Watch this AI figure out how to place blocks in Minecraft

Artificial intelligence doesn't compare favorably to humans when it comes to problem solving. Ask any eight year old child to place a few blocks on a grid in Minecraft and they'll almost certainly be bored by the task. Stephan Alaniz, a researcher with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Technische Universitat Berlin, yesterday published a white paper titled "Deep Reinforcement Learning with Model Learning and Monte Carlo Tree Search in Minecraft." In his paper the scientist explains his efforts to create a superior method for training an AI to perform simple tasks based on visual input. If we're ever going to have robots that can live and work among humans seamlessly without damaging us or our property they're going to have to understand how to interact with the environment using visual context. One of the most popular ways to train AI for this task is using video games with simple controls.