26 ms·

Minecraft to run artificial intelligence experiments

179 points by sjcsjc 11y ago

clishem 11y ago
I think any simulation of a reasonably complex environment is an opportunity for AI research, but I am hoping that TrueCraft (https://github.com/SirCmpwn/TrueCraft https://github.com/SirCmpwn/TrueCraft) will do well so that researchers do not depend on proprietary Minecraft.
- Tepix 11y ago
  A version is minecraft that is forever stuck at 1.7.3 is not very appealing. If you want a game like Minecraft that's open source, check out Minetest http://www.minetest.net/ http://www.minetest.net/
  - deepnet 11y ago
    Version 1.7.3 has everything required for the classroom and a clean room implementation is https://github.com/SirCmpwn/TrueCraft https://github.com/SirCmpwn/TrueCraft
    - asiekierka 11y ago
      It doesn't. Many classrooms rely on ComputerCraftEdu, for instance. While OpenComputers exists, it is not optimized for education, but rather for gameplay.
  - AnthonBerg 11y ago
    The stuff added after 1.7.3 isn't particularly interesting to everyone so opinions will vary :)
    - Ntrails 11y ago
      I dunno, explored the new end fortresses at the weekend and then proceeded to spend about 2 hours jumping off very high things and gliding around with the new wings. (it was frickin sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet) Next project is to set up some arkham style gliding challenges, although in this case missing the target by even a small amount is like to result in death...
      - DanBC 11y ago
        > Next project is to set up some arkham style gliding challenges, although in this case missing the target by even a small amount is like to result in death... Pilot wings in Minecraft? Sounds awesome. I enjoyed some of the dropper maps, and that game where you jump off a high point into a pool and place a block each time, making the target smaller and smaller each time.
    - quarterto 11y ago
      Bear in mind this is Beta 1.7.3, which came out in July 2011. A lot has been added in the last 5 years.
      - marpstar 11y ago
        Can anyone elaborate on some of the things that are missing since then? I've got a 5-year-old who loves Minecraft and we've talked about modding but it just doesn't seem very approachable for a child that young. TrueCraft running on .NET would be considerably easier for me to introduce him to...
        asiekierka 11y ago
        The "Adventure Update" and future updates in the same vein: hunger, enchanting, RPG-esque elements, etc. Also, some of the major redstone additions from the later versions, which are the ones I'd miss most.
  - asiekierka 11y ago
    I played with Minetest for a while. It feels like it suffers from a lack of identity beyond "it's Minecraft, but free and hackable!". This is not enough to build a unified playerbase, I'm afraid. Its API is much simpler, though, if limited (no client-side scripting, limited model options).
    - 91bananas 11y ago
      Here is a Minecraft my buddy pieced together with client side scripting https://github.com/teachthenet/pycraft/ https://github.com/teachthenet/pycraft/
      - asiekierka 11y ago
        Bukkit? This does not sound very client side. Even if it runs on LAN, you're still only touching the integrated server. Client-side scripting in Minecraft-esque modding would probably mean things like being able to create proper, interactive GUIs, HUDs, dynamic rendering, etc.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
    TrueCraft author here. I expect that at some point it will be forked and someone will add the features of newer versions.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- asiekierka 11y ago
  Sadly, TrueCraft, due to its nature, has to lock out one of the most potentially interested groups - Minecraft modders, both former and current. This saddens me a bit, as I myself am a strong fan of the beta 1.7.3 design ideals.
nefitty 11y ago
One day soon, when the current generation that Minecraft courts is my age (mid-20's+), anyone who has never experienced Minecraft on a beyond-coursery level will have no true base from which to analyze concurrent trends. I count myself in the latter group at the moment, but as I see Minecraft become a greater cultural touchstone every day my desire to experience what it offers continues to grow.
- marxidad 11y ago
  What are you waiting for? Try it already!
- pcote 11y ago
  Attempt to translate..... "If you're over 25, chances are your peers don't play Minecraft. I'm over 25. Therefore, I'll play Minecraft when more players are established working age adults." Good luck with that. In the meantime, my age 40+ wife and I have Minecraft mountains to craft into beautiful and creative castle homes.
  - nefitty 11y ago
    That's not exactly what I meant. At my current age my social tipping point for delving into new games is very high. The last game I embraced was Battlefield, and that became an insane timesuck. That makes BF the only game I've accepted into my life in the last 8 years, besides a good Tetris sesh every once in a while. Besides, my point is more a contemplation about what references, ideas, and concepts I'll because I might not ever dive deep into Minecraft. I didn't mean it in a snobby way at all.
- hacker_9 11y ago
  You build stuff out of low poly blocks. If your imagination can't comprehend that then you've missed out on much more than a game.
- VLM 11y ago
