The 1st Animal-AI Olympics Are Happening
Animal Versus Artificial Intelligence
Sounds like something straight out of a science-fiction novel, eh?
But it’s not fiction.
Applications will open in June for the first Animal-AI Olympics — a competition organized by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence in collaboration with GoodAI.
The team reads like something of a brainy Avengers, with members possessing combined expertise that spans from artificial intelligence to philosophy to neuroscience and beyond— including a video game programmer (who is also the CEO and founder of two companies, counting GoodAI) and a Professor of Cognitive Robotics who was a scientific advisor for everyone’s favorite trippy film featuring AI, Ex Machina.
But why pit artificial intelligence against nonhuman animal intelligence when AI has already proven superior to humans at a multitude of tasks?
The Animal-AI Olympics website explains…
“Humans are no longer the best Go players, quiz-show contestants, or even, in some respects, the best doctors. Yet state-of-the art AI cannot compete with simple animals at adapting to unexpected changes in the environment. This competition pits our best AI approaches against the animal kingdom to determine if the great successes of AI are now ready to compete with the great successes of evolution at their own game.”
For more info, you can check out the video here.
Instead of providing specific tasks, the team will present an arena for the animals and AI in which they’ll test for a list of cognitive abilities.
What’s required to win? “…an AI system that can behave robustly and generalise to unseen cases.” Who wins the top prize is determined by performance across the entire range of tests.
And to achieve a perfect score in the competition? That’ll require a “breakthrough in AI, well beyond current capabilities.”
The goals of the competition are outlined on the site and include benchmarking current AI against multiple animal species using animal cognition tasks, testing toward identifying cognitive abilities of AI systems, creating an ongoing benchmark and data reposity for artificial cognition, and more.
Again, you can check out the detailed goal list here.
But let’s get to the team.
Dr. Matthew Crosby, Leverhulme CFI Postoctoral Researcher
Based at Imperial College London, Dr. Crosby has his own website and a blog filled with fascinating posts on, “consciousness, philosophy of mind, AI and the future of intelligence.”
My fav blog post — “AI Suffering.”
He’s authored and co-authored book chapters and conference papers, and co-authored a paper published in Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing.
Dr. Marta Halina, Leverhulme CFI Project Leader
Dr. Halina acquired her Ph.D. in Philosophy and Science Studies from University of California, San Diego. Prior to that, she double majored at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, receiving a B.S. in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior from the College of Biological Sciences and a B.A. in Philosophy from the College of Liberal Arts.
Currently, she’s a University Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.
Her selected publications include “Octopuses as Conscious Exotica” in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences and “There is No Special Problem of Mindreading in Nonhuman Animals” in Philosophy of Science.
Benjamin Seyret, Leverhulme CFI Research Assistant
With a background originally in finance, he became a student of machine learning at Imperial College London in 2017.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Dr. Lucy Cheke, Leverhulme CFI Associate Fellow
Dr. Cheke is self-described on her website as, “…an experimental psychologist and University Lecturer in the department of Psychology, Cambridge. My research covers the interaction between cognitive processes, motivated behaviour and health.”
Keywords under the “Research Focus” section of her Cambridge Neuroscience website profile include, “mental time travel.” Curious? Check this out.
Professor José Hernández-Orallo, Leverhulme CFI Associate Fellow
Dr. Hernández-Orallo is a Professor of Information Systems and Computation at the Technical University of Valencia.
His book, The Measure of All Minds: Evaluating Natural and Artificial Intelligence, was published by Cambridge University Press in January, 2017; and his other publications span additional books and over two hundred journal articles and conference papers on several areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science and information systems.
You can read a guest post of his on the AI Roadmap Institute blog.
Professor Murray Shanahan, Leverhulme CFI Spoke Leader
“The idea that human history is approaching a ‘singularity’ — that ordinary humans will someday be overtaken by artificially intelligent machines or cognitively enhanced biological intelligence, or both — has moved from the real of science fiction to serious debate.”
Above is a quote from the summary of Professor Shanahan’s book, The Technological Singularity, published by the MIT Press in August, 2015. Truly a fascinating read.
A Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind, he was also a scientific advisor on Ex Machina.
Other books he’s authored include Embodiment and the Inner Life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds and Solving the Frame Problem: A Mathematical Investigation of the Common Sense Law of Inertia.
Marek Rosa, CTO and CEO of GoodAI
He has his own Wikipedia page which, nowadays, is the sign of being somebody.
Not only is he the CEO and founder of GoodAI, but the CEO and founder of Keen Software House — an independent video game development company responsible for games such as, “Medieval Engineers” and “Space Engineers.”
Olga Afanasjeva, COO of GoodAI
In addition to being the COO of GoodAI, Afanasjeva is the Director of the General AI Challenge, organized by the company.
She also designs beautiful dresses, which can be found here.
Marek Havrda, Strategy Advisor GoodAI
An economist and sociologist who’s studied at Georgetown University, Charles University, Lancaster University, Johns Hopkins University, and Warwick Business School, Marek Havrda holds a number of positions in additional to being Strategy Advisor at GoodAI, including: Director at neopas.com, Member of the Impact Assessment Board for the Czech Government, Impact Strategy Lead at miwa.eu, and Co-Founder of Prague Summer Schools.
The competition website mentions “planning begins for future iterations of the competition” after this year, as well as follow-up workshops in animal cognition and AI.
So what do you think? Are you excited for the Animal-AI Olympics? Sound off on Twitter here.
