14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Mojang and publisher Microsoft are announcing that they are planning to make the very popular Minecraft video game a testing ground for complex Artificial Intelligence experiments starting in July, by using a new technology called AIX.
The two companies claim that the title is capable of creating more interesting conditions for both amateurs and dedicated research teams and costs less than other solutions that are employed at the moment.
AIX will be offered under an open source license starting in the summer and is already offered to a small number of academics who are already testing its capabilities and the way it will interact with Minecraft.
Katja Hofmann and colleagues created the solution at the Microsoft lab in Cambridge, United Kingdom and states, "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."
Initially, all Artificial Intelligence research will be separated from normal gameplay, but it seems that Microsoft wants to allow them to interact in time to see how humans and AI will relate to one another and whether they can enhance creativity for both groups.
Minecraft is evolving in 2016
According to the Microsoft team, the fact that the Mojang title is entirely open ended is an advantage because it opens up the possibility of developing new types of AI that can create complex general intelligence systems rather than focus on simple and clear problems.
Minecraft has recently received a new combat-focused update, labeled 1.9, and the developers have said that they are continuing to work with the community to identify new areas of the title that can be improved and better balanced.
It will be interesting to see how the deployment of AI and the fact that they might eventually interact with human players will change the nature of the video game.
Minecraft was an indie hit before Microsoft announced that it was buying Mojang and since the acquisition, the title has been used for some of the most interesting initiatives inside the company, recently serving as a showcase for the impressive capabilities of the HoloLens augmented reality technology.
There are also plans to launch a new major update for the Windows 10 version of the game later in the year.