Microsoft’s using Minecraft to boost artificial intelligence research with Project AIX

Microsoft has quietly unveiled a new platform designed to harness the power of Minecraft to expedite artificial intelligence (AI) development.

Developed by a team led by Katja Hofmann, a researcher at Microsoft’s Machine Learning and Perception Group in the company’s Cambridge-based U.K. lab, Project AIX offers computer scientists the chance to use Minecraft to test out and improve AI research. For example, a bunch of Microsoft researchers in New York have been using AIX to try to teach a Minecraft character to climb a hill without actually being programmed to do so — involving trial-and-error, the character is given the same tools and resources as a human does when learning to do new things.

Mojang, a Sweden-based game development studio that’s best known for its work on Minecraft, was acquired by Microsoft for $2.5 billion in 2014. 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. And back in January, Microsoft announced a new version of Minecraft for schools in the wake of its acquisition of MinecraftEdu.

Using games to research artificial intelligence is nothing new, but Hofmann reckons Minecraft is ideal for such uses because of the variety of opportunities the game offers. “Minecraft is the perfect platform for this kind of research because it’s this very open world,” she said. “You can do survival mode, you can do ‘build battles’ with your friends, you can do courses, you can implement our own games. This is really exciting for artificial intelligence because it allows us to create games that stretch beyond current abilities.”

Games are not only a great way of researching AI, but also demonstrating its smarts — just last week, Google’s AlphaGo AI program defeated a human at the Go board game in what was touted as a milestone moment for machine learning and artificial intelligence.

AIX is currently being used in-house at Microsoft and it has also been opened to a small group of academics — but kicking off this summer the platform will be opened to anyone through an open-source license. By adopting an open-source approach, this means Microsoft can get hundreds or thousands of researchers working to make AIX better by contributing code.