The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Minecraft becomes testbed for artificial intelligence experiments its artificial intelligence technology Credit: Microsoft 14 March 2016 • 11:12am Minecraft is going to be a testbed for artificial intelligence (AI) experiments.
 Microsoft, who owns the hugely popular world-building game, revealed it will train an AI program to play Minecraft, which is more "sophisticated" than current AI research simulations.
 "We're trying to program it to learn, as opposed to accomplishing specific tasks," said Fernando Diaz, a senior researcher working on the project, known as AIX.
 For instance, the researchers want their AI program to learn how to find and climb to the top of a hill in a Minecraft world, rather than giving it instructions on how to get there.
 Minecraft has a creative, survival and adventure modes, which involve simple tasks such as walking around looking for treasure, and complex ones such as building a structure with other people.
 The collaborative aspects will be the most challenging for the AI.
 Microsoft bought Minecraft for $2.
5 billion (£1.
5 bn) back in 2014.
 "Minecraft is the perfect platform for this kind of research because it's this very open world," said Katja Hofmann, lead developer of AIX, the Microsoft program created for the research.
 "You can do survival mode, you can do 'build battles' with your friends, you can do courses, you can implement our own games.
 "This is really exciting for artificial intelligence because it allows us to create games that stretch beyond current abilities.
" Minecraft and artificial intelligence Credit: Microsoft The new research is the latest step in Microsoft's plan to heavily invest in AI.
 It recently purchased British startup SwiftKey, a predictive typing app that uses AI to guess users'e next word, for £174 million.
 Microsoft's eventual aim is to use the AI to improve its intelligent assistant Cortana.
 Hofmann created AIX at Microsoft's lab in Cambridge, UK out of frustration with the limitations of simple AI testing programs.
 The software platform lets computer scientists use Minecraft as an AI testing ground.
 It works by allowing the AI to control a character and learn from the feedback about the consequences of its actions.
 It is currently available to a few academic researchers under a private beta, and will be released under an open-source license to any computer scientist who wants to use it, in the summer.
 Microsoft's researchers hope that they can teach the computer general intelligence, which involves more nuanced problem solving and decision making.
 Humans are not currently able to play against the AI, which is training in a "roped off" version of the game.
 Microsoft plans to release it to play with real Minecraft players in the future.
 Most important inventions of the 21st Century: in pictures Playing games against humans is a good way to improve an AI's reinforcement learning - when the program learns from its previous actions.
 This process was used by Google's AlphaGo, which last week beat the world champion of the board game Go three times, winning the overall five-game match outright.
 AlphaGo learned to win by playing Go against itself more than 30 million times.
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