Why, to this day, am I still mesmerized by Legos? Is it the fact that it was my first "engineering" like activity which allowed unconstrained creativity that ultimately lead to my career in software engineering? Or was it more mundane, Robinhood never looked so good until I made him battle a space alien...

Lego is low-barrier-to-entry hardware programming for children - i.e. people who haven't yet learned that normal people don't make things.

There is a theory that OO really caught on in the 80s/90s because of a generation that had first grown up with interchangeable identical building blocks of Lego bricks in the 70s

Now I'm wondering what a functional building toy might look like.

A lego toy that could only return copies of lego toys?

Logo?

I just bought a LEGO set the other day for a fun little diversion. To this day at the ripe age of 33 it's still therapeutic and very enjoyable to kick back and build a car out of LEGOs. I really enjoy the designs they come up with, complete with little hints of suspension viewable from the wheel well. The car even has the little trough where the windshield wipers would live.

My mother-in-law bought me a Lego F1 Ferrari for my birthday a couple of years ago. Probably the best gift I've received since I was a kid. Because it turns out that I still I like playing with Lego, but I no longer think to buy it for myself.

I don't know, but I bet there is a very strong correlation between played with lego as kid : works as software developer now.

I wouldn't be willing to work out which one comes first. Does playing with lego cause you to want to build things, or do you want to build things and naturally start playing with lego.

It's the most awesome toy ever built. I've started my kids on Lego as soon as they could hold the bricks, and informed all relatives for all presents to be from the house of Lego.

It's also one of the only toys with resale value (after being played with); the ebay auctions for Lego are hard to win.

It's like trying to understand people who are incurious about technology.

Lego are joys to hackers! We like to think, modify, and build things.

The Minecraft developer should implement lego NXT-esque stuff in his game :)

He does have Redstone, which is Turing Complete, to the point where someone built a 16 bit ALU (I think they went further than that though) out of it. I've seen a few seven segment displays in it too.

I'm working on a game -- when time allows -- that lets you build and race vehicles using Lego Technic-style pieces, e.g. gears, motors, belts, blocks, etc. It's honestly pretty easy from a tech perspective (I'm using Python + PyOgre + Bullet for the core of it), but presenting the vehicle designer to the user in a nice way is really tough. I'll announce the alpha here as soon as I have anything, of course.

Not meta enough! It should be made out of 1x2, 2x2, 4x2 and 8x2 blocks, and construct itself! That would be mindblowing.

But it would lead to an army of insatiable Lego Von Neumann machines taking over the universe.

The "RepLegoRap."

Skip the pointless summary:

http://battlebricks.com/makerlegobot/

Please can someone invent a way to turn all the plastic packaging that I throw out into lego bricks?

There are already Lego-compatible designs on Thingiverse (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:591), and the RepRap community is working on the recycling aspect (http://www.3dreplicators.com/cgi-bin/cblog/index.php?/archiv...)

We'll be there before you know it.

This could be fun as a two phase process, with a typical injection molding machine making legos and then lego maker bot turning them into things. Then you'd have plastic powder -> somewhat arbitrary objects without needing to swap molds out.

Also add a lego recycler that rips apart a legos object and grinds the bricks to form the molder's input plastic pellets.

Use a thing-o-matic to bootstrap a lego thing-o-matic and a maker-lego bot.

So it's a Lego compiler, but it can't quite compile itself yet. I guess that's the next step?

Before humanity meets its doom at the hands of self-replicating sentient lego robots? Yes.

P.S. Start stocking up on these now: http://shop.lego.com/Product/?p=630&cmp=kac-csena&hq...

Yes, I want to wait until this thing can build itself so I don't have to build it.

Now they just need to miniaturize it 10^9-fold and we'll have our molecular nanotech.

Cool! Also interesting and perhaps even more geeky:

Lego Turing Machine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYw2ewoO6c4

So.. its meta lego? (Made 'a lego... get it?)

Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all night.

> Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all night.

Thanks for the warning ;)

I never meta lego I didn't like. :-P

That's impressive...I guess. But can it build itself? :)

That's a tad like asking if an artificial intelligence is sentient, no? :P