Microsoft Research has announced an innovative artificial intelligence project based around one of its newer acquisitions: the voxel-’em-up smash hit Minecraft.
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The agent starts out knowing nothing at all about its environment or even what it is supposed to accomplish.
Microsoft believes that Minecraft is flawless for this task because it’s more “sophisticated” than other AI research simulations and is cheaper to use.
Academic researchers can already make use of it under a private beta.
To that end, the agent needs to figure out how to complete it task, try a lot of different approaches and encounter problems like falling into rivers and lava pits. It also ‘needs to understand – via incremental rewards – when it has achieved all or part of its goal’. As a result, the team is motivated to build a platform based on Minecraft, which does not depends on search engines to work in a predictable way, said Allison Linn, a senior writer at Microsoft.
“Minecraft is the flawless platform for this kind of research because it’s this very open world”, AIX developer creator Katja Hofmann said, praising features like survival mode, friendly battles, and courses.
Microsoft says that by using Minecraft researchers will be able to create AI that’s more adept at “general intelligence”, learning in a similar way to humans by parsing information from light, smell, sound, and touch. Since then, Microsoft has been pushing the game in a number of interesting new directions, including a partnership with Code.org to help teach kids to code using the virtual world of Minecraft.
A new piece of software called AIX allows users to add an AI control code to the game and shows feedback as a character navigates the world. Hofmann’s background is in how to make search more of an intelligent assistant than a simple information retrieval system, but she said one problem with testing her theories in real-world scenarios is that millions of people are depending on search engines to work in a predictable way.
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“People build incredible structures that do unbelievable things in Minecraft and this allows experimenters to put in tasks that will stretch AI technology beyond its current capacity”, Hoffman told the BBC. It’s not just for fun; it’s created to also improve artificial intelligence in the real world. The two components can run on Windows, Linux or Mac OS, and researchers can program their agents in any programming language they are comfortable with.
