Evolving Flying Machines in Minecraft Using Quality Diversity
This work addresses the challenge of generating diverse and functional flying machines in Minecraft, which is incremental as it builds on prior EvoCraft API efforts.
The paper tackled the problem of evolving flying machines in Minecraft by applying fitness-based evolution and quality diversity search, specifically MAP-Elites, which discovered flying machines more reliably than fitness alone when using an appropriate behavior characterization.
Minecraft is a great testbed for human creativity that has inspired the design of various structures and even functioning machines, including flying machines. EvoCraft is an API for programmatically generating structures in Minecraft, but the initial work in this domain was not capable of evolving flying machines. This paper applies fitness-based evolution and quality diversity search in order to evolve flying machines. Although fitness alone can occasionally produce flying machines, thanks in part to a more sophisticated fitness function than was used previously, the quality diversity algorithm MAP-Elites is capable of discovering flying machines much more reliably, at least when an appropriate behavior characterization is used to guide the search for diverse solutions.