Pretty cool, they seem to have made an XML interface for parsing minecraft commands, allowing various programming languages to be used to compose "missions" which can then be outputted as XML and read by the mod to be run in the game. I think this is crucial because (IMO) Java is not a good language for beginners because it is such a "large" language.
Pretty much. The XML is mainly used to specify the 'mission' that you want your agent to perform. You write your agent in Python (or a few other languages), and it can be as simple as this: https://github.com/Microsoft/malmo/blob/master/Malmo/samples...
Malmö is one of my favorite cities in the world. I try to visit there every year from Australia, ever since 2013 when it hosted the Eurovision Song Contest. Loved the train stations there, especially Triangeln:
Me too, so I actually asked them and apparently it's because it's approximately in the middle between Cambridge (where the team is located) and Stockholm (where Minecraft was made).
I talked to someone who had worked at Microsoft Research, who mentioned that it is actually policy to name projects after cities. Apparently it's not possible to trademark a name of a city, so this protects against being sued for trademark infringement. Since Microsoft has lots of money, they are a tempting target for lawsuits.
I read through the tutorial and one thing that stood out was the sections that required changing an xml file by hand. I don't thing that you should have to manually modify xml for common use cases when it would be simple enough to build a tool to do that.
[1] http://h2r.cs.brown.edu/announcing-burlapcraft/