Microsoft has said it’s going to make its AIX platform for testing artificial intelligence projects open-source.

AIX is currently used by Microsoft Research, Redmond’s boffin lab, and is also available as a private beta to a select bunch of academic researchers. The platform allows researchers to test their AI research in the unstructured play mode of the Minecraft game as a kind of testing ground to prove its abilities.

Microsoft said AIX will be available for everyone to use under an open-source license later this summer.

The announcement was likely designed to try and grab some of the limelight for Microsoft at a time when Google is getting all of the AI attention, after its AlphaGo program successfully beat South Korean Go player Lee Se-dol three times in five match series.

Microsoft’s AIX is quite different from Google’s AlphaGo however, as its focused on projects that involve general intelligence, or something “more similar to the nuanced and complex way humans learn and make decisions,” Allison Linn, a senior writer at Microsoft, explained in a blog post.

According to Linn, computers are now capable of performing complex tasks like understanding and translating speech, and recognizing images and writing captions for them.

“A computer algorithm may be able to take one task and do it as well or even better than an average adult, but it can’t compete with how an infant is taking in all sorts of inputs — light, smell, touch, sound, discomfort — and learning that if you cry chances are good that Mom will feed you,” Linn continued.

She added that humans have so far been able to develop computer tools that can, for example, recognize words, but they cannot seamlessly integrate these skills together in the same way humans can.

Using Minecraft as a testing ground makes its much more cost-effective for researchers to test technologies capable of performing more advanced tasks. For example, Microsoft Research is currently trying to teach a Minecraft character to climb a hill with its own intuition, by teasing it with rewards every time it takes a step towards its goal, even though it doesn’t know what the goal is yet. If those researchers were to try and do the same thing in a real-world environment, the cost would almost certainly be too prohibitive.

Microsoft’s AIX platform, developed in Cambridge, U.K., consists of a “mod” for the Java version, plus code that helps AI agents sense and act within the Minecraft world, Linn said. Researchers can use any programming language to program their AI agents, and the components both run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

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