Project Malmo - Minecraft for AI Research

Project Malmo is an open source artificial intelligence (AI) experimentation platform, designed to support fundamental research. Rapid progress in many areas of AI research requires experimentation in interactive settings (agents interact with an environment) that are complex, diverse, dynamic and open, and that provide increasingly more difficult challenges as technology progresses. Project Malmo achieves such flexibility by building on top of Minecraft, a popular computer game with millions of players. The game Minecraft is particularly appealing due to its open ended nature, collaboration with other players, and creativity in game-play.

In this demo, we show the capabilities of the Project Malmo platform and the kind of research they enable. These range from 3D navigation tasks to interactive scenarios where agents converse, compete or collaborate with one another or humans to achieve a goal. The platform is designed to foster collaboration and openness. The result is a cross-platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux), cross-language (e.g., C/C++, Java, C#, Python, Lua) experimentation environment that uses standard data formats to easily exchange tasks and recorded data. Recently, the platform was publicly released as open source software.