We will be releasing a'playground', a simple simulation environment for intelligent agents based on the Unity platform3. This environment has basic physics rules and a set of objects such as food, walls, negative-reward zones, pushable blocks and more. The playground can be configured by the participants and they can spawn any combination of objects in preset or random positions (pictured). It will be important for the participants to design good environments for their agents to learn in. Configuration files for the playground can also be exchanged between participants should they wish to collaborate. The competition tasks will include ten cognitive categories each with ten subtasks.

In one of Aesop's fables, a thirsty crow finds a pitcher with a small amount of water beyond the reach of its beak. After failing to push the pitcher over, the crow drops pebbles in one by one until the water level rises, allowing the bird to have a drink. For Aesop, the fable showed the superiority of intelligence over brute strength. Two and a half millennia later, we might get to see whether AI could pass Aesop's ancient intelligence test. In June, researchers will train algorithms to master a suite of tasks that have traditionally been used to test animal cognition.

Are today's best artificial intelligence (AI) systems as smart as a mouse? A new contest aims to find out. The Animal-AI Olympics, which will begin this June, aims to "benchmark the current level of various AIs against different animal species using a range of established animal cognition tasks." At stake are bragging rights and $10,000 in prizes. The project, a partnership between the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and GoodAI, a research institution based in Prague, is a new way to evaluate the progress of AI systems toward what researchers call artificial general intelligence.