Earlier this year I wrote about an interesting project from Microsoft that aimed to capitalize on the Minecraft platform they bought back in 2014.  The aim was to use the platform to train AIs developed by the company.

They launched Minecraft AIX to utilize the platform for research into areas such as AI.  The platform was developed at Microsoft’s Cambridge lab and allows researchers to use the Minecraft environment to test out their theories and hopefully therefore make progress in the field of AI.

“In future work, we intend to take advantage of the flexibility of the Minecraft domain to construct even more challenging cognitive tasks to further evaluate our architectures,” they conclude.

So, it’s interesting that Google DeepMind have taken a similar path by developing their own 3D virtual world that is open and available for others to use.

DeepMind Lab

The platform, known as DeepMind Lab, looks very similar to the blocky world of Minecraft.  The AI agent visible in the world can navigate around, gauging its surroundings and do a few simple tasks.

Via machine learning, the agents can learn various tasks, including navigating mazes.

“We’re trying to develop these artificial intelligence agents that can learn to perform well on a wide range of tasks from looking at the environment and from observing what happens,” DeepMind say.

This new environment builds upon a platform known as Labyrinth that has been used by DeepMind for a little while now.  It’s this platform that helped develop the AI capable of mastering various retro video games, for instance.

The overall aim is to allow for AI to be developed that can easily transfer their knowledge onto other tasks.  It also allows them to test out approaches for developing control systems for real-world applications, such as with industrial robotics.

The code for the virtual environment is completely open source and available on GitHub.