Google develops AI algorithm 'DreamerV3,' 'the first AI that can mine diamonds in Minecraft without human data'
A research team at Google DeepMind has announced that it has developed an AI algorithm called 'DreamerV3' that can mine diamonds in the popular game software 'Minecraft'. The developer says that it is superior in that it can obtain specific knowledge from the surrounding environment and apply that knowledge.
Mastering diverse control tasks through world models | Nature
AI masters Minecraft: DeepMind program finds diamonds without being taught
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01019-w
According to Daniyal Hafner, one of the developers, DreamerV3 is an algorithm that learns the surrounding environment, imagines future scenarios, and improves its behavior. The AI can take action according to the surrounding environment without having to learn human behavior later.
'Diamond mining in Minecraft was added on later,' Hafner said. 'We didn't develop it with Minecraft in mind, but we thought it would be an ideal test environment.'
In Minecraft, players will explore various terrains such as forests, mountains, deserts, and swamps. One of the items that can be obtained in this is 'diamonds'. In order to obtain diamonds, you must collect materials such as wood and stone to make tools, use those tools to collect higher-level materials, and make more tools.
Hafner and his team set 12 milestones from the start of the game until the acquisition of diamonds, and set up a protocol that gave a reward of +1 each time a milestone was reached. In this setting, the AI built based on DreamerV3 was made to play the game, and the game was reset when the player died or after 36,000 steps (about 30 minutes) to induce the AI to learn basic behaviors to obtain rewards rather than getting used to one specific behavior.
With this setting, the AI needs to keep playing for about nine days before it can mine diamonds for the first time. This takes a very long time, but it is excellent in that it allows the AI to learn how to operate and solve tasks in an unknown environment.
There have been attempts to have AI mine Minecraft diamonds in the past, but it was common for AI to learn human play videos or for humans to assist in stages, and it was not possible to have AI mine diamonds by learning knowledge of a new area from scratch. For this reason, Hafner evaluates DreamerV3 as 'the world's first agent that can find Minecraft diamonds from scratch without human data.'
Excited to share that DreamerV3 has been published in Nature!
pic.twitter.com/EGNLmBTmAE โ Danijar Hafner (@danijarh) April 2, 2025
Dreamer solves control tasks by imagining the future outcomes of its actions inside of a continuously learned world model ๐
It's the first agent to find diamonds in Minecraft from scratch without human data! ๐
๐
Hafner and his colleagues also ran DreamerV3 on Atari games and other systems, demonstrating its ability to solve tasks in different environments.
'DreamerV3's capabilities could also be applied to robots learning to interact in the real world, where the cost of trial and error is much higher than in video games,' Hafner said.
His next goal is to defeat the Minecraft boss, the Ender Dragon.
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