{"id":888374,"date":"2026-10-20T02:48:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T02:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/888374\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T02:48:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T02:48:09","slug":"four-ai-agents-have-slain-minecrafts-ender-dragon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/888374\/","title":{"rendered":"Four AI Agents Have Slain Minecraft’s Ender Dragon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today in news about stuff that AI agents have done that is relatively benign and\/or at least does not involve hacking the government-funded healthcare system<\/a> in my home country: beating Minecraft! And look, I\u2019ll be honest: as someone who hasn\u2019t allowed Minecraft into my life, I can\u2019t say I was entirely aware that \u201cbeating\u201d it was something that one could do. Isn\u2019t it a voxelized sandbox in which one can do cool things like building hard drives and giant temples and whatnot?<\/p>\n

Apparently not! Or, at least, that\u2019s not all it is, because as per a paper<\/a> submitted to the arXiv preprint server last week, \u201cfour Gemini 4 Argon agents in a sandboxed Minecraft survival world\u201d succeeded in fulfilling the goal with which they were tasked: \u201cdefeat[ing] the Ender Dragon.\u201d Doing so took the agents just over a day\u2019s worth of cooperative gameplay and cost about $520 in tokens.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most interesting detail that jumps out from a cursory glance at the paper\u2019s summary is that the agents \u201cwrote a total of 2,783 JavaScript programs.\u201d If you find yourself wondering why the agents would be writing JavaScript programs at all, you\u2019ll find the paper to be an interesting read. The answer to the JavaScript question lies in the claim that \u201cto our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end autonomous completion of Minecraft by AI agents, achieved using only the standard Mineflayer library without pre-scouted seeds or other game-specific tools written by humans.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s the Mineflayer library? The answer lies on the project\u2019s GitHub page<\/a>: it\u2019s a \u201ca powerful, stable, and high level JavaScript API [for creating Minecraft bots].\u201d In other words, the agents didn\u2019t control in-game characters directly; instead, they used Mineflayer to script the actions. As the paper explains, \u201crather than seeing pixels or pressing keys, an agent acts by writing and running a short JavaScript program, such as walk to these coordinates and mine every iron ore within 16 blocks, and by reading the text that comes back.\u201d<\/p>\n

To a human, this probably feels like an unnecessarily complicated and somewhat backwards way of approaching the task at hand. But it does say something interesting about what\u2019s actually happened here. As the paper itself notes, these are general-purpose coding agents. What they\u2019re good at is, well, writing code. As such, this is ultimately less about [dramatic music] slaying the Ender Dragon and more about the agents\u2019 ability to take on a large and complicated coding task.<\/p>\n

It required them to divide tasks in a manner that made the most efficient use of their time, communicate successes and failures, etc. The paper notes that these sorts of abilities are exactly what\u2019s required to tackle large-scale software engineering tasks: \u201cComplex real-world software engineering and enterprise tasks demand the same long-horizon coding and multi-agent coordination.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anyway, reading this paper is the sort of thing that makes the direction that the AI industry has taken, with its brazen, unpunished IP thefts and its endless attempts to shoehorn AI into any and every conceivable piece of software, so endlessly frustrating. If you simply consider the paper in and of itself, it documents some fascinating phenomena. Take, for example, the section entitled Emergent Behavior. \u201cNothing in the agents\u2019 instructions mentioned roles\u2026 beyond the line that the players decide how to share the work,\u201d the researchers write. \u201cOver the 229 messages they exchanged before the win, the team converged on practices familiar from effective human teams.\u201d This is genuinely interesting!<\/p>\n

So too is the fact that while the agents succeeded in the end, they often made a royal bollocks of things that humans would consider straightforward: playing on Easy mode, they nevertheless managed to die a total of 605 times, \u201cmostly to monsters.\u201d The paper also notes that \u201c22% of programs [written by the agents] ended in an error\u201d and that it took them \u201cnearly 14 hours\u201d to figure out how to defeat the final boss, which\u2026 well, it\u2019s not Malenia<\/a>, put it that way.<\/p>\n

But, of course, this can\u2019t be read without the more general context of these sorts of tasks being a prelude to ever-more extensive automation of jobs that used to be the preserve of humans. This, of course, would be wonderful\u2026 if the benefits of that automation were shared equally, instead of accruing exclusively to the exact same twerps who spend all their time telling us that this process is inevitable and that we should all suck it up and learn to code\u2014oh. Wait. Maybe not that, hey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today in news about stuff that AI agents have done that is relatively benign and\/or at least does…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":888375,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[182,11458,12624,74],"class_list":["post-888374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-gemini","tag-minecraft","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=888374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/888375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=888374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=888374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=888374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}