EvoCraft: A New Challenge for Open-Endedness

TL;DR

EvoCraft introduces a Minecraft-based platform for studying open-ended algorithms by enabling the automatic creation of complex structures, providing a new challenging environment for evolutionary search methods.

Contribution

The paper presents EvoCraft, an open-source Minecraft framework with an API for evolving complex artifacts, emphasizing its potential for advancing open-ended algorithm research.

Findings

Evolution can grow structures towards specific targets.

Evolution struggles to create moving simple machines.

Minecraft's versatility makes it a challenging environment for open-ended search.

Abstract

This paper introduces EvoCraft, a framework for Minecraft designed to study open-ended algorithms. We introduce an API that provides an open-source Python interface for communicating with Minecraft to place and track blocks. In contrast to previous work in Minecraft that focused on learning to play the game, the grand challenge we pose here is to automatically search for increasingly complex artifacts in an open-ended fashion. Compared to other environments used to study open-endedness, Minecraft allows the construction of almost any kind of structure, including actuated machines with circuits and mechanical components. We present initial baseline results in evolving simple Minecraft creations through both interactive and automated evolution. While evolution succeeds when tasked to grow a structure towards a specific target, it is unable to find a solution when rewarded for creating a simple machine that moves. Thus, EvoCraft offers a challenging new environment for automated search methods (such as evolution) to find complex artifacts that we hope will spur the development of more open-ended algorithms. A Python implementation of the EvoCraft framework is available at: https://github.com/real-itu/Evocraft-py.