Four autonomous AI agents managed to complete Minecraft, a popular game in which players explore the world, gather resources, craft items and survive. They needed 27 hours and 14 minutes of continuous play to defeat the Ender Dragon, the final boss. This is reported by Google DeepMind researchers Maxence Faldor, Satinder Singh and Roberta Raileanu in a paper posted on the arXiv preprint server (a preprint is a scientific work before peer review).
Unlike many AI experiments in which models are trained on huge volumes of game data, these agents (software bots) were not specifically taught to play Minecraft. They relied on existing knowledge and general programming skills. The researchers gave them no strategy or detailed instructions, only one phrase: "defeat the Ender Dragon".
The agents were placed in a shared, randomly generated Minecraft world in survival mode on easy difficulty with cheats disabled. A fifth agent acted as an observer: it checked progress and technical errors. Humans monitored the game through a dashboard. Instead of a mouse and keyboard, the agents controlled the characters by writing JavaScript code through Mineflayer, a standard tool for bots. They received text updates about health, inventory and location and communicated with each other in the in-game chat. They determined all steps themselves, without human intervention.
During the game, the agents wrote 2,783 of their own computer programs and died 605 times. But most importantly, they distributed tasks themselves (mining, crafting, combat) by communicating in chat. No roles were assigned to them. After death, the agents returned to the game, learned from their mistakes and adjusted their strategies and code. "No one assigned roles or wrote the game logic," the authors note.
The researchers emphasize that this was a single run, so it cannot be claimed that the system will succeed every time. "One run. We describe a single run, the first attempt, which does not show the reliability of the method." Nevertheless, the achievement demonstrates the capabilities of AI.