Facebook has an AI assistant for Minecraft: Here's why

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.

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.

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.

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,