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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

It may be cheating, and sort of against the point, but those recipes are stored as json files. Makes things a lot easier.

It would be cheating. The contest rules [1] specifically rule out using domain knowledge.

[1] https://gitlab.aicrowd.com/minerl/minerl-resources/blob/mast...

The humans finding diamonds in 20 minutes are cheaters by that logic.

Yes, a human competing in the AI challenge would be cheating.

would it really be cheating? I mean if you get a competitive edge by utilizing complex logic, would it be fair ?

Complex logic would almost certainly involve human domain knowledge which is disallowed.

The resources the programs can use are well specified. A human child is not part of the specified equipment.

Allowing access to the data changes the problem. It’s an interesting problem in its own right, but seems much easier to accomplish and arguably much less valuable than limiting input to images and output to mouse/keyboard. Teaching computers to interact with the world is the trick that we want to teach.

That's my thinking as well. It's much more interesting to see how the AI copes with the world, rather than getting bogged down in OCR and other previously-solved problems.

That feature has only existed for <20% of the games lifetime. It is more than likely that the person you're replying to played the game before the recipe book existed.

Yes, they said as much. I'm just letting them know that the feature they asked about is now in the game.

They had 60 million frames of video (about 277 hours, assuming 60fps) to show to the computer for it to learn how. I think a human player could pick it up in that time.

Minecraft was hugely successful early on specifically because it didn't have to explain itself -- you had to do your research to figure out the game. And when you died you sometimes lost everything.

I guess they needed to add tutorials to better accomodate the wave of younger people who picked up the game in the mid 10's, but I actually appreciate Notch's decisions (or series of happy accidents that culminated in a highly addictive game).

It really did have to explain itself though. It was frustrating trying to play without spoilers because it was basically impossible. You had to go read guides saying how to make a crafting table, how to make tools, etc.

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.

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