The view from inside block world

If you lived inside minecraft, or even a 2D version, what would your brain look like? To rephrase the question, how smart can a minecraft agent be with only a finite number of computing voxels?

To start we could try to count how many voxels it would take per “brain” to produce a sufficiently intelligent agent. So let’s go measure the block world food chain.

As an aside, let’s ignore cellular mechanics. We don’t need to “feed” each voxel, we’ll just assume that each is sufficiently nourished and try to derive the most simple survival strategies all the way up to general intelligence.

The first layer would be worms. Worms just eat from one end and vacate the other. Let’s make this count as a single voxel.

The second layer would be something with a conditional logic to it. Two voxels to choose from and a direction for each voxel. I bet a mosquito brain could fit in two voxels.

The third layer would be a state machine, requiring a flag and dependent logic gates. This would be aN+b voxels. An example of this could be a simple territorial animal like a spider.

The fourth layer would have some internal read-write memory. M + bN + c voxels. At this point we have general (finite size) intelligence. Animals in this class could be anything from birds to apes.

The fifth layer would be conscious intelligence. What is lacking from the previous layer to this is unknown. This is cutting edge research. No one has yet shown a capacity for language in a machine. Maybe it is simply a matter of choosing the right combination of functions. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I will be reproducing each of these classes of intelligence to test their fitness in block world. You can explore blockworld along with me on GitHub. Yes, I am gamifying this concept.