Minecraft to be used to test artificial intelligence

World-building game Minecraft is to become a testing ground for computer scientists researching artificial intelligence.

Microsoft, which owns the popular game, has developed a new AI testing software called AIX at its research lab in Cambridge that will allow artificial intelligence agents to operate within the game, navigating its world in the same way a human would.

Researchers hope to develop an AI agent that can "learn" to climb a hill, avoiding pitfalls such as lava and rivers along the way.

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The "sandbox" nature of Minecraft, which allows players to interact with their environment in an almost infinite variety of ways, means researchers can easily design new tasks or obstacles for the computer to overcome.

"People build amazing structures that do amazing things in Minecraft and this allows experimenters to put in tasks that will stretch AI technology beyond its current capacity," project leader Katja Hofmann told the BBC.

"Eventually, we will be able to scale this up further to include tasks that allow AI agents to learn to collaborate with humans and support them in a creative manner."

The team says the game's world is more sophisticated than existing simulators used to test AI and that the software is far cheaper and easier to use than a robot.

For now, the AIX software has only been released to a handful of academics, who will initially run the game on their machines without participating in the multi-player mode. Eventually, however, the project's leaders envision letting other players interact with the code.

"At this moment, there is nothing comparable and this is just in its beginnings, so I see many possibilities for it," said Professor Jose Hernandez-Orallo, one of the academics given early access to the software.

It will be released as an open source product in July, meaning that anyone who owns a copy of Minecraft – there are currently more than 100 million registered users - can start their own artificial intelligence experiments.