Project AIX: Using Minecraft to build more intelligent technology by Allison Linn.
From the post:
In the airy, loft-like Microsoft Research lab in New York City, five computer scientists are spending their days trying to get a Minecraft character to climb a hill.
That may seem like a pretty simple job for some of the brightest minds in the field, until you consider this: The team is trying to train an artificial intelligence agent to learn how to do things like climb to the highest point in the virtual world, using the same types of resources a human has when she learns a new task.
That means that the agent starts out knowing nothing at all about its environment or even what it is supposed to accomplish. It needs to understand its surroundings and figure out what’s important – going uphill – and what isn’t, such as whether it’s light or dark. It needs to endure a lot of trial and error, including regularly falling into rivers and lava pits. And it needs to understand – via incremental rewards – when it has achieved all or part of its goal.
“We’re trying to program it to learn, as opposed to programming it to accomplish specific tasks,” said Fernando Diaz, a senior researcher in the New York lab and one of the people working on the project.
The research project is possible thanks to AIX, a platform developed by Katja Hofmann and her colleagues in Microsoft’s Cambridge, UK, lab and unveiled publicly on Monday. AIX allows computer scientists to use the world of Minecraft as a testing ground for conducting research designed to improve artificial intelligence.
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The project is in closed beta now but said to be going open source in the summer of 2016.
Someone mentioned quite recently the state of documentation on Minecraft. Their impression was there is a lot of information but poorly organized.
If you are interested in exploring Minecraft for the release this summer, see: How to Install Minecraft on Ubuntu or Any Other Linux Distribution.