Problem Setup/Goal: A common problem for players in Minecraft is when they are outside at nighttime and they have to avoid dying to hostile animals. If a player is unarmed, the only solution is to run. However, many new players have difficulties evading hostile animals. Our AI agent should learn to survive at night time by avoiding different kinds of hostile animals, while determining that friendly animals are safe to walk by. (e.g. the agent should learn to stay further away from animals that shoot arrows than animals that require direct contact to harm, whereas animals like cows and pigs are not a concern). Input/Output Semantics: The input that the agent will take is a 20x20 field on which both friendly and hostile animals are standing. The agent will determine a path to take through these animals which will allow it to survive the maximum amount of time. Applications: This agent can be used to help players survive the nighttime.
In this project, we will use a cognitive model under reinforcement learning to train the AI agent.
We will quantitatively evaluate primarily based on the time that our agent survives. We will set specific benchmarks for how long they are able to do so, for example 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, etc. After actually starting, we will have a more accurate idea of what times can be reasonably expected for different settings of the world (size of field, number of enemies, etc). With random walking and sprinting as the baseline, the agent should only survive for a few seconds. Our trained agent should be able to survive for many times that duration (maybe a few minutes?) when given the same input.
We can qualitatively test that our project is working correctly by observing and ensuring that the agent is running away from enemies and not running away from non-enemies. A sanity check is that with 1 enemy animal, the agent should be basically running away from it the entire time, and - assuming the enemy is not faster than the agent - should be able to avoid getting caught and survive forever. Any case with 1 enemy animal with additional non-enemy/friendly animals should behave identically to the case with only 1 enemy animal.
A moonshot case is that with 10 zombies, 10 skeletons, and 10 creepers on a 20x20 block field, the agent will survive for an hour.
Thursday (January 21, 2021) - 12:30 pm