Notes

Minecraft Diamond Challenge Leaves AI Creators Stumped

Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped By Sam Shead Technology reporter



12 December 2019



Most Minecraft players can locate the key diamonds in minutes. However, it's much more difficult to train artificial intelligence to do this job.



Microsoft is an Minecraft publisher and other companies pushed coders to design AI agents that could find the sought-after treasures.



Most people can master it in their first session.



However there was no way to prove that any of the more than 660 entries submitted met the task.



The results of the MineRL - which is a pronounced mineral - competition are due to be announced informally on Saturday at the NeurIPS AI conference in Vancouver, Canada.



The objective was to see whether the problem could be solved without requiring a huge amount of computing power.



Despite the lack of an award One of the organisers said that she was "hugely impressed" by the participants.



Katja Hofmann, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, stated that "the task we set was very challenging." "Finding diamonds in Minecraft involves a number of steps - from cutting down trees, making tools to exploring caves and actually finding a diamond.



"While no agent submitted has yet solved the problem completely, they have made a significant amount of progress and have learned to make many of the tools needed to accomplish the task."



Mining diamonds



Minecraft has become wildly popular since its release in 2011.



The open-world game has been downloaded more than 180 million times and the title is played by more than 112,000,000 people each month.



Diamond is a crucial resource in Minecraft. It can be used to create powerful weapons and armour.



However, to get the precious stone, the player must first go through a series of other steps.



"If you're familiar with the game it shouldn't take you more than 20 minutes to get your first diamonds," Minecraft player Jules Portelly told the BBC.



The entry requirements were that the entrants only be allowed to use one graphics processing unit (GPU) and that they undergo four days of instruction. For context, AI systems usually need months or years of game play to master games like StarCraft II.



A comparatively small Minecraft dataset, comprising 60 million frames of recorded human player data, was also made available to entrants to train their systems.
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"At the start of every episode they spawned in a procedurally-generated Minecraft world," explained Dr Hofmann.



"So they had to understand the concept about finding resources, creating tools, and finding a gem."



Minecraft for artificial intelligence experiments



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AI assistant to help Minecraft players



The developers were asked to develop programs that learn by imitation, using an approach called "imitation learning".



This is where you attempt to make AI agents adopt the best approach to solving a task by getting them to imitate humans or other software.



This contrasts with "reinforcement learning" in which an agent is trained to determine the best solution through trial and error.



All AI



Research has proven that reinforcement learning can lead to superior results.



DeepMind's AlphaGo Zero program, for instance, beat an earlier effort by the research hub , which used reinforcement learning and the analysis of data labelled from human behavior to teach the game of Go.



This "pure" method requires more computing power, and is too expensive for researchers not working in large organisations or in government.



William Guss, the main contest's organiser and PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, told the BBC that the purpose of the contest was to demonstrate that "throwing massive compute at problems isn't always the right way for us to push the limits of the art as a field".



He added: "It works directly against democratising access to these systems of reinforcement learning, and leaves the ability to train agents in difficult environments to corporations that have vast amounts of computing."



However, the final outcome could highlight the advantages these entities with a good financial position have.



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