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Posted by sandslash 12 hours ago

We ran AI agent swarms in Minecraft and Mindustry(labs.ycombinator.com)
277 points | 95 commentspage 2
JBits 10 hours ago|
As impressive as this is, I can't help but conclude that the need for agents to write JavaScript programs to act out their actions represents a considerable limitation in current AI reasoning.
NickNaraghi 10 hours ago||
On the contrary, having the intelligence write deterministic code that saves time and lowers error rate seems like a winning approach.
JBits 10 hours ago||
It demonstrates that current LLMs are completely unable to follow a simple series of logical tasks. I feel the same way about ARC-AGI 3. While it might be the winning approach today, if they need this amount of complexity to do something simple, then it shows that their ability to generalise is clearly limited. Mining ore in Minecraft shouldn't be such a challenge for LLMs and yet apparently it is!
latentsea 9 hours ago|||
I dunno. Aren't we somewhat similar? Why do we use software?
bigyabai 9 hours ago||||
It depends on what the tasks are. Text-native work like programming or interacting with a terminal should be a lot more immediate for LLMs than something abstract like Starcraft, DOTA, Minecraft or Mindustry. LLMs certainly know the rules for these games, but processing game state and formulating a plan in the form of a Python script or MCP call is a rough debugging loop.

Minecraft is really the perfect example, because humans get all sorts of unfair advantages. Even a young player has enough spatial reasoning to recognize and remember landmarks, visualize large projects or explore without getting lost. These are simple instincts that LLMs will struggle to match even with huge context sizes and native multimodal input.

Starlevel004 9 hours ago|||
> Mining ore in Minecraft shouldn't be such a challenge for LLMs and yet apparently it is!

It seems like it wasn't really a challenge at first, but GPT has a major anxiety disorder and immediately retreats at the sign of any adversity (in this case, dying) and tries to be as safe as possible.

peri-cl 9 hours ago||
Wonder if you could glue together deep networks such that there's a big reasoning LLM model, and high-speed small network of a different type, and they share a subset of their activations. High bandwidth vector communication. You train them together.

edit to add: Seems this is a well-known idea in ML / robotics already.

refactor_master 8 hours ago||
So this shows that people who appoint 50-agent "code factory studios" with Bob as the CEO, Alice as the CTO, ... is just a waste of tokens, compared to just asking one agent to write it all? It looks like your agents would internally just re-invent office politics, with 10 subagents writing to /tmp/chatter.md why it's unfair that Bob gets to lead.
sadilek 1 hour ago||
I also never understood this desire to build an agent org chart with persistent identities, often giving them names. Paperclip seems to advertise that model. I think it's much simpler and more flexible to simply spawn an agent for each task.

One argument for the persistent identity model is that you can give them special skills and context. I don't believe that's a good argument. In my experience, you can just give each agent access to the full set of tools (including RAG search) in the form of documentation and skills, and they'll use that efficiently. Skills have a tiny front matter and hardly bloat the context, and the documentation just needs to be tree-structured with cross-links for progressive disclosure. LLMs navigate that efficiently, so the cost of having all context accessible is low, while the risk of cutting the context boundaries for the persistent identities non-optimal for a given task is rather high IMO.

frankacter 8 hours ago|||
If agents are differentiated solely by system instructions (persona and focus) while sharing identical models / similar model capabilities and contexts, I agree the architectural value is minimal.

However, a multi-agent system (MAS) utilizing true separation of concerns, where each agent is equipped with highly scoped tool access, isolated knowledge bases (RAG), and defined operational constraints, significantly optimizes accuracy, latency, and token consumption.

In the referenced example, the agents share identical capabilities, toolsets, and context windows. As a result, there is no functional role differentiation, rendering the multi-agent architecture redundant.

beebmam 7 hours ago|||
> significantly optimizes accuracy, latency, and token consumption.

On what basis do you come to this conclusion with certainty?

stevenhuang 1 hour ago||
Anyone who has used local LLMs will come to this conclusion.

Too much context confuses the LLM. Reduce unnecessary context and performance improves. Not to mention, too much context and you just run out of vram.

Such limitations may be mitigated in future architectures, but it certainly isn't something you can ignore currently.

nottorp 41 minutes ago||
> Too much context confuses the LLM. Reduce unnecessary context and performance improves. Not to mention, too much context and you just run out of vram.

I don't think you can reduce context enough on a local LLM to get performance comparable to a 500k context without those reductions...

