Minecraft is the next frontier for Artificial Intelligence.
It’s a massive game with many mechanics and complicated sequences of actions. My games To teach players how to play Minecraft requires an entire wiki with over 8000 pages. Artificial intelligence is incredible however, how effective could it be?
This is the question that we’ll answer in this article. We’ll design a bot and try to achieve one of the most difficult challenges in Minecraft: finding diamonds from scratch. We’ll also try this challenge in randomly generated worlds to ensure we don’t know a specific seed.
What we’ll discuss is not restricted to Minecraft. It can also be utilized in more complex environments. We will use two techniques to create the backbone of our intelligent agent.
Before we can train an agent we must first be aware of how the environment interacts with it. Let’s begin by creating a scripted bot, so that we can become familiar with the syntax. We’ll make use of MineRL, a great library that lets you build AI applications in Minecraft.
The code used in this article is available on Google Colab. It is a refined and simplified version of the outstanding notebooks made by the organizers of the MineRL 2021 competition (MIT License).