Notes

An aI Learned to Play Minecraft and it's actually Pretty Good

Chess Go, Chess, and now-Minecraft. Artificial intelligence models have added a new victory to their killing list.



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Artificial intelligence company OpenAI was able to use an unlabeled mix of Minecraft videos, as well as some of them classified by contractors, to create an artificial neural network that can play Minecraft. This is a major achievement for the technology which previously had a difficult time overcoming the game's simple, yet loose gameplay. Open AI engineers revealed their findings in a research paper, and then a blog post this week.



The OpenAI model was able to perform more than basic survival and crafting. It was capable of performing many of the same complicated tasks as a human Minecraft player. OpenAI released a video of its model swimming, hunting and cooking animals. It even mastered the "pillar jumping" technique. Recently, Deepmind was able to successfully make its MuZero AI play Atari games.



Previous AI models have famously relied on various forms of reinforcement learning in the past to beat classic games such as Chess and Go. Minecraft On the other hand is a game that can be mastered by young children, but presents a challenge for AI systems due to its open-world and open-ended structure.



There's an obscene number of videos on the internet that showcase Minecraft gameplay, they only tell a portion of the story of how to actually learn how to play the game, at least when it comes to training an AI. According to OpenAI the flood of unlabeled video content excels at demonstrating "what" to do, but it doesn't provide exact key presses or mouse movements that are necessary for an AI to understand "how" to play.



The engineers have solved this "how" problem by developing an imitation learning technique that is semi-supervised they call "Video PreTraining," or VPT. OpenAI basically took a smaller sample of data from contractors that included Minecraft gameplay as well as key presses and other actions. OpenAI then developed a new model that uses the contractors' videos to predict what actions will come next in each step of an Minecraft video. Equipped with the basic knowhow that their AI had, it was capable of comprehending larger datasets of Minecraft videos that are online. Instead of just dump a large amount of data on their AIs, the engineers took the time teach them the fundamentals of inputs.



"For many tasks, our models exhibit human level performance and we are the first to describe computer agents that can craft diamond tools, which can take proficient humans upwards of 20 minutes (24,000 actions in the environment) of gaming to complete," OpenAI worte in their research paper detailing the results.



According to ZDNet, the cost of all that training and assistance to contractors was about $160,000. The majority of that money according to ZDNet, went to paying contractors who put together around 4,500 hours of gameplay. The cost per hour for contractors was $20.
Minecraft Servers Are My Thing


Below you can see the AI cutting wood, directing its inventory, and exploring caves.



It's hard to believe that an AI that can mine a diamond in Minecraft at a rate of 1% per year is worth the annual salary of some surgeons. But it's worth taking a look back to see how far technology has advanced. Three years ago teams of technologists competed in the MineRL competition were tasked with one straightforward task: develop an AI that could mine a diamond in Minecraft. The contestants were reportedly able to finish the task, and every last one of them failed. OpenAI's model can now craft diamond tools.



OpenAI isn't only a tech company using Minecraft to conduct its AI experiments. In the last month, at its Build conference, Microsoft revealed a new AI Minecraft "agent" that operates within the game. Users interacting with Microsoft Minecraft agents can type in commands that are then generated automatically using the game's software API. Wired informs us that users can type phrases such as "come here" into the Minecraft bot and it will translate it into Minecraft code. The bot then proceeds to move forward. Microsoft's Minecraft agent is able to do more than just walk. It can also find items from the game and combine them into something. It can probably do that faster and better than the writer who's many years removed from his last Minecraft session.


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