Playing Minecraft with Program Synthesis: Adapting FrAngel to Uncover Diverse Subprograms

Abstract

Program synthesis remains largely unexplored in the context of playing games, where exploration and exploitation are crucial for solving tasks within complex environments. FrAngel is a program synthesis algorithm that addresses both of these aspects with its fragments used for the generation of new candidate programs. We introduce a generalised version of the FrAngel program synthesis algorithm that accepts an arbitrary iterator and grammar, enabling flexible modifications. We then formulate Program by Example (PBE) program synthesis from rewards and apply this framework to Minecraft's navigation task, where dense rewards guide the algorithm's exploration. Then, we use the generalised version of the algorithm to conduct experiments in the context of exploration of the algorithm. The experiments show the importance of exploration as a step required for the exploitation and finding the wanted solution to the task while also revealing that sometimes more exploration does not necessarily mean reaching the solution faster.