Minecraft Used as Training Site for New AI

Minecraft is one of the most popular games of our time. Known for its block-based aesthetics and almost limitless exploration, the game allows people to do almost whatever they want. Because of the endless possibilities afforded by the game, Minecraft has been central to an artificial intelligence (AI) research group.

Reported by the MIT Technology Review, researchers at Facebook have been using Minecraft as their training system for their new AI. While most contemporary successful AI systems are designed to excel at one task, these researchers are looking to create AI that can do multiple things well as it assists a player in their Minecraft adventure.

As their research paper, entitled “Why Build an Assistant in Minecraft?”, notes, “In this work we have argued for building a virtual assistant situated in the game of Minecraft, in order to study learning from interaction, and especially learning from language interaction. We have argued that the regularities of the game environment and task space can and should be used explicitly as tools to make the relevant learning problems more tractable, rather than as diagnostics to measure if a method can learn those regularities.”

In other words, Minecraft’s multiple required, but relatively regular, actions – scavenging, building, forging, etc. – make it an ideal learning space for their AI. In fact, because actions like building are so simple, yet so complex (building a shelter, for example, is more difficult than building a circle), the AI will have to be able to respond to all manners of very specific requests while not having to necessarily learn a whole new skill.

Although the AI assistant is still in its incipient stages, the research team is hoping that it is something that can continue to learn even after initial training. If you’re interested in trying out an early version, you can download the code here.