  "Minecraft on a beyond-coursery level will have no true base from which to analyze concurrent trends" There is a literal reading of the post that's correct. The deobfuscation of the above line is something like you have no visceral hands on experience with concurrency issues until you try to build a massive automated manufacturing plant in modded minecraft. Go ahead, try and build an optimized manufacturing plant to automatically hands off manufacture all the components for something complicated like the AE2 mod, without understanding concurrency. Everything in minecraft happens in parallel, not in a single threaded machine code or abstract object model. Its like real assembly line engineering, not like writing traditional code at all. Big modded minecraft systems are chock full of LIFOs and deadlocks and queueing and latency issues to work around and debug. Minimal successful production is one thing, but perfectly optimized higher speed parallel production is a whole nother challenge. I will admit that trying to use a single printing press to make AE2 components often annoys me enough into just building assembly lines with five presses, but that produces interesting issues of its own relating to peak to average power requirements of the entire system, and minimal latency (how do you expect something 30 blocks on a side to be as low latency as something 3 blocks on a side?) Any idiot can make a concurrent system work by using ridiculous top tier stuff and setting the goal low enough, but its a fun engineering challenge in the true sense of engineering to make it as small, reliable, fast, and cheap as possible (plus constraints added for fun, sometimes). Both in modded minecraft and in the real world. At this time of morning, I can't think of a kids toy that teaches concurrency design concepts better than "beyond-coursery level" modded minecraft. "Here's a cheap FPGA now implement a working pipelined ALU" isn't really a kids toy although its got similar concepts inside, and its cheap enough for a kid to afford.
kriro 11y ago
The fact that they want to use it as a teaching platform of sorts has very exciting implications. Minecraft is really huge with kids and that's an excellent way of getting more young people interested in AI and programming in general. To this day I think the Berkeley intro to AI class[1] on edx is the best I've seen because it uses Pacman as the running example which makes everything more approachable. It would probably be interesting to turn some of the examples from AIAMA into Minecraft examples as well. [1] https://www.edx.org/course/artificial-intelligence-uc-berkeleyx-cs188-1x https://www.edx.org/course/artificial-intelligence-uc-berkel...
- unclebucknasty 11y ago
  I sometimes doubt the practicabilty and wisdom of this persistent drumbeat to get more kids to learn programming. Sure, there's value in it, but it's frequently posited as something all kids should be doing. Yet, it's frankly not for everyone and the tendency is to diminish the value of other fields (especially if they are completely non-STEM). Worse, this is primarily driven by an economic rationale. Not only do we encourage a monolithic culture that overvalues tech; I also think the assessment of opportunities for pogrammers in the future is overblown. The tech itself will see to this.
  - dagw 11y ago
    The 'secret' is not to say "you should learn programming so you can be become a programmer", but rather "you should learning programming so that you can apply that skill to whatever you end up working with". Even someone working in completely non-STEM fields can potentially derive massive value from knowing some basic programming. Even just knowing some super simple MS Office macros that automate some basic administrative tasks is something that can be applied to basically any job out there where you att any point deal with a computer. Programming shouldn't be just for programmers, just like writing isn't just for writers.
    - unclebucknasty 11y ago
      The objective and the value are not typically posited in such a restricted manner.
2bitencryption 11y ago
Just had a strange thought. Say a sufficiently advanced AI agent is trained in Minecraft with the pixels on the screen as the only raw input (its 'eyes') and then trained to do simple tasks like building houses or hunting for rabbits. Eventually, to us, these in-game players will seem to reason and 'think' about their world. ...which in my mind grants a few points to the "the universe is a computer simulation" paradox/thought experiment/theory.
- argonaut 11y ago
  Unfortunately, the "wishful thinking" (e.g. wild speculation) step in the thought experiment is the "eventually" step.
- facepalm 11y ago
  You might enjoy the book "Vehicles" by Valentio Braitenberg
  - infinite8s 11y ago
    Or Permutation City by Greg Egan.
- tragomaskhalos 11y ago
  You could let it run for a while, and then put up a sign in the world saying "This is God speaking: bad news pal, you're actually a bit of Python running on some kid's laptop".
- hacker_9 11y ago
  They did do this with DeepMind [1], before they pointed it at Go. Simple 2d games though, like Space Invaders. They said 3d games would be their next phase after Go. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePv0Fs9cGgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePv0Fs9cGgU
brillenfux 11y ago
So skeletons will be an even worse pain int the future? On a more serious note: I really hope they improve the mod mechanism, it's really painful to use mods as it stands. And mods are a very big part of Minecraft. As I understand it, Minecraft will be reimplemented soon anyways?
- deciplex 11y ago
