For the development of artificial intelligence, Microsoft is taking advantage of Minecraft, a game that the company purchased for $2.5 billion from Mojang back in September 2014.
Dubbed as Project AIX, researchers can create artificially intelligent characters called "agents" and let them roam the world of Minecraft via the development platform.
These agents are set out without prior knowledge about the environment they're placed in without a programmed purpose of what they are supposed to do. That means they will have to figure things out on their own, recognize their surroundings and understand when it achieves at least part of its goal through incremental rewards.
In other words, they will go through a lot of what regular players usually face, including going up a hill, distinguishing light from dark, traveling on different types of terrain, building sites with blocks, bracing the enemy attacks and even falling into rivers and lava pits.
According to the platform developer Katja Hofmann and her colleagues at Microsoft Cambridge lab, the game is perfect to test out Project AIX, as it offers virtually limitless possibilities that range from simple to complex tasks.
"You can do survival mode, you can do 'build battles' with your friends, you can do courses, you can implement our own games," Hofmann says.
The goal here isn't only to create agents that can soon be included in Minecraft, but to also develop a technology that's capable of learning by and from itself.
What's more, the development can open a more efficient way to make progress in artificial intelligence research.
"Building a robot and trying to teach it to climb a real hill is costly and impractical; unlike in Minecraft, you'd have to repair or replace the robot with another costly machine each time it fell into a river," Microsoft says.
It's also worth mentioning that Minecraft is not just a game anymore, as it has been used for educational purposes and virtual reality, defining a new direction for the future of gaming. It even touches on history, teaching Irish kids about the 1916 Uprising.
This summer, Microsoft intends to make Project AIX available to everyone with an open-source license. For now, it's accessible only to a couple of select people in the academic community.
