Skip to main content

Animal-A.I. Olympics will test bots against the latest animal intelligence tests

A few months back, we wrote about the Animal-A.I. Olympics, a then in-development competition which aimed to test top artificial intelligence agents by putting them through cognition tests designed for animals. This was intended to be open to anyone who wanted to create an A.I. they thought would be able to pass a battery of tests, all meant to measure some aspect of bot intelligence. Jump forward to the present day, and the contest has officially launched — with its creators releasing Version 1.0 of the test environment, and announcing the official rules for entrants, increased prize money, and other crucial information.

“For prizes, we now have $32,000 equivalent value, with $20,000 total in cash and travel reimbursement for the top three entries and the most biologically plausible entry,” Matthew Crosby, a postdoctoral A.I. researcher working on the project, told Digital Trends. “We are also giving out $10,000 worth of AWS credits half-way through — $500 to each of the top 20 entries — that can be used during the second half of the competition.”

Recommended Videos

As far as tests go, the team has bumped the number up from the originally planned 100 to a massive 300, split across 10 categories. All tests are either pass or fail, meaning a maximum score of 300 for the contest. These categories are arranged in order of increasing difficulty, starting with simple food retrieval in empty environments and ending with problems which require more complex causal reasoning to solve. However, participants won’t know what the tests involve — meaning they’ll have to create as general purpose an A.I. as possible.

Submissions open on July 8 and the contest itself will run through November 2019. During that time, participants can enter multiple times, which gives plenty of opportunity for improving personal scores. The final results will be presented at the NeurIPS 2019 conference in December.

“Given the wide variety of tasks, every interesting idea has the potential to win at least some prize,” Crosby continued. “We encourage everyone to just download the environment and play around with it to see what they can come up with. We also encourage them to submit their entry even in the early stages so that they can see how well it’s doing on the tasks. Given the variety of tasks, even a simple agent might solve some tasks that others are struggling at.”

Any further advice? “Try to make an agent that behaves like an animal,” Crosby said. “It should always want to get the most food it can. It should be keen to explore its environment when food is not readily available, and [be] able to make intelligent decisions when faced with multiple possibilities.”

And, just like that, your July Fourth holiday got filled up with homework!

Luke Dormehl
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Here’s what a trend-analyzing A.I. thinks will be the next big thing in tech
brain network on veins illustration

Virtual and augmented reality. 3D printing. Natural language processing. Deep learning. The smart home. Driverless vehicles. Biometric technology. Genetically modified organisms. Brain-computer interfaces.

These, in descending order, are the top 10 most-invested-in emerging technologies in the United States, as ranked by number of deals. If you want to get a sense of which technologies will be shaping our future in the years to come, this probably isn’t a bad starting point.

Read more
Nvidia lowers the barrier to entry into A.I. with Fleet Command and LaunchPad
laptop running Nvidia Fleet Command software.

Nvidia is expanding its artificial intelligence (A.I.) offerings as part of its continued effort to "democratize A.I." The company announced two new programs today that can help businesses of any size to train and deploy A.I. models without investing in infrastructure. The first is A.I. LaunchPad, which gives enterprises access to a stack of A.I. infrastructure and software, and the second is Fleet Command, which helps businesses deploy and manage the A.I. models they've trained.

At Computex 2021, Nvidia announced the Base Command platform that allows businesses to train A.I. models on Nvidia's DGX SuperPod supercomputer.  Fleet Command builds on this platform by allowing users to simulate A.I. models and deploy them across edge devices remotely. With an Nvidia-certified system, admins can now control the entire life cycle of A.I. training and edge deployment without the upfront cost.

Read more
Can A.I. beat human engineers at designing microchips? Google thinks so
google artificial intelligence designs microchips photo 1494083306499 e22e4a457632

Could artificial intelligence be better at designing chips than human experts? A group of researchers from Google's Brain Team attempted to answer this question and came back with interesting findings. It turns out that a well-trained A.I. is capable of designing computer microchips -- and with great results. So great, in fact, that Google's next generation of A.I. computer systems will include microchips created with the help of this experiment.

Azalia Mirhoseini, one of the computer scientists of Google Research's Brain Team, explained the approach in an issue of Nature together with several colleagues. Artificial intelligence usually has an easy time beating a human mind when it comes to games such as chess. Some might say that A.I. can't think like a human, but in the case of microchips, this proved to be the key to finding some out-of-the-box solutions.

Read more