Minecraft survival has player health and player armour strength. It also has a hunger bar. And the player has an inventory of items collected.

And then there are a bunch of statistics. http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Statistics

I agree this would make a player that has an unusual play style (never making a base, for example), but it might make for some fun Let's Play videos.

And increasing YouTube subscriber count, and video view count, and video thumbs up, while minimising video thumbs down would be an interesting experiment. ("I welcome our AI Clickbaiting overlords")

I'm much more interested in an AI that optimizes audience stats than one that optimizes in-game stats.

I predict a twitch stream of an AI playing various games. Watching it fail and succeed on various games and situations would be very interesting. Maybe a couple devs to do a voice-over.

If you haven't seen it already, you might be interested in subreddit simulator https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator which is pretty much that but for upvotes on reddit. It's at most kind of amusing at times for now

I would follow that channel and its devblogs assiduously

You still can create a set of goals within the game that count as "success" and others as "failure" to guide the reinforcement; and have the learning process try to figure out everything else in Minecraft in order to achieve those goals.

Indeed, a GA would work quite nicely here - but I guess you'd need a cluster of machines simulating (not playing) Minecraft for this to be a viable experiment.

This is something I discussed with some fellow AI enthusiasts 2 years ago. We tried to come up with some "reward function" that would encourage very general behavior and reward more generally intelligent AIs.

The idea I had was to reward collecting blocks of different types, with exponentially decreasing reward. So finding a block it's never found before is 100 points, the second it finds is 50 points, and so on. It encourages exploration and touching on as many mechanics of the game as possible.

The important part is that the AI learns on its own though, not programmed to do specific tasks by a human. However it should perhaps be given recipes and some other meta information, because discovering those by chance is highly improbable.

As in the limitations u have in minecraft = rules.