The AI has become unbeatable in chess and GO, but is unable to mine diamonds in Minecraft.
In recent years we have seen how artificial intelligence has not only learned in different games and areas but has even become the best. In chess he is practically unbeatable against a human being and the same happens in Go, where he knocked out the best player in the world. Nevertheless, in situations where the rules of the game are more open and the AI has no defined parameters … has a bad time. So much so that in Minecraft he is not able to find a simple diamond.
660 artificial intelligences not so intelligent
Getting a diamond in Minecraft could be said to be one of the end goals of the game (all this in the context of Minecraft, which doesn’t really have an end goal). For this you need to carry out different previous steps and obtain other materials and tools to reach the level of being able to mine a diamond. For example, it is essential to have an iron pick, for which you must obtain first iron, for which you also need previously a stone pick, a furnace, coal … And obviously apart from getting all these materials you also have to survive this entire period. definitely, mining a diamond shows that you have mastered and controlled how to play Minecraft.
Building on that earlier this year Microsoft with the participation of other organizations created the MineRL (pun for pronouncing “mineral”) competition. In this competition the various participants with their respective artificial intelligences had to get a diamond in Minecraft. The AIs were offered 1,000 hours of Minecraft gameplays and four days to learn the game. The gameplays showed game scenes in which they navigated (to learn to move), in which materials and tools were obtained or scenes in which they simply survived the adversities of the environment (monsters, lava, falls, hunger … ).
With this material an adult would have more than enough to learn to play Minecraft and in the end get at least one diamond. The AI apparently does not, out of 660 participants none have successfully completed the mission.
According to those responsible for MineRL to the BBC, some of the artificial intelligences achieved relevant achievements and intermediate steps how to get iron picks to mine diamonds. But find the diamonds and mine them … nobody. Neither by imitation learning (watching the 1,000 hours of gameplays) nor by reinforcement learning (practicing for 4 days of trial and error) were the AIs able to master the game.
The objective of the competition according to those responsible was put artificial intelligence in a bind. The limit of 1,000 hours of demonstration and four days of practice was purposely imposed to see what an AI can do with so few resources. They wanted to see if a problem in “an open world” like Minecraft can be solved with little resources and computing power. Because of course, the DeepMind AI, which has Google’s capital behind it, was not participating in this challenge. At the moment the thousands of youtubers who are dedicated to uploading Minecraft gameplays do not see their work threatened by automation.
