Tech giants open virtual worlds to bevy of AI programs

The Minecraft video game is popular with children; now a version is being used to test artificial-intelligence programs. The Minecraft video game was familiar to José Hernández-Orallo long before he started using it for his own research. The computer scientist, who devises ways to benchmark machine intelligence at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, first watched his own children play inside the 3D virtual world, which focuses on solving problems rather than shooting monsters. In 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft, and its science arm, Microsoft Research, gave its own researchers access to a new version of the game that allowed computer programs, as well as people, to explore and customize the 3D environment. Then, after inviting a small group of outside researchers that included Hernández-Orallo to download the machine-friendly version of the world, last July, Microsoft made it freely available to anyone, with the goal of speeding up progress in artificial intelligence (AI).