Minecraft has always been a sandbox for creativity, but a new free experience for its Education platform is now using it to teach the fundamentals of artificial intelligence. Titled 'Hour of AI: The First Night,' this free activity tasks players with programming an AI companion to survive the game's most iconic challenge: making it through the first night.
Instead of just punching trees and frantically digging a hole for shelter, players use the MakeCode block-based programming interface to train an 'AI Agent.' The goal is to teach the agent to recognize patterns, identify resources, and automate tasks like gathering wood and building a simple structure before the creepers and zombies come out.
Programming Your Survival
The gameplay loop is a clever twist on the classic survival formula. You aren't just surviving; you're teaching another entity how to survive. This makes abstract concepts like machine learning tangible. As you guide your AI Agent, you're essentially providing it with a training dataset, helping it learn the difference between a tree and a pig, or a block of dirt and a block of wood. It’s a hands-on lesson in how AI learns, what its capabilities are, and where its limitations lie, all within the familiar rules of the
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