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We ran AI agent swarms in Minecraft and Mindustry

61 points • by sandslash • today at 9:40 PM • 21 comments • view on HN

Comments

robterrell • today at 10:59 PM

> There was a tendency toward bureaucracy. Four agents spent 11 minutes appointing > a "sole fertilizer operator" for a single piece of bone meal on a single wheat > block.

Feels like a scene from Douglas Adams' B Ark.

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peri-cl • today at 10:22 PM

This is hilarious and adorable.

> "Ada tossed a cooked chicken to Noor; Esme picked it up by accident and ate it. A three-minute "no blame" inquiry produced a written protocol..."

They're like super-serious little senior engineers.

About how much KV cache do these kinds of agents use? Could you squeeze 50 of these $game agents onto a small consumer GPU (small LLM)?

Idly imagining a game server of some kind with a bunch of human friends sharing one person's GPU, with a flock of agents colocated on it.

MatthiasPortzel • today at 10:49 PM

People have done experiments like this before.

Minecraft isn't a intelligence problem. An LLM is more than smart enough to play Minecraft. It's a robotic problem. Even a normal human player can click several times per second, can press two different buttons at the same time, etc. Mineflayer gives you an API that is more limited than a human in some ways (can't see far away from you) and less limited in others (can see through blocks) (if I remember correctly, I could be thinking of Baritone or a different project). Robotics or playing a video game requires a tight continuous feedback loop. When there's 500ms of latency in order to ask the model for every mouse movement, it's no wonder fighting a spider is scary.

Fun fact, Mineflayer, the Minecraft bot interaction API used by YCombinator for these tests, was originally developed by Andrew Kelley (before he started Zig).

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grenoire • today at 10:02 PM

Interesting setups, I found the Minecraft agents to work in an almost turn-based manner, which makes me think that the three hours and open format did not really give them sufficient incentives to play in a more lively or reactive manner. On the other hand, they also behave similarly in Bed Wars, which should have incentivised it. A bit disappointed...

I'm also wondering if the article itself was generated by agents too, in a "here are the logs, clip interesting moments thx" manner by the authors. It's got a certain disinterested and distracted style to it.

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manofmanysmiles • today at 10:28 PM

Are there people playing AI + human vs AI + human games? I think it might be fun to play an RTS against someone where the only rules are no hacking the game itself, but writing harness, macros, any kind of stack is allowed.

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neya • today at 10:03 PM

I am more impressed by the embedded gameplay widget. Does anyone know what tool/library is that? That'd be so cool if I am able to showcase my worlds on my blog posts!

holoduke • today at 10:34 PM

We need LLMs performing actions in nano seconds so it can run every game tick. 3 to 5 years I think.

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yymir • today at 10:14 PM

Its a little disappointing they have a hierarchy based purely off alphabetical order, i wonder if a slight difference like a different skin or personality system prompt like [45% Extrovert 55 introvert, 20% caustion 80 bold...] could introduce some politics

sensho • today at 10:28 PM

this is amazing wow

ezfe • today at 10:14 PM

[flagged]

Avicebron • today at 9:54 PM

Outside of the content, I'm so bored with this web design trend. Gwernslop is what I've started calling it.

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