From Microsoft's announcement:

“We're looking for opportunities where we can really help accelerate the pace of artificial intelligence innovation in a way that is going to be very close to the real world, with real experiences and real data,” said Evelyne Viegas, the director of artificial intelligence outreach at Microsoft Research. The AIX platform consists of a mod for the Java version and code that helps artificial intelligence agents sense and act within the Minecraft environment. The two components can run on Windows, Linux or Mac OS, and researchers can program their agents in any programming language they are comfortable with.

AIX is an AI platform developed by researcher Katja Hofmann, whose focus is machine learning and perception. She's part of Microsoft Research Cambridge, the lab that unveiled AIX today. Hofmann said that Minecraft is an appealing world for AI to explore because “You can do survival mode, you can do 'build battles' with your friends, you can do courses, you can implement our own games. This is really exciting for artificial intelligence because it allows us to create games that stretch beyond current abilities.”

As a full game, the world of Minecraft is rich with horrors, from spiders to zombie to skeletons and more, which come out at night and make life hard for characters. During the day, the world is safe to explore, as the monsters are afraid of the light. This is great for human players, who can time their excursions around the sun. For the AI learning to climb in a monsterless void, night and day are irrelevant information. Making an intelligence that can discard useless information is as much a part of AI as teaching it to act on useful facts.

For now, that means an intelligence in a simulation is learning to climb as high as it can. When the project is released open-source this summer, it could mean armies of machines learning how to survive the virtual world all on their own, with monsters lurking in the darkness.