An artificial intelligence (AI) system has for the first time figured out how to collect diamonds in the hugely popular video game Minecraft — a difficult task requiring multiple steps — without being shown how to play. Its creators say the system, called Dreamer, is a step towards machines that can generalize knowledge learned in one domain to new situations, a major goal of AI.
Collecting a diamond is “a very hard task”, says computer scientist Jeff Clune at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who was part of a separate team that trained a program to find diamonds using videos of human play. “There is no question this represents a major step forward for the field.”
An even bigger target for AI, says Clune, is the ultimate challenge for Minecraft players: killing the Ender Dragon, the virtual world’s most fearsome creature.
Neuro-sama: finally a worthwhile opponent
AI is gonna play videogames for us too? I don’t want this
So the funny thing is… the lead researcher added “finding diamonds” since it’s a niche and highly difficult task that involves multi-step processing (have to cut wood, make pickaxe, mine iron, …) that the AI was not trained on. DeepMind has a good track record with real life usage of their AI… so I think their ultimate goal is to make the AI go from “Minecraft kiddies” to something that can think on the spot to help with treating rare disease or something like that
Y’know they could have used something like Slay the Spire or Balatro… but I digress
“Think”
Edit: second one not the first.
It will play alongside us, maybe future npcs will seem as real as another player. This is both exciting and terrifying haha but sites like .io games where already using AI to make servers seemed there were more players than what really was there.
I think the problem with all of this is not telling the player. If I know I’m playing with bots it’s fine since I can choose but don’t deceive me saying they are humans, that should be (or maybe is?) illegal.
Totally worth the environmental offset. It can find diamonds in Minecraft. A gift to humanity.
A gift to humanity.
Only if AI can do it 24/7 for all of us.
Sounds like April fools news. Dreamer is a great name for Minecraft player. What could go wrong?
Welcome to the Google DeepMind Minecraft SMP server : ) (/s)
Consuming only the power usage of a small country to run a thriving Minecraft SMP of AIs running around randomly and accomplishing nothing!
They’ve only just achieved this - something that a six year old can do - and yet there are dozens of corporations and startups claiming to already be developing humanoid robots. Yeah I don’t think the humanoid robots are going to be here soon. Imagine 300kg of steel with the intelligence of a 6 year old barrelling down the street.
Somehow, “supercomputer learns to do a task in 9 days that an average child could do in a couple hours” doesn’t impress me all that much.
Also, expert human players take 20-30 minutes to find diamonds??? Divide those numbers by 5 and it might be realistic; top players can speedrun the whole game in less than that fairly consistently.
