AI bots are learning to team up by wrangling digital swine in Minecraft

Wrangling a pig--even a virtual one--is much easier if you get a friend to help. This much seems clear from a contest organized by Microsoft researchers to test how artificially intelligent agents could cooperate to solve tricky problems. How best to cooperate with your pig-wrangling pal is another question. The competition addresses an area of artificial intelligence that has had relatively little attention so far. AI researchers often develop software capable of performing a specific human task, such as playing chess or Go, and then measure it according to its ability to defeat a human player.