want to take out on a piece of lumber. I'm not going to question it. I'm not going to get anywhere near your fists. But if instead you just want to chop the tree down like a normal not rage-fueled person, then you're just going to need to

chip away at a small layer of wood. One little strip through the center there. Doing that calculation, you actually get yourself a much more reasonable number of punches. 66,000, 535. And remember, each of those punches has got to be full strength. I mean Steve is a fast puncher but even at his rate of four full power punches a second, that is still four hours, 37 minutes and 14 seconds a non-stop wailing on the tree to do the hard work of just slicing through a single thin block of wood. So let's look at it from the other angle. Steve is able to down logs from trees in just three seconds which is about 16 swipes from his meaty paws which means that each of those punches must be packing some serious power. If we keep all of our assumptions intact and observe 16 punches is enough to completely pulverize one complete cubic meter of wood. That means that when Steve is punching a spruce, the softest of all of Minecraft's trees, he is punching with a staggering 40 million pounds of force. And that's not even the half of it.

Steve is able to karate chop down every Minecraft tree with the same number of hits per block, including the Mighty Oak, which would require a whopping 274 million pounds of force per punch to take down the tree with the efficiency that we see in the game from Steve. To put that into perspective, that's over 211,000 times stronger than the world's most powerful boxers. That's 98 times the thrust of a space shuttle solid rocket booster at liftoff. These punches are not only powerful enough to pulverize a mere tree, they're enough to lift a rocket into space nearly 100 times over. And Steve is putting out that kind of force with every single one of his punches. It's no wonder he's able to carry

dozens of giant gold blocks around in his pockets due to stronger than Superman. Actually come to think of it, that's a good question. Is Steve's stronger than Superman? Or Steve's pants pocket stronger than Superman? How is he carrying all that in his pants? Anyway, all of this should make one thing abundantly clear. If you want to chop down a tree, use an axe. Seriously, while you could wail on the tree with titantically strong punches for a solid 30 minutes, you could instead pick up an axe and direct all your effort to a single point of contact. Sure, Steve might have the power of Titans in his fists, but if you want to work smarter and not harder, you can wield that same level of power just by picking the right tool for the job.

But hey, that's just a theory! A game theory! Thanks for watching!