  > As I understand it, Minecraft will be reimplemented soon anyways? That would explain why the extant Java version is riddled with years-old bugs and no hope of getting them fixed while they charge full speed ahead with additions to The End and hang-gliding and other shit nobody actually asked for. Of course, there is no reason to think the reimplementation won't have annoying bugs as well, which also won't be fixed while they continue to add esoteric features out of the blue. Yeah, I'm salty.
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    What bugs are you talking about? I've played on and off from 1.2ish, both online and standalone. It's still an unoptimised mess but it's not too bad.
    - deciplex 11y ago
      Here's one: https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-51053 https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-51053 Basically they tried to make some improvements to carts in general, fucked that up, then "reverted" that change and since then powered carts don't work. There's even a fix posted a year ago on the damn ticket itself - but apparently they are too busy adding attention-grabbing bullshit to even do a simple copy / paste job in order to fix major flaws in the game. You'd think, in a game called "Minecraft", that minecarts would get more attention. Alas... However, now that I've looked at this again, it appears they are finally planning to do something about this problem, where "something" is just removing powered carts altogether: https://twitter.com/jeb_/status/699241247391772672 https://twitter.com/jeb_/status/699241247391772672 And don't get me started on boats - though they did eventually fix that after a few years.
z3t4 11y ago
If it wasn't possible to "cheat" by using xray or insta mining super tools ... it would be a fun experiment making mining robots etc.
- NietTim 11y ago
  Well, you can always limit yourself (assuming you're a dev) with what you're allowed to do
- asiekierka 11y ago
  Orebfuscator is a pretty nice solution to X-ray. As for super fast mining tools, you can just not add any to the game.
  - z3t4 11y ago
    I don't think there is a limit on how many "block mined" you can send to the server per second. Or they might have fixed that. Some cheats allow(ed) you to fly around while at the same time mining everything around you.
    - asiekierka 11y ago
      I think plugins like NoCheatPlus did something about it, but with more and more conservative cheat detection methods you start running into the edge cases of legitimate users.
10dpd 11y ago
Its seems that the current progress in AI pioneered by DeepMind is predicated on being able to measure progress by using a pre-defined set of rules (i.e. the game currently being played). How will this work in a MineCraft simulation where there are no rules? Where will the feedback loop come from, e.g. a subjective evaluation by "humans"?
- BoudewijnE 11y ago
  As in the limitations u have in minecraft = rules.
- TuringTest 11y ago
  You still can create a set of goals within the game that count as "success" and others as "failure" to guide the reinforcement; and have the learning process try to figure out everything else in Minecraft in order to achieve those goals.
  - zamalek 11y ago
    Indeed, a GA would work quite nicely here - but I guess you'd need a cluster of machines simulating (not playing) Minecraft for this to be a viable experiment.
- DanBC 11y ago
  Minecraft survival has player health and player armour strength. It also has a hunger bar. And the player has an inventory of items collected. And then there are a bunch of statistics. http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Statistics http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Statistics I agree this would make a player that has an unusual play style (never making a base, for example), but it might make for some fun Let's Play videos. And increasing YouTube subscriber count, and video view count, and video thumbs up, while minimising video thumbs down would be an interesting experiment. ("I welcome our AI Clickbaiting overlords")
  - zdkl 11y ago
    I would follow that channel and its devblogs assiduously
10dpd 11y ago
Its seems that the current progress in AI pioneered by DeepMind is predicated on being able to measure success by using a pre-defined set of rules (i.e. the game currently being played). How will this work in a MineCraft simulation where there are no rules? Where will the feedback loop come from, e.g. a subjective evaluation by "humans"?
daemin 11y ago
This sort of reminds me the experiment that some people ran on a custom Ultima Online server back in the day. They found some interesting behaviours came out from the monsters. I.e. which animals were afraid of which other ones, grouping etc.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
zeveb 11y ago
Interesting that it's named 'AIX,' which is also the name of IBM's Unix-like OS. I guess it says something about IBM's AIX's prospects in the market when no-one associated with this project even thought about it.
- surge 11y ago
  Yeah, I'm wondering if they'll run afoul of trademark. AIX is still around, but IBM is very much pushing Linux, even on the same platform/hardware, so even IBM sort of sees it as dated or offering very little that Linux doesn't offer. Probably more cost effective as I imagine they charge similar for support but have to put less effort into the code.
iandanforth 11y ago
For those interested in more details, a paper using this system is here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/alekha/arxiv_geql.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/alekha/arxiv_g...
- _delirium 11y ago
  For some reason that PDF loads incredibly slowly for me, so here's a link to the abstract on arXiv.org: http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.04119 http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.04119

