Live data from Hacker News

Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

bbc.co.uk

1–10 of 113 posts

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#2
Interestingly, when I started playing the game, this task was essentially impossible for human players without consulting external resources, because the crafting recipes were unlisted, and you needed to know the specific recipes for various things like crafting tables, pick-axes, and shovels that would be nearly impossible to discover by randomly trying to guess recipes.

I don't know if there's a starting tutorial in the game now that explains some basic crafting recipes to get started with (there better be!), but unless the AI can understand it, or you're explicitly programming in the recipes as data, good luck.

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#3
post #2

Interestingly, when I started playing the game, this task was essentially impossible for human players without consulting external resources, because the crafting recipes were unlisted , and you needed to know the specific recipes for various things like crafting tables, pick-axes, and shovels that would be nearly impossible to discover by randomly trying to guess recipes. I don't know if there's a starting tutorial…

Minecraft has had a native recipe book for some time. It displays crafting recipes as you progress through the game.

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#4
post #2

Interestingly, when I started playing the game, this task was essentially impossible for human players without consulting external resources, because the crafting recipes were unlisted , and you needed to know the specific recipes for various things like crafting tables, pick-axes, and shovels that would be nearly impossible to discover by randomly trying to guess recipes. I don't know if there's a starting tutorial…

Right. Theres tons of prior dependencies that could be used with regular old planning and scheduling. Deciding what you need right now is actually trivial with that stock knowledge, and ML might help with where or how to get it, etc.

But I dont think the problem is to get Minecraft agents that can make diamond swords ... it's to use only ML to make agents, which means throwing away all that. That's fine.

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#5
> Entrants were only allowed to use a single graphics processing unit (GPU) and four days of training time.

Alphastar SCII bot has been using much more resources and time than this to train, so maybe there is one of the reasons no entrant has achieved the goal yet.

> A relatively small Minecraft dataset, with 60 million frames of recorded human player data, was also made available to entrants to train their systems.

It will be interesting to see if these artificial and somewhat arbitrary constraints (although I get that the idea is to restrain it to resources that are somewhat realistically available to a single individual without organizational backing today) will either cripple this challenge or in the end yield some innovative results because the entrants will have to devise algorithms that use much less data and resources than what has been traditionally required to get SOTA results.

Additionally it is also unclear whether the way humans learn to play this game is actually using a smaller or a much bigger dataset to learn from. Sure, a human can learn to play it in 20 minutes, but that's after 9-10 years of other pretraining of seing, understanding and operating in the 3D physical world performing various tasks, getting compressed knowledge from other people by watching and listening to them... Maybe that would be an interesting challenge - to still constrain the final model to 1 GPU for 1 day, but at least allow the model to pretrain on arbitrary similar data, if it is not sourced directly from minecraft or any clones.

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#6
post #2

Interestingly, when I started playing the game, this task was essentially impossible for human players without consulting external resources, because the crafting recipes were unlisted , and you needed to know the specific recipes for various things like crafting tables, pick-axes, and shovels that would be nearly impossible to discover by randomly trying to guess recipes. I don't know if there's a starting tutorial…

The challenge is to do this via imitation learning, so it gets to watch others find diamonds first.

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#7

> Entrants were only allowed to use a single graphics processing unit (GPU) and four days of training time. Alphastar SCII bot has been using much more resources and time than this to train, so maybe there is one of the reasons no entrant has achieved the goal yet. > A relatively small Minecraft dataset, with 60 million frames of recorded human player data, was also made available to entrants to train their systems.…

> single graphics processing unit (GPU) and four days of training time.

Maybe there is a reason they had this restriction? I can only think of allowing the winning AI to be ready for end users whic h generally have a single GPU?

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#8
post #2

Interestingly, when I started playing the game, this task was essentially impossible for human players without consulting external resources, because the crafting recipes were unlisted , and you needed to know the specific recipes for various things like crafting tables, pick-axes, and shovels that would be nearly impossible to discover by randomly trying to guess recipes. I don't know if there's a starting tutorial…

Minecraft has had a native recipe book for some time. It displays crafting recipes as you progress through the game.

If the challenge was to train an AI to be able to read a recipe book that would be more impressive imo. Even more impressive would be an AI that could gather the necessary resources. It would be a full game playing AI. An imitation AI to get diamonds is neat, but the fact that it is considered feasible on one GPU in one day speaks to the difficulty of the problem more than anything imo.
Post reply on HN