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.
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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.