Watch artificial intelligence grow a walking caterpillar in Minecraft

The video above will be familiar to anyone who's played the 3D world-building game Minecraft. The algorithm takes its cue from the "Game of Life," a so-called cellular automaton. There, squares in a grid turn black or white over a series of timesteps based on how many of their neighbors are black or white. The program mimics biological development, in which cells in an embryo behave according to cues in their local environment. Some researchers have replaced the simple rules (e.g., any white square with three black neighbors turns black) with more complex ones decided by neural networks, machine-learning algorithms that roughly mimic the brain's wiring.