If artificial intelligence (AI) agents are to become real players in society, using their machine abilities to complement our human strengths, they must first become players in the video game of Minecraft. And to prove themselves in Minecraft, they must work together to capture animals in a maze, build towers of blocks, and hunt for treasure while fighting off skeletons. That, anyway, is the premise of a competition organized by Microsoft, Queen Mary University of London, and crowdAI (a platform for data-science challenges). Next month, the organizers will announce the winner--the team that created an AI that could best observe its Minecraft environment, determine which of three missions it had to accomplish, and then collaborate with another AI agent to carry out that mission. By emphasizing adaptability and cooperation, the organizers aimed to encourage research on AI agents that could one day interact with humans to accomplish tasks in the real world.

Artificial intelligence has come a long way in the 20 years since International Business Machines Corp.'s Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game chess match, or even the six years since Watson trounced Ken Jennings on Jeopardy! Computers have beaten top human players at checkers, backgammon, poker, and go. Add to the list Super Smash Bros. Melee, a 2001 Nintendo Co. fighting game that lets you pit, say, Mario against Pikachu. Humanity has MIT researchers to thank for this defeat, chronicled in a paper they published in February, but Melee isn't the only video game getting a lot of playtime from learning machines. AI software has cracked Super Mario Bros.; early Atari SA games such as Space Invaders; arcade mainstays Pac-Man and Mortal Kombat; even mobile favorite Angry Birds.

AI has achieved milestones in mastering games like chess, Go, and, recently, poker--illustrating how successful machines have become at completing specific, narrow tasks. But can AI move beyond the narrow, toward achieving more general, human-like skills? On Thursday, Microsoft launched a competition to address this question. Microsoft's Project Malmo, which the company calls a "sophisticated AI experimentation platform," brings researchers together to use Minecraft as a testing tool for developing AI--smart, collaborative AI that can compete in a virtual world. The Malmo Collaborative AI Challenge asks PhD students to enter this world and create AI that can team up with randomly assigned players to compete for a high score in Minecraft.

Almost every machine learning breakthrough you hear about (and most of what's currently called "artificial intelligence") is supervised learning; where you start with a curated and labeled data set. But another technique, reinforcement learning, is just starting to make its way out of the research lab. Reinforcement learning is where an agent learns by interacting with its environment. It isn't told by a trainer what to do and it learns what actions to take to get the highest reward in the situation by trial and error, even when the reward isn't obvious and immediate. It learns how to solve problems rather than being taught what solutions look like. Reinforcement learning is how DeepMind created the AlphaGo system that beat a high-ranking Go player (and has recently been winning online Go matches anonymously). It's how University of California Berkeley's BRETT robot learns how to move its hands and arms to perform physical tasks like stacking blocks or screwing the lid onto a bottle, in just three hours (or ten minutes if it's told where the objects are that it's going to work with, and where they need to end up).

Microsoft has published the source code for its Project Malmo, allowing anyone to conduct artificial intelligence experiments in the world of Minecraft with a little programming. It unveiled the project, then known as AIX, back in March, but at the time only a few academics had access to the code. On Thursday the company made good on its promise to open up the source code by publishing it on Github. Minecraft, the blocky world-building game that Microsoft paid $2.5 billion for two years ago, is an ideal place to test how artificial intelligences will interact with one another and with humans. As it's a simulation, Minecraft is a safe place to test how AIs learn to perform certain kinds of physical tasks: In Minecraft, a rogue machine or runaway car can hurt no one.

For Katja Hofmann, Minecraft is not just a virtual world: it is a gym for artificial intelligences. Hofmann, 36, is the lead researcher on Microsoft Research Lab's Project Malmo, an open-source platform that makes it possible to test AIs inside the game's pixelated universe. "A question in artificial intelligence is how we get AIs to learn how to interact in a complex environment, to experiment in a wide range of settings," she says. Researchers using Project Malmo, which was made available to developers in July 2016 after a year of in-house testing at Microsoft's Cambridge-based lab, can create AI agents and set them loose in a modified version of Minecraft's free-to-roam 3D environment. There, through trial and error, the agents learn how to move, walk and dodge obstacles in a physically consistent world - something usually requiring expensive robots.

Project Malmo, a platform that uses the world of Minecraft as a testing ground for advanced artificial intelligence research and innovation, is available for novice to experienced programmers on GitHub via an open-source license. The system is primarily designed to help researchers develop sophisticated AI that can do things like learn, converse, make decisions and complete complex tasks. It supports research on a range of methods such as reinforcement learning, deep learning and symbolic AI, allowing researchers to compare and integrate different approaches to advance AI understanding, reasoning, learning and communications. Project Malmo is available at aka.ms/github-malmo

For Katja Hofmann, Minecraft is not just a virtual world: it is a gym for artificial intelligences. Hofmann, 36, is the lead researcher on Microsoft Research Lab's Project Malmo, an open-source platform that makes it possible to test AIs inside the game's pixelated universe. "A question in artificial intelligence is how we get AIs to learn how to interact in a complex environment, to experiment in a wide range of settings," she says. Researchers using Project Malmo, which was made available to developers in July 2016 after a year of in-house testing at Microsoft's Cambridge-based lab, can create AI agents and set them loose in a modified version of Minecraft's free-to-roam 3D environment. There, through trial and error, the agents learn how to move, walk and dodge obstacles in a physically consistent world - something usually requiring expensive robots.

Now, the video game has a scientific connection. Microsoft has made Project Malmo available for programmers on GitHub via an open-source license. This platform uses the world of Minecraft to test advancements in artificial intelligence research. Before this move, the system was only used in private viewing by computer scientists. "We're trying to put out the tools that will allow people to make progress on those really, really hard research questions," Katja Hofmann said, the leader of Project Malmo and a researcher in Microsoft's research lab in Cambridge, UK.

That's what Microsoft's Project Malmo, formerly known as DNA Storage Project, is doing right now. Publicly unveiled today on the official Mojang blog, Project Malmo has just made its open source tools available to everyone today in an effort to help others help strengthen AI in various ways. Mojang notes that Minecraft is the perfect way to educate AI when it comes to offering solutions to problems, sharpening spatial and temporal reasoning, and even collaboration. Project Malmo can offer diverse opportunities at teaching artificial intelligence software and act as a research tool that can test these theories as well. If you're interested in seeing what Project Malmo has to offer in addition to testing it out for yourself, you can download the mod for the PC/Mac edition of Minecraft here.