Facebook will use Minecraft to give its AI a crash course in listening to players' directions

Minecraft is more than just a game, according to Facebook, it also makes an ideal training ground for sophisticated artificial intelligence. The company says it will use Minecraft, a popular sandbox-style building and adventure game, to train an AI assistant on one of the most important human abilities: multi-tasking. 'Instead of superhuman performance on a single difficult task, we are interested in competency across a large number of simpler tasks, specified (perhaps poorly) by humans,' researchers say in a proposal paper. The bot will be able to interact with players and then perform tasks based on requests like'come here' or'can you build a circle there?' Minecraft was created in 2009. At the start of the game, a player is put into a'virtually infinite game world.'