179 points by sjcsjc 11y ago

I think any simulation of a reasonably complex environment is an opportunity for AI research, but I am hoping that TrueCraft (https://github.com/SirCmpwn/TrueCraft https://github.com/SirCmpwn/TrueCraft) will do well so that researchers do not depend on proprietary Minecraft.

Tepix 11y ago
A version is minecraft that is forever stuck at 1.7.3 is not very appealing. If you want a game like Minecraft that's open source, check out Minetest http://www.minetest.net/ http://www.minetest.net/
- deepnet 11y ago
  Version 1.7.3 has everything required for the classroom and a clean room implementation is https://github.com/SirCmpwn/TrueCraft https://github.com/SirCmpwn/TrueCraft
  - asiekierka 11y ago
    It doesn't. Many classrooms rely on ComputerCraftEdu, for instance. While OpenComputers exists, it is not optimized for education, but rather for gameplay.
- AnthonBerg 11y ago
  The stuff added after 1.7.3 isn't particularly interesting to everyone so opinions will vary :)
  - Ntrails 11y ago
    I dunno, explored the new end fortresses at the weekend and then proceeded to spend about 2 hours jumping off very high things and gliding around with the new wings. (it was frickin sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet) Next project is to set up some arkham style gliding challenges, although in this case missing the target by even a small amount is like to result in death...
    - DanBC 11y ago
      > Next project is to set up some arkham style gliding challenges, although in this case missing the target by even a small amount is like to result in death... Pilot wings in Minecraft? Sounds awesome. I enjoyed some of the dropper maps, and that game where you jump off a high point into a pool and place a block each time, making the target smaller and smaller each time.
  - quarterto 11y ago
    Bear in mind this is Beta 1.7.3, which came out in July 2011. A lot has been added in the last 5 years.
    - marpstar 11y ago
      Can anyone elaborate on some of the things that are missing since then? I've got a 5-year-old who loves Minecraft and we've talked about modding but it just doesn't seem very approachable for a child that young. TrueCraft running on .NET would be considerably easier for me to introduce him to...
      - asiekierka 11y ago
        The "Adventure Update" and future updates in the same vein: hunger, enchanting, RPG-esque elements, etc. Also, some of the major redstone additions from the later versions, which are the ones I'd miss most.
- asiekierka 11y ago
  I played with Minetest for a while. It feels like it suffers from a lack of identity beyond "it's Minecraft, but free and hackable!". This is not enough to build a unified playerbase, I'm afraid. Its API is much simpler, though, if limited (no client-side scripting, limited model options).
  - 91bananas 11y ago
    Here is a Minecraft my buddy pieced together with client side scripting https://github.com/teachthenet/pycraft/ https://github.com/teachthenet/pycraft/
    - asiekierka 11y ago
      Bukkit? This does not sound very client side. Even if it runs on LAN, you're still only touching the integrated server. Client-side scripting in Minecraft-esque modding would probably mean things like being able to create proper, interactive GUIs, HUDs, dynamic rendering, etc.
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
  TrueCraft author here. I expect that at some point it will be forked and someone will add the features of newer versions.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
asiekierka 11y ago
Sadly, TrueCraft, due to its nature, has to lock out one of the most potentially interested groups - Minecraft modders, both former and current. This saddens me a bit, as I myself am a strong fan of the beta 1.7.3 design ideals.

