News Microsoft announces Minecraft-powered AI experiment platform

There's already been some very nice studies in the minecraft domain, particularly at looking at generating hierarchical structures of tasks.

Interestingly, Microsoft seems to be looking at alternatives to Deepmind's Deep Q Networks. I don't know if that's to deliberately differentiate themselves or because they want to study these techniques in their own right (I can't say I know much about gradient boosting)

 

It's now been released under the name malmo:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-malmo/
https://mojang.com/2016/07/project-malmo-uses-minecraft-to-make-ai-smarter/