At the BETT show in London earlier this year, the Minecraft exhibition was predictably abuzz with activity.  The game can be quite aptly described as a cultural phenomenon, but far from being purely a source of entertainment, owners Microsoft believe it is a vehicle for much greater things.

For instance, they held their first Minecraft in Education Summit in Los Angeles last year, at which educators revealed how they are using the game to teach children a whole range of topics, but in particular the STEM topics that remain such a challenge to excite children in.

The science of Minecraft

It turns out that the Microsoft team aren’t merely using Minecraft for educational purposes.  They have recently launched Minecraft AIX to utilize the platform for research into areas such as AI.

The platform was developed at Microsoft’s Cambridge lab and was unveiled to the world recently.  It allows researchers to use the Minecraft environment to test out their theories and hopefully therefore make progress in the field of AI.

The platform is currently available in beta mode to a select group of researchers, but it will be rolled out more widely this summer via an open-source license.

“Minecraft is the perfect platform for this kind of research because it’s this very open world,” the team say. “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.”

Improving general intelligence

The team are particularly hoping to make advances in the general intelligence of machines.  This includes many of the tasks that young people do without a second thought on Minecraft.

This will be crucial if we are to get machines that are great at doing very specific things branching out and combining those with various other tasks.

By using Minecraft, it provides researchers with a practical and cost effective playground to test out their ideas. Not only does it overcome limitations posed by building and maintaining physical devices, but you also remove any barriers posed by the involvement of humans in the experiment.

“It’s a digital playpen for artificial intelligence,” the team say. “It’s an environment in which we can develop an algorithm for teaching a young artificial intelligence to learn different concepts in the world.”

Eventually it’s hoped that Minecraft will prove beneficial to both Microsoft researchers but also the wider AI community.

The platform comes with a mod for a Java version of the game, plus code that can help AI agents understand the environment.  It can be run on Windows, Mac OS or Linux, with programming work possible in any language the researchers choose.

Minecraft has undoubtedly made a huge impression on the educational world.  It will be fascinating to see just what kind of dent it can make in the world of AI.