AI masters Minecraft: DeepMind program finds diamonds without being taught

Minecraft is among the world’s most popular video games and has 100 million monthly active users.Credit: Mojang Studios 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 learn in one domain to new situations, a major goal of AI. “Dreamer marks a significant step towards general AI systems,” says Danijar Hafner, a computer scientist at Google DeepMind in San Francisco, California. “It allows AI to understand its physical environment and also to self-improve over time, without a human having to tell it exactly what to do.” Hafner and his colleagues describe Dreamer in a study in Nature published on 2 April1. In Minecraft, players explore a virtual 3D world containing a variety of terrains, including forests, mountains ... Read full article.