nefitty 11y ago

One day soon, when the current generation that Minecraft courts is my age (mid-20's+), anyone who has never experienced Minecraft on a beyond-coursery level will have no true base from which to analyze concurrent trends. I count myself in the latter group at the moment, but as I see Minecraft become a greater cultural touchstone every day my desire to experience what it offers continues to grow.

marxidad 11y ago
What are you waiting for? Try it already!
pcote 11y ago
Attempt to translate..... "If you're over 25, chances are your peers don't play Minecraft. I'm over 25. Therefore, I'll play Minecraft when more players are established working age adults." Good luck with that. In the meantime, my age 40+ wife and I have Minecraft mountains to craft into beautiful and creative castle homes.
- nefitty 11y ago
  That's not exactly what I meant. At my current age my social tipping point for delving into new games is very high. The last game I embraced was Battlefield, and that became an insane timesuck. That makes BF the only game I've accepted into my life in the last 8 years, besides a good Tetris sesh every once in a while. Besides, my point is more a contemplation about what references, ideas, and concepts I'll because I might not ever dive deep into Minecraft. I didn't mean it in a snobby way at all.
hacker_9 11y ago
You build stuff out of low poly blocks. If your imagination can't comprehend that then you've missed out on much more than a game.
VLM 11y ago
"Minecraft on a beyond-coursery level will have no true base from which to analyze concurrent trends" There is a literal reading of the post that's correct. The deobfuscation of the above line is something like you have no visceral hands on experience with concurrency issues until you try to build a massive automated manufacturing plant in modded minecraft. Go ahead, try and build an optimized manufacturing plant to automatically hands off manufacture all the components for something complicated like the AE2 mod, without understanding concurrency. Everything in minecraft happens in parallel, not in a single threaded machine code or abstract object model. Its like real assembly line engineering, not like writing traditional code at all. Big modded minecraft systems are chock full of LIFOs and deadlocks and queueing and latency issues to work around and debug. Minimal successful production is one thing, but perfectly optimized higher speed parallel production is a whole nother challenge. I will admit that trying to use a single printing press to make AE2 components often annoys me enough into just building assembly lines with five presses, but that produces interesting issues of its own relating to peak to average power requirements of the entire system, and minimal latency (how do you expect something 30 blocks on a side to be as low latency as something 3 blocks on a side?) Any idiot can make a concurrent system work by using ridiculous top tier stuff and setting the goal low enough, but its a fun engineering challenge in the true sense of engineering to make it as small, reliable, fast, and cheap as possible (plus constraints added for fun, sometimes). Both in modded minecraft and in the real world. At this time of morning, I can't think of a kids toy that teaches concurrency design concepts better than "beyond-coursery level" modded minecraft. "Here's a cheap FPGA now implement a working pipelined ALU" isn't really a kids toy although its got similar concepts inside, and its cheap enough for a kid to afford.

