“Minecraft is a really good model of a lot of these robot problems,” computer scientist Stefanie Tellex said in a release about the research. The game, which has been purchased (by humans) nearly 20 million times and gained over 100 million users since its release in 2009, uses sandbox-style play that lets users build their own worlds to explore. That can be tough, the authors write, because of the “exponential number of ways a robot can affect the world.” New research by computer scientists at Brown’s Humans to Robots Laboratory is focusing on how to help robots better plan complex actions, even in a quickly-changing environment. That’s changing, though, and scientists at Brown University are using the virtual world of Minecraft to help train robots to “think” in real-world environments. And now, as detailed at (opens in new tab), the original Herobrine seed has been discovered as well.Humans are really good at deciding what to do next. It is possible to crunch the numbers to discover specific seeds, though: The Minecraft title screen seed (opens in new tab) was discovered in July 2020, and the Pack.png seed (opens in new tab) was dug up a few months later. Unfortunately, nobody knew exactly which world it was: Specific Minecraft worlds, as we explain here (opens in new tab), can be perfectly recreated with 'seeds,' but if you don't know the seed, you're pretty much out of luck. What is real, however, is the Minecraft world in which Herobrine was first seen.

Herobrine doesn't exist (Copeland explained how he got the ball rolling here (opens in new tab)) and, for the record, Notch never had a brother.

Not that it really matters, because-spoiler alert-the whole thing was made up. Like all good legends, this one had a hook in the real world: Herobrine was reportedly Notch's dead brother (opens in new tab), although to be honest I'm not sure whether the idea was that Notch coded his deceased sibling into Minecraft to preserve him for eternity, or if it was his vengeful spirit come back to haunt the game.

Robot herobrine