An artificial intelligence (AI) system has for the first time figured out how to collect diamonds in the hugely popular video game Minecraft — a difficult task requiring multiple steps — without being shown how to play. Its creators say the system, called Dreamer, is a step towards machines that can generalize knowledge learned in one domain to new situations, a major goal of AI.

Collecting a diamond is “a very hard task”, says computer scientist Jeff Clune at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who was part of a separate team that trained a program to find diamonds using videos of human play. “There is no question this represents a major step forward for the field.”

An even bigger target for AI, says Clune, is the ultimate challenge for Minecraft players: killing the Ender Dragon, the virtual world’s most fearsome creature.

The associated preprint

Associated blog post

~~Neuro-sama: finally a worthwhile opponent~~

Scientists have long sought to unravel the mysteries of strange metals — materials that defy conventional rules of electricity and magnetism. Now, a team of physicists at Rice University has made a breakthrough in this area using a tool from quantum information science. Their study, published recently in Nature Communications, reveals that electrons in strange metals become more entangled at a crucial tipping point, shedding new light on the behavior of these enigmatic materials. The discovery could pave the way for advances in superconductors with the potential to transform energy use in the future.

Scientists at the world’s largest atom smasher have released a blueprint for a much bigger successor that could help solve remaining enigmas of physics.

The plans for the Future Circular Collider — a nearly 91-kilometer (56.5-mile) loop along the French-Swiss border and even below Lake Geneva — published late on Monday put the finishing details on a project roughly a decade in the making at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Corporations lied

The next revolution in physics will not discover new particles but refine our informational constructs to capture finer scales. When we do, the Big Bang’s “mystery,” photons’ “duality,” and black holes’ “singularities” will be seen as artifacts of resolution, not reality.

Our daily experience presents time as a unidirectional flow, an apparent fundamental aspect of reality. However, within the principles of Information Dynamics, this perceived arrow of time is understood not as a fundamental law, but as an emergent statistical property.

Consider the sequence of an egg transitioning from an intact state to a broken one. This progression represents a change in information. We consistently observe this transformation but never its spontaneous reversal. The reason lies in the concept of entropy, a measure of disorder within a system. An intact egg represents a relatively ordered state, while a broken egg embodies a multitude of disordered configurations. Statistically, disordered states are significantly more probable. The number of ways an egg can be broken is vast, leading to a high-entropy state, whereas the number of ways it can be perfectly whole, a low-entropy state, is limited.

Our perception of time's forward direction aligns with this statistical bias. The natural evolution of information states tends toward higher entropy due to the greater probability of such states. Observing an egg break is witnessing a transition from a less probable, ordered state to a far more probable, disordered one. This progression defines the temporal order we perceive.

At a fundamental level within Information Dynamics, the transitions between information states are considered symmetric. The underlying dynamics, potentially arising from an ineffable universal information, do not inherently favor a transition from order to disorder at the most basic level. However, the sheer preponderance of high-entropy states creates an overwhelming statistical tendency in that direction. Furthermore, our macroscopic observation, which doesn't capture the reversible movements at a molecular level, reinforces this unidirectional perception of time.

Thus, from the perspective of Information Dynamics, the arrow of time, as clearly demonstrated by the example of a broken egg, emerges not as a foundational principle, but as a statistical consequence of the inherent probabilities governing the evolution of information states within the universe.

Untold numbers of embryos are sitting in storage and studied in labs around the world.

Even at work, our phones are usually within reach. But does removing them from our desks help us be less distracted by them? A researcher, asking people to place their phones just out of their reach, put it to the test. The results showed that participants didn’t spend any less time pursuing leisure activities when their phones were further away from them, and that they switched between work and leisure tasks just as often.