Can you work out how to mine a diamond in just 4 days? That is the task artificial intelligence will be set in a new competition.
°Őłó±đĚý will kick off on 1 June and will take place inside the video game Minecraft. Entrants will have to build an AI that can successfully navigate and survive in the online game and ultimately learn the complex task of how to mine a diamond.
The Minecraft world is Lego-like, with objects built of blocks that can be added or modified. Some objects require prerequisite tools before they can be built. Making a bed, for example, requires a player to first shear some sheep and collect wood.
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AIs will start the competition in a random starting location without any items, and will receive points for collecting items that are prerequisites for a diamond, such as an iron pickaxe.
“The interesting thing about Minecraft is that although there may be a specific goal and trajectory, there are actually several ways to get to that goal,” says William Guss at Carnegie Mellon, one of the organisers of the competition. Microsoft is also involved.
Diamonds can be found in different locations, such as villages or underground mines. One pathway a competitor could take is to: gather wood, create a wood pickaxe, use that to mine stone to create a stone pickaxe, mine iron ore, create a furnace to smelt iron for an iron pickaxe, and then use that to mine a diamond.
9 million steps
The hierarchical processes in Minecraft will add complexity for AI competitors, says organiser Brandon Houghton. An AI equipped with the best tool in the game, a diamond pickaxe, would take 9 million steps to randomly find a diamond, he says.
Because the chances of being randomly rewarded are small, AI competitors will need to observe the behaviour of real players in order deduce the goals of game, a process known as inverse reinforcement learning.
To train their AIs, competitors will use a dataset of recorded human gameplay totalling around 1000 hours, which is .
Rankings will be determined based on the points the AI has accumulated during the game, with a diamond worth 1024 points. The top competitors will have to submit the AI’s code to the judges, who will re-train the AI from scratch for four days. The top ten highest-scoring AIs will move onto the final round to determine a winner.
AIs are already very good at video games like StarCraft IIĚý˛ą˛Ô»ĺĚýDota 2. They are able to beat many humans, but only when they’ve trained for the equivalent of hundreds of years of gameplay. Whether AIs can learn such skills in short timeframes remains to be seen.
The MineRL competition will present AI with unusual challenges, says Mike Cook at the Queen Mary University of London. “For a long time, we thought about game-playing AI as a mathematical battle of wits and logic,” he says, but games enable players to be creative, inventive and social.
“I think the core challenge here – to create a diamond – is obviously very focused, so we won’t see much variation in the outcome,” he says, but that the AI competitors will take divergent approaches towards finding a diamond.