kriro 11y ago

The fact that they want to use it as a teaching platform of sorts has very exciting implications. Minecraft is really huge with kids and that's an excellent way of getting more young people interested in AI and programming in general. To this day I think the Berkeley intro to AI class[1] on edx is the best I've seen because it uses Pacman as the running example which makes everything more approachable. It would probably be interesting to turn some of the examples from AIAMA into Minecraft examples as well. [1] https://www.edx.org/course/artificial-intelligence-uc-berkeleyx-cs188-1x https://www.edx.org/course/artificial-intelligence-uc-berkel...

unclebucknasty 11y ago
I sometimes doubt the practicabilty and wisdom of this persistent drumbeat to get more kids to learn programming. Sure, there's value in it, but it's frequently posited as something all kids should be doing. Yet, it's frankly not for everyone and the tendency is to diminish the value of other fields (especially if they are completely non-STEM). Worse, this is primarily driven by an economic rationale. Not only do we encourage a monolithic culture that overvalues tech; I also think the assessment of opportunities for pogrammers in the future is overblown. The tech itself will see to this.
- dagw 11y ago
  The 'secret' is not to say "you should learn programming so you can be become a programmer", but rather "you should learning programming so that you can apply that skill to whatever you end up working with". Even someone working in completely non-STEM fields can potentially derive massive value from knowing some basic programming. Even just knowing some super simple MS Office macros that automate some basic administrative tasks is something that can be applied to basically any job out there where you att any point deal with a computer. Programming shouldn't be just for programmers, just like writing isn't just for writers.
  - unclebucknasty 11y ago
    The objective and the value are not typically posited in such a restricted manner.

2bitencryption 11y ago

Just had a strange thought. Say a sufficiently advanced AI agent is trained in Minecraft with the pixels on the screen as the only raw input (its 'eyes') and then trained to do simple tasks like building houses or hunting for rabbits. Eventually, to us, these in-game players will seem to reason and 'think' about their world. ...which in my mind grants a few points to the "the universe is a computer simulation" paradox/thought experiment/theory.

argonaut 11y ago
Unfortunately, the "wishful thinking" (e.g. wild speculation) step in the thought experiment is the "eventually" step.
facepalm 11y ago
You might enjoy the book "Vehicles" by Valentio Braitenberg
- infinite8s 11y ago
  Or Permutation City by Greg Egan.
tragomaskhalos 11y ago
You could let it run for a while, and then put up a sign in the world saying "This is God speaking: bad news pal, you're actually a bit of Python running on some kid's laptop".
hacker_9 11y ago
They did do this with DeepMind [1], before they pointed it at Go. Simple 2d games though, like Space Invaders. They said 3d games would be their next phase after Go. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePv0Fs9cGgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePv0Fs9cGgU

brillenfux 11y ago

So skeletons will be an even worse pain int the future? On a more serious note: I really hope they improve the mod mechanism, it's really painful to use mods as it stands. And mods are a very big part of Minecraft. As I understand it, Minecraft will be reimplemented soon anyways?

deciplex 11y ago
> As I understand it, Minecraft will be reimplemented soon anyways? That would explain why the extant Java version is riddled with years-old bugs and no hope of getting them fixed while they charge full speed ahead with additions to The End and hang-gliding and other shit nobody actually asked for. Of course, there is no reason to think the reimplementation won't have annoying bugs as well, which also won't be fixed while they continue to add esoteric features out of the blue. Yeah, I'm salty.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  What bugs are you talking about? I've played on and off from 1.2ish, both online and standalone. It's still an unoptimised mess but it's not too bad.
  - deciplex 11y ago
    Here's one: https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-51053 https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-51053 Basically they tried to make some improvements to carts in general, fucked that up, then "reverted" that change and since then powered carts don't work. There's even a fix posted a year ago on the damn ticket itself - but apparently they are too busy adding attention-grabbing bullshit to even do a simple copy / paste job in order to fix major flaws in the game. You'd think, in a game called "Minecraft", that minecarts would get more attention. Alas... However, now that I've looked at this again, it appears they are finally planning to do something about this problem, where "something" is just removing powered carts altogether: https://twitter.com/jeb_/status/699241247391772672 https://twitter.com/jeb_/status/699241247391772672 And don't get me started on boats - though they did eventually fix that after a few years.

