Facebook is working on an AI smart assistant for Minecraft

Facebook's AI Assistant

Facebook is working on an AI smart assistant for Minecraft

Now Facebook is working on its own AI assistant inside popular game Minecraft. The aim is to create an AI system able to perform a wide variety of tasks, rather than one. An AI assistant that can help people with everyday tasks outside a gaming environment.


Minecraft has grown to be one of the most popular games ever since its release in May 2009. This is an open-world game that requires players to explore an infinite area and build 'blocky' structures like statues, cities, etc. In the game, players can explore a virtual world, harvest natural resources, craft tools, and build impossible, blocky structures. Reports say that more than 90 million people playing it every month.


So, Minecraft makes an ideal platform to train an AI. According to the researchers, there’s a huge opportunity for the AI assistant to learn inside “Minecraft” and that it could eventually evolve to a point where it can ask human players to help it acquire more knowledge.


The idea of training an AI within a sandbox game like Minecraft means that the AI would be able to multitask, performing a variety of useful tasks rather than perform one task perfectly. Like most AI programs do it in today’s day.


AI algorithms are generally very good at just one thing - and it learns even more as it interacts with humans.


Researchers from Facebook Inc is working on an AI assistant that can interact with “Minecraft” players and then perform a wide range of tasks upon request. The assistant that learns from the interactions and develops new skills that can be applied to different tasks.


But doing so is challenging. The social giant says that the bot still finds some issues in decoding the meaning of words in complex player commands. The technique chosen by Facebook is still in working process. When telling the AI to build a structure with precise specifications, the bot would need to know what each word means and what the structure should look like, while distinguishing among measurements, instructions, and any other context that the player might throw at them.



The company also says that the outcome of the game can be predicted easily and the bot can be taught to act on commands given by players.


Researchers at Facebook and MIT released a paper in July stating how it plans to utilise the popular sandbox game to train its AI.


The social media giant hopes that the issues might be eliminated as most people start interacting with the AI assistant in Minecraft.


It's that potential for almost infinite creativity with a small set of easy-to-understand tools, in conjunction with the difficulty of teaching an AI to understand natural language, that has Facebook spending countless hours on a private Minecraft server.


Artificial intelligence has shaped our lives and made a lot of repetitive processes much faster and more efficient for us. So, it's about time we should start looking into developing much more advanced AI programs that would be capable of carrying out a variety of tasks.




Source