AI injected into Minecraft and left alone is now teaching itself how to play

Researchers have injected an artificial intelligence program into an instance of Minecraft and left it to its own devices. The AI is now teaching itself how to survive.

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The AI was developed by the company SingularityNET and the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI Alliance). The AI has been named Autonomous Intelligent Reinforcement Inferred Symbolism, or AIRIS for short. According to reports the AI essentially started from nothing within Minecraft and over time slowly taught itself how to play using nothing but the game's feedback loop.

The researchers explained how the AI is able to play Minecraft. The AI is given two types of environmental inputs and a list of actions it can perform. The first input is a 5 x 5 x 5 3D grid that blocks names that surround the AI agent. The researchers say this is how the AI is able to "see" the world around it. The second input is the current coordinates of the AI agent. The list of actions the AI has available to it is movement-based, which it can perform in one of eight directions - the four directions (forward, back, left, and right) and then diagonally for a total of 16 "actions".

"The agent begins in 'Free Roam' mode and seeks to explore the world around it. Building an internal map of where it has been that can be viewed with the included visualization tool. It learns how to navigate the world and as it encounters obstacles like trees, mountains, caves, etc. it learns and adapts to them. For example, if it falls into a deep cave, it will explore its way out. Its goal is to fill in any empty space in its internal map. So it seeks out ways to get to places it hasn't yet seen."

The researchers say future iterations of the AI will have more actions, such as being able to place blocks, collect resources, fight monsters, and crafting.

"If we give the agent a set of coordinates, it will stop freely exploring and navigate its way to wherever we want it to go. Exploring its way through areas that it has never seen. That could be on top of a mountain, deep in a cave, or in the middle of an ocean. Once it reaches its destination, we can give it another set of coordinates or return it to free roam to explore from there."

"The free exploration and ability to navigate through unknown areas is what sets AIRIS apart from traditional Reinforcement Learning. These are tasks that RL is not capable of doing regardless of how many millions of training episodes or how much compute you give it."