Minecraft could be the key to creating adaptable AI

Minecraft is not only the best-selling video game in history, it could also be key to creating adaptable artificial intelligence models that can pick up a variety of tasks the way humans do. Steven James at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and his colleagues developed a benchmark test within Minecraft to measure the general intelligence of AI models. MinePlanner assesses an AI's ability to ignore unimportant details while solving a complex problem with multiple steps. Lots of AI training "cheats" by giving a model all the data it needs to learn how to do a job and nothing extraneous, says James. That is a fruitful approach if you want create software to accomplish a specific task – such as predicting the weather or folding proteins – but not if you are attempting to create artificial general intelligence, or AGI.