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Google researchers have released a paper claiming that four Google Gemini 4 Argon AI agents just beat Minecraft without any help from humans. It took them just over 27 hours to take down the Ender Dragon in what is believed to be a world first.
Of course, it’s not as simple as just turning up and firing arrows at the thing. To reach The End and defeat the Ender Dragon in Minecraft, there are a series of trials you have to complete.
You have to get Ender Pearls, Ender Rods, and craft Eyes of Ender, before tracking down a Stronghold and completing a puzzle. This takes a fair bit of farming and requires you to work up through the basic Minecraft tools.
To start the test, Google placed a team of four agents into a random Minecraft seed with a goal of defeating the Ender Dragon. According to Google, the agents used in-game chat to coordinate but otherwise had no strategy assigned going in — just a goal.
“Each agent controlled a player via an open-source library called Mineflayer and coordinated with its teammates through in-game chat and shared memory,” the researchers said. “No one assigned roles or wrote game logic. The agents planned, wrote, and debugged every program themselves. Researchers could watch the run on a live dashboard and pause or stop it at any time, but they had no cause to intervene.”
The agents settled into roles quickly, with some building Enderman shelters for farming materials, others gathering food, and others focusing on exploration. They shared combat tips and helped each other recover lost gear when they died.
Over the playthrough, the four agents exchanged 229 messages, ran 2,783 programs, and died 605 times, which suggests worse performance than my kid when he was five. A fifth agent oversaw the process to make sure the other bots weren’t cheating, but you can tell they weren’t by how many times they died anyway.
It took around 13.5 hours to reach The End, and the remaining time was spent trying to kill the final boss (and dying a lot). The current Minecraft speedrun record is six minutes and 36 seconds, so the AI agents won’t be breaking any records any time soon. The agents used 1.35 billion input tokens, which would cost a normal user around $1,620. That’s $60 per hour, which works out at $15 an hour per agent. Not a bad salary for a group of computer ghosts who don’t need sustenance.
“To 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,” the team wrote in a paper, via Engadget. “Winning required the agents to keep a coherent plan across thousands of dependent steps for more than a day.”
What is the point of all this? The researchers said they wanted to study how teams of agents coordinate in a setting where every step is visible to help understand such systems before they are trusted with real-world tasks. “The skills required to solve Minecraft such as coordinating a team, recovering from failure, and pursuing a goal for more than a day, are also what agents need to work reliably alongside people,” they said.
Kirk McKeand is a Contributor on IGN News. Find him on Twitter @MckKirk