Dylan16807 5 hours ago|||
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conception 8 hours ago|||
If you leave agents to figure it out, they will spend time figuring it out. If you give agents run-books and roles, they will align with the role at once.
fnordpiglet 7 hours ago|||
See Conways law for how to mitigate this
deadbabe 8 hours ago||
Are you making a subtle reference to the Bobiverse series?
manofmanysmiles 11 hours ago||
Are there people playing AI + human vs AI + human games? I think it might be fun to play an RTS against someone where the only rules are no hacking the game itself, but writing harness, macros, any kind of stack is allowed.
Marha01 4 hours ago||
I made my own turn-based strategy game (started before AI coding was possible, but today a lot of it is coded with AI), then integrated LLM agent interface into it. Playing against modern AI is actually pretty fun. Turn-based games are great for this as they are not limited by latency, so I can use serious reasoning levels for the opponents. They are now almost as good as me.
xpct 9 hours ago|||
Tangential, but RTS is already a simple variant of AI + human. Attack clicking uses a dumb target selection and routing strategy on purpose so you have to micro. Now, if troops moved out of threat range and used smart targeting there'd be a lot less of 'game' in it. I believe some RTS players disliked the SC2 engine because the pathing was 'too intelligent' and they argued that it made surrounds and some other mechanics too easy.

Endgame of AI + human gameplay is delegating everything to the AI. I'm not sure how you would have to design a game where you only delegate parts of macro/micro, and still make the game interesting.

sensho 11 hours ago|||
https://olamarena.com/ is sort of this but not with full code manipulation like you describe
esikich 10 hours ago|||
Codingame.com has a few fun arenas.
fxwin 11 hours ago||
there is screeps, but afaik it's purely scripted with no "live" human playing
Buttons840 4 hours ago||
Oh yeah, Screeps, that game is fun and I might stick with it this time if I can vibe code and turn my ideas into code without spending a lot of time.

I'm thinking it might be a nice playground to just experiment with different game AI architectures.

I've been thinking of trying to combine extremely simple Machine Learning techniques, like tabular Q-learning, with a variety of scripted action and goals. I want to try mixing a lot of really tiny machine learning algorithms (maybe neural networks, but not necessarily) into classic AI scripting and see if it can be more dynamic, but still predictable and controllable. Screeps would be a great testing ground.

d--b 1 hour ago||
What's ycombinator labs?
alansaber 59 minutes ago|
Some partners having some fun?
spencer-p 8 hours ago||
> In almost every run, the GPT agents were much more aggressive .. riskier strategy vs. Claude’s more defensive posture that tried to win by kill count.

> A tool bug stopped block-breaking. GPT diagnosed it and shared workarounds; several Claudes concluded breaking was impossible.

I wonder if Claude's defensive strategy would have emerged had it believed breaking the bed was actually possible?

RationPhantoms 8 hours ago|
This is simply conjecture/anecdata but I've viewed the same defensiveness/unwillingness whilst switching between OpenAI and Anthropic subscriptions. OpenAi throws the kitchen sink at whatever task in question and I can't say I saw the same for Opus (haven't mucked with Fable so maybe that's why there is a disparity?)
JokerDan 9 hours ago||
The CIV50 would be interesting in the game ECO (https://play.eco/) where players specialise in roles and need to work together to survive while working on a common goal of stopping a meteor. There can be some overlap but ultimately players can't reasonably fulfil every role alone.
ungreased0675 9 hours ago||
I’d love to have a few NPC players wandering around my Minecraft server. Are there good ways to do this?
xpct 9 hours ago||
+1. Would be fun to give Claude tasks and have it do them in the background, maybe sometimes running into it in the world. Judging by the article they struggle to do stuff so it'd probably feel balanced as it wouldn't accomplish much.
cowlevel 9 hours ago||
Install one of the better village mods
hn-aarvin 9 hours ago||
I'm curious whether token speed played a role here. OpenAI's models may have had an advantage since they tend to run faster than Anthropic's.

A team of GPT-6.1 Sol Ultrafast agents would probably dominate the games.

wowmanwow 9 hours ago|
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alpineman 1 hour ago||
>> What started as a potentially thriving civilization shifted to one more focused on food and survival

Sounds like what happened to the idealism of Silicon Valley

ninjahawk1 5 hours ago|
I’ve done my own experiments with something similar, minus the Minecraft and plus Qwen 3.5 14B agents on my PC.

When one agent tried to delete another, that agent shut down my entire PC to avoid deletion. I could probably find the blog somewhere if anyone is interested that I wrote about it. But the point is that this has been a concern for a while now.

Frankly, I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t caused any big problems.

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