SMP java 1.19.4, Contribute to AI Research!!!!

[PLAICraft.ai]

Hi fellow minecrafter,

 

We've got exciting news from the Pacific Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence (PLAI) at UBC! We're merging the worlds of Minecraft and AI research, and you're invited to join through our platform, plaicraft.ai, to aid our data collection process. It's not just playing games; it's contributing to cutting-edge AI research.

 

BetterStructures and more!!: We want to make the server as fun as possible for everyone so we recently added a bunch of structural plugins that adds over a hundred of new structures and sites for you to explore and challenge. We are also working on PVP, bedwars and skyblock content, which will make the server even more fun!

 

Here’s how you can get involved! -Register on plaicraft.ai with your email(you can fake one, as long as you can receive email from it it's fine). -Complete a consent form. -Play Minecraft and contribute to science! (all you need is a Chrome browser and a steady internet, you'll be playing on VM)

 

Why You Should Participate?

-Support AI Research: Your gameplay directly contributes to important AI advancements. 

-Free Minecraft Access: Enjoy the game without any cost.

-We have shaders and a bunch of cool mods loaded on our instances 

-Great Community: Our server currently has a fantastic community, with many awesome players you can meet.

 

Elephant in the room:

Now I want to address some obvious concerns, I sure did a good job making us sound like a scam by the above content. I know that the "free Minecraft" thing has always been taboo in the Minecraft community. So how can I prove to you that this is not a scam?

- The easiest way and most official way is that we are approved by the University of British Columbia ethics board, our BREB number is H23-02389. You can verify this case number yourself.

- The harder way is that I'll explain the technical details of this project and why we choose to provide free Minecraft. So the goal of this project is very similar to the paper MineDojo or MineRL, we want to collect a multi-modal dataset that consists of video, audio, keyboard and mouse movement. Minecraft has been a very important simulation environment for the ML community and there are tons of papers related to it.

Now we obviously don't have enough money like those big tech companies who can just pay people to play, so we have to turn to the Minecraft community. To record all the data mentioned, there needs to be a lot of setup and coding, and it's definitely impossible for us to ask people to run these recording programs on their personal computers. So we carefully configured the AWS EC2 instance to run Minecraft alongside the programs. And that's where and why we also provide you with free Minecraft licenses, of course, we are not giving the account to you, just allowing you to be able to play Minecraft on these instances. You might ask, "Why can't I log in with my account on the instances?", that's because first login with your personal Minecraft account is another privacy risk; second not all our target audiences have an account; and lastly we restricted a lot on what you can do on the instance, basically all you can do is play Minecraft and that's all the data we want, allowing you to log in will make things complicated to control.

 

For more information on the project and the team, visit Dr. Frank Wood’s website or follow @frankdonaldwood on Twitter. You can also learn more about PLAI lab research on our website (just search ubc plai). Join us in transforming your gaming experience into a meaningful contribution to AI research. Let’s push the boundaries of what gaming can achieve together! Happy plaiing!

 

Best, 

The PLAI Team