AI masters Minecraft: DeepMind program finds diamonds without being taught | The Dreamer system reached the milestone by ‘imagining’ the future impact of possible decisions.

“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.”

“Every time you play *Minecraft*, it’s a new, randomly generated world,” he says. This makes it useful for challenging an AI system that researchers want to be able to generalize from one situation to the next. “You have to really understand what’s in front of you; you can’t just memorize a specific strategy,” he says.

Previous attempts to get AI systems to collect diamonds relied on using videos of human play or researchers leading systems through the steps.

By contrast, Dreamer explores everything about the game on its own, using a trial-and-error technique called reinforcement learning — it identifies actions that are likely to beget rewards, repeats them and discards others.

Key to Dreamer’s success, says Hafner, is that it builds a model of its surroundings and uses this ‘world model’ to ‘imagine’ future scenarios and guide decision-making.

“The world model really equips the AI system with the ability to imagine the future,” says Hafner.

This ability could also help to create robots that can learn to interact in the real world — where the costs of trial and error are much higher than in a video game, says Hafner.”

Should not have called it “Dreamer” and make it work on Minecraft. That suggests they are cheating.

Neuroscientist/Author/Entrepreneur/AI prognosticator Jeff Hawkins has been a strong advocate of predictive models. In his book “A thousand brains: a new theory of intelligence”, He develops the idea that the brain creates multiple models to explore all potential possibilities. It is an interesting idea