z3t4 11y ago

If it wasn't possible to "cheat" by using xray or insta mining super tools ... it would be a fun experiment making mining robots etc.

NietTim 11y ago
Well, you can always limit yourself (assuming you're a dev) with what you're allowed to do
asiekierka 11y ago
Orebfuscator is a pretty nice solution to X-ray. As for super fast mining tools, you can just not add any to the game.
- z3t4 11y ago
  I don't think there is a limit on how many "block mined" you can send to the server per second. Or they might have fixed that. Some cheats allow(ed) you to fly around while at the same time mining everything around you.
  - asiekierka 11y ago
    I think plugins like NoCheatPlus did something about it, but with more and more conservative cheat detection methods you start running into the edge cases of legitimate users.

10dpd 11y ago

Its seems that the current progress in AI pioneered by DeepMind is predicated on being able to measure progress by using a pre-defined set of rules (i.e. the game currently being played). How will this work in a MineCraft simulation where there are no rules? Where will the feedback loop come from, e.g. a subjective evaluation by "humans"?

BoudewijnE 11y ago
As in the limitations u have in minecraft = rules.
TuringTest 11y ago
You still can create a set of goals within the game that count as "success" and others as "failure" to guide the reinforcement; and have the learning process try to figure out everything else in Minecraft in order to achieve those goals.
- zamalek 11y ago
  Indeed, a GA would work quite nicely here - but I guess you'd need a cluster of machines simulating (not playing) Minecraft for this to be a viable experiment.
DanBC 11y ago
Minecraft survival has player health and player armour strength. It also has a hunger bar. And the player has an inventory of items collected. And then there are a bunch of statistics. http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Statistics http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Statistics I agree this would make a player that has an unusual play style (never making a base, for example), but it might make for some fun Let's Play videos. And increasing YouTube subscriber count, and video view count, and video thumbs up, while minimising video thumbs down would be an interesting experiment. ("I welcome our AI Clickbaiting overlords")
- zdkl 11y ago
  I would follow that channel and its devblogs assiduously

10dpd 11y ago

Its seems that the current progress in AI pioneered by DeepMind is predicated on being able to measure success by using a pre-defined set of rules (i.e. the game currently being played). How will this work in a MineCraft simulation where there are no rules? Where will the feedback loop come from, e.g. a subjective evaluation by "humans"?

daemin 11y ago

This sort of reminds me the experiment that some people ran on a custom Ultima Online server back in the day. They found some interesting behaviours came out from the monsters. I.e. which animals were afraid of which other ones, grouping etc.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

zeveb 11y ago

Interesting that it's named 'AIX,' which is also the name of IBM's Unix-like OS. I guess it says something about IBM's AIX's prospects in the market when no-one associated with this project even thought about it.

surge 11y ago
Yeah, I'm wondering if they'll run afoul of trademark. AIX is still around, but IBM is very much pushing Linux, even on the same platform/hardware, so even IBM sort of sees it as dated or offering very little that Linux doesn't offer. Probably more cost effective as I imagine they charge similar for support but have to put less effort into the code.

iandanforth 11y ago

For those interested in more details, a paper using this system is here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/alekha/arxiv_geql.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/alekha/arxiv_g...

_delirium 11y ago
For some reason that PDF loads incredibly slowly for me, so here's a link to the abstract on arXiv.org: http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.04119 http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.04119