Google’s Dreamer AI Learns How Play Minecraft Without Training

A new AI system from Google DeepMind has figured out how to collect diamonds in Minecraft — one of the game’s toughest challenges — without any human instructions.

The AI, named Dreamer, taught itself to play Minecraft and reached expert level in just nine days. It did so by simply imagining the future outcomes of its own actions, as reported in a study published in Nature.

“Dreamer marks a significant step towards general AI systems,” said Danijar Hafner, a computer scientist at Google DeepMind, as reported by Tech Xplore. “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,” he added.

Minecraft is played by more than 100 million monthly users, to experience randomly generated 3D worlds. In order to find diamonds, users need to play multiple steps, starting with wood collection, followed by tool creation, then furnace construction, iron extraction, and finally underground excavation.

The process typically requires several hours of gameplay for most players. However, Dreamer used ‘reinforcement learning’ to discover new actions by retaining successful attempts and ignoring unsuccessful ones. The team provided small rewards for each step, such as crafting a plank and mining iron. They then reset the game every thirty minutes to prevent pattern memorization.

Differently from older AI systems who ‘watched’ human play in order to learn, Dreamer operated autonomously, and it did not require human demonstrations or step-by-step guidance. The system’s internal “world model” creation function allowed it to predict the results of actions before taking them.

“The world model really equips the AI system with the ability to imagine the future,” Hafner said, as reported by Tech Xplore. Jeff Clune, an AI expert from the University of British Columbia, called the achievement a “major step forward for the field,” reported Tech Xplore.

While humans can locate a diamond in approximately 20–30 minutes, Dreamer needed nine days to do the same. However, the researchers believe this work has far-reaching implications beyond video-games.

“This could help robots teach themselves how to achieve goals in the real world,” Hafner added, as reported on Tech Xplore.