1. The Animal-AI Olympics:
Outline
ARAKAWA, Naoya
The Whole Brain
Architecture Initiative
Image Credit Squidoodle

2. What is the Animal-AI Olympics?
● Ongoing AI software competition
http://animalaiolympics.com/
● Competing with software agents
● Agents are
in virtual environments.
● Prizes: total $32,000
● Agents’ cognitive capabilities to be tested
are inspired by animals.

3. AAO is organized by people at Leverhulme
Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI)
Who are behind it?
Sponsors and Partners
Artificial
Intelligence Journal

4. ○ 2019-07-08: Online submissions open ✔
We are here!
○ 2019-09-01: AWS Credits Prize Deadline
○ 2019-11-01: Deadline for final submission
○ 2019-12: Results announced at NeurIPS 2019
Dates

5. ● Participation is team-based (up to 5 members).
Please read the rules carefully!
● You submit your agent to the EvalAI platform :
https://evalai.cloudcv.org
● You can submit your agent many times!
● Your submission will be scored
automatically and the ranking of
teams will be displayed.
● Your best result before the deadline (Nov. 1)
will be used for prize evaluation.
Participation/Submissions

6. ● Interest in (measuring) kinds of intelligence
○ AI
○ Human
○ Animals
○ ….
● AI hasn’t reached the level of animal intelligence.
● But the situation is better with the rise of Deep
Learning.
Background of the Competition

7. An intelligent agent should be able to deal with
novel situations.
〜 General intelligence/AGI
Evaluating Intelligence
⇒ Hidden Tests
Test details are not disclosed to avoid ‘tuning.’
Only environments & categories of cognitive
capabilities are disclosed.

8. 1. Food:
2. Preferences
3. Obstacles
4. Avoidance
5. Spatial Reasoning
6. Generalization
7. Internal Models
8. Object Permanence
9. Advanced Preferences
10.Causal Reasoning
Categories of Tasks

9. 1. Food: getting food in an environment
free of obstacles.
2. Preferences: e.g., choosing a small food nearby
or a big remote food
3. Obstacles: the environment contains obstacles &
may require exploratory forage.
4. Avoidance: the environment contains hot zones
and death zones with negative rewards.
Simple Task Categories

10. 5. Spatial Reasoning: complex navigation &
knowledge of simple physics (e.g., slopes)
6. Generalization: to respond to environmental
variations (e.g., different obstacle colors).
7. Internal Models: to remember the layout of the
environment during blackout.
8. Object Permanence: objects out of sight still
exist...
9. Advanced Preferences: choosing from complex
behavior options
10.Causal Reasoning: some planning
Complex Task Categories

11. Environments: on the Unity ML-Agents Toolkit
- configurable -
Configurations used for evaluation are
unknown!
Test for each category: pass or fail
within 250, 500 or 1000 steps
Some test details

12. Overall Prizes
● 1st place: $6,500 cash + ~$1,000 travel to NeurIPS
● 2nd place: $5,000 cash + ~$1,000 travel to NeurIPS
● 3rd place: $1,500
Category Prizes: $200 for each category
AWS Prizes
● For the top 20 teams by overall score on Sept. 1st.
● Each winner will be awarded $500 of AWS credits.
The Whole Brain Architecture (WBA) Prize
● $4,000 cash for the most biologically plausible entry
+ ~$1,000 travel to NeurIPS
Prize Details

13. Call for Participation!
AAO is challenging & interesting for
● AI engineers
● those who are interested in
cognition