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AI agent swarms in Minecraft fail to build civilization, drown in bureaucracy

46 points entryleveljobsc 1 hour ago 14 comments

GuestFAUniverse 1 hour ago | parent

Germany 2027 and onwards.

radial_symmetry 1 hour ago | parent

HAHA this is the only comment right now and exactly what I came in here to say

bhouston 59 minutes ago | parent

I think that is a common failure case. It isn't that different that agents getting stuck in other types of loops, distractions. There is this great short novel about it by Adrian Tchaikovsky, "Service Model":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Model

bad_haircut72 59 minutes ago | parent

This site is cancerous, overloaded with ads

fallinditch 40 minutes ago | parent

Interesting insights about similar issues in this video by Openrig [1]

Multi-agent coordination is an engineering problem characterized by the inevitable emergence of human-like social pathologies - such as bureaucratic inertia.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AL-PQuB2wy0

perching_aix 33 minutes ago | parent

> human-like social pathologies - such as bureaucratic inertia

Isn't bureaucracy just the sociological manifestation of synchronization overhead? Sounds shortsighted to file it away as just some weird social pathology that emerges out of nowhere specifically affecting humans.

_vertigo 32 minutes ago | parent

I started playing the rs-sdk (https://github.com/MaxBittker/rs-sdk) with Claude after seeing it on HN the other day. I haven't looked at the Minecraft experiment but just letting an agent loose in the game and telling it to play did not work well. At first it really did not have a good feel for how the game actually plays and would routinely waste tons of time doing something that makes no sense — very reminiscent of the "four agents spent 11 minutes appointing a ‘sole fertilizer operator’ for a single piece of bone meal on a single wheat block" anecdote in this article.

But, after several hours of correcting and directing Claude (build modular, re-usable snippets of useful code rather than one-off scripts for driving, document your learnings for future agents, etc., explicit guidance on playing more optimally) it can now play the game fully on its own. I just gave it a goal to play through the end of the "Legends quest" (nearing end game content, requires playing through lots of complex quests ) and it's breezing through it.

I haven't experimented with swarms of agents yet, but I know if I had tried to create a swarm in 2004scape before the agent was actually good at playing the game, it would have failed horribly. So, I wonder how good the agents they were experimenting with are at Minecraft when playing alone.

lifeisstillgood 11 minutes ago | parent

>>> build modular, re-usable snippets of useful code …

That’s fairly close to a definition of civilisation. :-)

ajrouvoet 30 minutes ago | parent

Wow, Tomshardware is spawning a ton of ads. Impossible to read this.

delichon 14 minutes ago | parent

Humans arrived at a capacity for social cooperation via millions of generations in which it has been a force on reproductive fitness. That created deeply rooted phenotypes like empathy, loyalty, hierarchy, and morality. Even if such concepts can be well described in a statistical model of language, there is no reason to think that they automatically become embedded in motivation. Without that, they may as well be anthropological observations by Martians.

To embed them as motivations, we can embed neural nets within a framework of genetic algorithms, in which successful cooperation is a gate to the next generation. It seems to me that this approach should be not just about creating efficient agent swarms, but should also be at the core of alignment efforts.

serioussecurity 14 minutes ago | parent

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22319

Maybe a skill issue? Deepmind beat Minecraft. Or are the goals different?

jordanb 10 minutes ago | parent

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