Facebook has an AI assistant for Minecraft: Here's why
What's the story
From winning complex games to detecting dangerous diseases, artificial intelligence is thriving in a range of fields, improving progressively. The tech is smarter than we could imagine, but even with all the advancements, bots fail to handle multi-tasking. Now, in a major move, Facebook is trying to solve this problem by placing its own AI assistant inside popular game Minecraft. Here's all about it.
Strategy
AI to build structures in Minecraft
Minecraft, as many already know, is an open-world game that requires players to explore an infinite area and build 'blocky' structures like statues, cities. They have to perform a range of tasks to build these structures, which is exactly what Facebook is leveraging. The company hopes its bot inside the game will interact with humans and learn to execute their wide-ranging 'building' commands.
Advantage
Minecraft makes ideal platform for AI training
Being an infinite area game, Minecraft makes an ideal platform to train an AI, thanks to its relatively simple and easy to understand rules. Facebook says the outcome of the game can be predicted easily and the bot can be taught to act on commands given by players. There may be many commands, but each one would be fairly simple to execute.
Room
There's still a long way to go
The technique chosen by Facebook appears to be working, but the company says that the bot still finds trouble in decoding the meaning of words in complex player commands. For instance, when asked to "build a tower 15 blocks tall and put a smiley on top," the AI might struggle in understanding the meaning of a tower or smiley.
Possibility
Increased usage, however, might solve these issues
Having said that, Facebook hopes that these issues might be eliminated as more and more people begin interacting with the AI assistant in Minecraft. Considering Minecraft's humongous user-base of 90 million (every month), we expect some would definitely like to use an assistant for building cool stuff. Meanwhile, a detailed study about the same is available here: https://bit.ly/2ZCBUhL,