Microsoft will use the game Minecraft to work with artificial intelligence.
Minecraft is about to get smarter — a whole lot smarter. Microsoft, the new owner of the virtual building and strategy game, has revealed its ongoing use of the platform to test and develop artificial intelligence (AI) software. It will roll out that test on a large scale to general audiences soon.
Dubbed “Project AIX,” the AI experiment using the popular gaming platform began within the confines of Microsoft itself. The computer giant then shared the project with a group of academics in a beta phase. An open source rollout comes next with a target date sometime this summer. That open source launch means the software will become modifiable and freely available to Minecraft players.
Microsoft bought the company responsible for Minecraft for $2.5 billion back in 2014. Following the acquisition, Microsoft researchers deemed the game’s unique design a perfect platform for studying and potentially developing AI.
The aim of Project AIX is to use Minecraft to help researchers crack one of the toughest challenges standing in the way of developing AI: “general intelligence.” That obstacle is a big one that encompasses the intricate ways in which people learn new things, often through trial-and-error, and make decisions based on their unique learning experiences. While AI research has advanced to the point that computers can be programmed to do such things as understand and translate speech, teaching computers to learn new skills is an obstacle that hasn’t been overcome.
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In announcing the open source launch of Project AIX, Microsoft researchers explained the challenge they’re focusing on: teaching a Minecraft character how to climb a hill without programming it to do so.
“We’re trying to program it to learn, as opposed to programming it to accomplish specific tasks,” senior researcher Fernando Diaz explained on Microsoft’s blog. The research project was developed by Katja Hofmann and colleagues at Microsoft’s Cambridge lab. Hofmann came up with the AIX idea about a year ago after becoming “frustrated by the limitations of other platforms that use simpler, less sophisticated games for artificial intelligence research,” the post explained.
Hofmann and the Microsoft team call Minecraft the ultimate testing ground because the game offers “users endless possibilities.”
“Minecraft is the perfect platform for this kind of research because it’s this very open world,” Hofmann said. “You can do survival mode, you can do ‘build battles’ with your friends, you can do courses, you can implement our own games.”
As for what’s holding up a breakthrough in AI general intelligence, Hofmann explained that humans simply “don’t understand ourselves (and how we learn) well enough.”
Perhaps Minecraft gamers will be able to offer insights on that front. An exact date for when they’ll get the chance has not yet been announced.
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