Perhaps taking a cue from Google’s AlphaGo, Microsoft has launched a new project that will train new artificial intelligence programs by having them play Minecraft.

According to Microsoft, the project challenges AI with the seemingly simple in-game task of climbing a hill while avoiding obstacles. What makes this task difficult is the fact that the AI is not told anything about how Minecraft works, so it must figure everything out on its own.

“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,” Allison Linn, a senior writer at Microsoft, said in a blog post.

“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.”

“Minecraft is the perfect platform for this kind of research”

The Minecraft project is built on Microsoft’s new AIX platform developed by Katja Hofmann, a researcher at Microsoft who had grown tired of existing methods for testing and training AI using simpler games. According to Hoffman, Minecraft works well for testing AI because of its openness and customizability.

“Minecraft is the perfect platform for this kind of research because it’s this very open world,” Hofmann said. “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.”

In some ways, Minecraft is both simple and complex from the perspective of an AI. Since the world is built using voxels (AKA cubes), the AI has less information to sort through when it comes to learning the environment.

At the same time, the game contains a wide range of complex systems that can be used in a number of creative ways, such as creating a monster farm that spawns monsters, kills them, and harvests the items they drop.

Of course, it will likely be some time before AI reaches that point, but then again, the same thing was said about the creation of an AI that could beat a professional Go player.

You can find out more about Microsoft’s AI experiments with Minecraft on its official blog.

Image credit: 2016 TechFest at Microsoft on March 8, 2016. Photography by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures