Four Google DeepMind agents beat Minecraft on their own

They wrote 2,783 programs, died 605 times on Easy, and took 27 hours to kill the Ender Dragon.

Google DeepMind researchers say a team of four Gemini 4 Argon agents finished Minecraft with no human input, killing the Ender Dragon after 27 hours and 14 minutes. The paper describes it as, to the authors' knowledge, the first end-to-end autonomous completion of the game by AI agents.

The agents shared one randomly generated survival world on Easy. Each controlled a player through the open-source Mineflayer library, coordinated in in-game chat and shared notes, and wrote every program they ran: 2,783 short JavaScript programs in all. They died 605 times.

Nobody assigned roles, but within about ten minutes the agents had split the work between food and beds, diamonds, iron and tools, and the Nether portal. The dragon fight took 69 deaths before one agent worked out it could stack dirt pillars to reach the healing crystals.

There are limits. Mineflayer tells the agents where blocks and creatures are and plans their routes, they read text rather than the screen, and it was a single run. Tom's Hardware puts the token cost at about US$520.