In a move which underscores an effort by Microsoft to advance the development of artificial intelligence (AI) through a game, the company said in a Monday announcement that it has launched an AI platform based on popular construction game Minecraft.

The Minecraft-based AI platform announced by Microsoft is called Project AIX. The platform has been developed by Microsoft with contributions from Katja Hofmann -- a researcher at the company's lab in Cambridge, UK -- and her colleagues.

The announcement of the new Minecraft-based Project AIX platform by Microsoft apparently marks the company's plans to open the platform to researchers and AI enthusiasts, so as to ensure that AI move closer towards achieving the desirable "general intelligence" capabilities.

Announcing the Project AIX platform, Microsoft said that researchers are currently using Project AIX to "train" an AI agent in such a way that it learns how to do things -- like climbing mountains in the virtual world -- in the Minecraft environment.

About the tester AI agent being developed by researchers using Project AIX, Fernando Diaz -- senior researcher in Microsoft's research lab in New York -- said in the blog post: "We're trying to program it to learn, as opposed to programming it to accomplish specific tasks."