
Minecraft to run artificial intelligence experiments - sjcsjc
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35778288
======
kriro
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-
berkel...](https://www.edx.org/course/artificial-intelligence-uc-berkeleyx-
cs188-1x)

~~~
mikegerwitz
I am personally very uncomfortable with introducing children to programming
using Minecraft---sure, it has some benefits, but it's teaching them to
embrace a proprietary platform that tells them that they cannot study or
modify the source code. Support for modding does not count. What children need
to be introduced to is software and an operating system where you can "mod"
_everything_, and expect to be able to! _That_ is a practical skill and a
powerful foundation.

Children should be encouraged to adopt free software. Replacements like
Minetest exist, and they also have a strong modding community. I'd recommend
people instead invest their time creating excellent mods for Minetest and
bring it up to par with the features of Minecraft. I will be introducing my
son to Minetest soon (he's four) before he gets into Kindergarten and his
peers start talking about Minecraft and pressure him into a world of
proprietary software. I would rather him talk to his friends about Minetest
and encourage them to play with him.

There are also many other projects that aim to teach children programming.

Proprietary software is incompatible with education. rms has talked at length
about these issues; I encourage others to consider his perspective:

[https://www.gnu.org/education/education.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/education/education.en.html)
[https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-
important...](https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-
important.html)

~~~
VLM
Computercraft mod gives you LUA programmed turtles with impressive levels of
programability.

Its fairly bare metal. Its not like you're running "mine.tunnel" and it does
all the work for you, you have to program every little detail of movement or
activity. Its not like LUA or LUA inspired, it is LUA so you get functions and
real control flow.

I find it mildly amusing to program for my mining turtle to dig a large
transport tunnel for me and line it with torch on the wall every X blocks and
double tracked rails along the bottom and collect the goodies for me. This is
not exactly the pinnacle of software development, but it is fun, which is all
that counts.

Its also fun to emulate quarries and deep mining operations with programmed
turtles. They come in handy for weird automations also.

My son watched the now ancient direwolf20 youtube mod spotlight on
computercraft but had no motivation to run it himself. He's more an arduino
kid, which is OK I guess.

(just to save time, insert here "LUA is not a real programming language", and
insert here "I don't care its more of a programming language than watching
youtube unboxing videos")

Computercraft is not unique, its just the oldest and most widespread of its
genre. Personally I'd like a LISP in minecraft. Hoist out the guts of
computercraft and toss in a nice jvm lisp like clojure ... in my infinite
spare time... Assuming someone else hasn't already...

Minetest might be cooler sooner than you think. Its hard to speak for the
community, but most see it as only a matter of time before MS kills minecraft
modding a monetization scheme or abandonment of the java platform or who
knows, at which point the mod authors and players will be salivating for
something like minetest. The problem with minetest is nobody mods it so you
can't program a turtle in LUA on minetest, only minecraft.

~~~
infinite8s
Logo would make an excellent programming language for Minecraft (adapted to
add a few extra base commands for digging - laying down a block would be
equivalent to pen down). I wonder if anybody has tried to integrate the two of
them!

~~~
DanBC
That would be great.

Here's a "graphics turtle": [http://www.stuffaboutcode.com/2014/07/minecraft-
fractal-tree...](http://www.stuffaboutcode.com/2014/07/minecraft-fractal-
trees.html)

Here's Rust and LLVM in Minecraft command blocks:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/37dkg4/sbbm_scri...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/37dkg4/sbbm_scripting_in_vanilla_minecraft_with_rust_and/)

Here's someone hacking gnuplots into Minecraft worlds:
[https://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/hacki...](https://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/hacking-
a-gnuplot-into-minecraft/)

------
clishem
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
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/)

~~~
AnthonBerg
The stuff added after 1.7.3 isn't particularly interesting to everyone so
opinions will vary :)

~~~
Ntrails
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
> 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.

------
nefitty
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.

~~~
pcote
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
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.

------
2bitencryption
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.

~~~
facepalm
You might enjoy the book "Vehicles" by Valentio Braitenberg

~~~
infinite8s
Or Permutation City by Greg Egan.

------
10dpd
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"?

~~~
DanBC
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")

~~~
waterlesscloud
I'm much more interested in an AI that optimizes audience stats than one that
optimizes in-game stats.

~~~
soared
I predict a twitch stream of an AI playing various games. Watching it fail and
succeed on various games and situations would be very interesting. Maybe a
couple devs to do a voice-over.

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

~~~
_delirium
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)

------
brillenfux
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
> _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_
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
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.

~~~
voltagex_
Right... Thanks for that. That's very disappointing. Still, there might be a
remote chance that Minecraft is eventually open sourced. This is New Microsoft
after all.

------
zeveb
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
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.

------
daemin
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.

------
z3t4
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.

~~~
asiekierka
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
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
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.

