

Microsoft's Minecraft-Themed AI Tool, 'Malmo', Now Open Source

With a little programming know-how, you can help teach AI bots how to comprehend Minecraft players and interact with a digital world.

July 8, 2016

You might be a pretty savvy Minecraft player, but are you as good at playing Minecraft as a computer? It sounds like a silly question to ask—who really cares about AI Minecraft skills, anyway—but you'd be surprised by the answer. As it turns out, Minecraft represents an ideal environment for artificial intelligence research, and it's the big training ground for Microsoft's Project Malmo platform. And, as Microsoft announced today, Project Malmo is now open source and free for anyone to play with.

"The system, which had until now only been open to a small group of computer scientists in private preview, is primarily designed to help researchers develop sophisticated, more general artificial intelligence, or AI, that can do things like learn, hold conversations, make decisions and complete complex tasks," Microsoft describes.

"That's key to creating systems that can augment human intelligence — and eventually help us with everything from cooking and doing laundry to driving and performing lifesaving tasks in an operating room."

The ultimate goal of AI is to move beyond simply understanding what's happening in an environment—a series of reasonable responses to external stimuli—and actually comprehending the innate meaning of what's being said or done. In other words, modern AI systems are pretty good about parsing your queries and figuring out an appropriate response based on what you've said, but they have comprehension for what you're actually saying or any possible clue as to why you're saying it. It's an advanced call-and-response, but that's it.

Though one's prowess in Minecraft doesn't really mean much in the real world—being a master block builder in a digital game doesn't mean you can pound a nail into a board without hurting yourself—it's actually a great training ground for artificial intelligence. Not only can researchers create bots that try to learn and comprehend what people are saying to them, and each other, but these bots can also learn how to navigate a large, virtual space. They can solve puzzles and mazes, build various constructions, learn a world's boundaries so they don't hurt themselves, and perform a variety of other digital tasks.

"Minecraft is the perfect platform for this kind of research because it's this very open world. 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," said Katja Hofmann, a Microsoft researcher, in one of Microsoft's blog posts about Project Malmo.

You can grab Project Malmo over at Github right now—a mod for the Java version of Minecraft, which you'll want to have before you start playing around with Microsoft's platform. You'll need to know a little bit about programming to do anything, but Microsoft maintains that even novices should be able to use Project Malmo. It also works with any programming language that someone wants to use.


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