Animal-AI 3: What's New & Why You Should Care

The Animal-AI Environment is a unique game-based research platform designed to serve both the artificial intelligence and cognitive science research communities. In this paper, we present Animal-AI 3, the latest version of the environment, outlining several major new features that make the game more engaging for humans and more complex for AI systems. New features include interactive buttons, reward dispensers, and player notifications, as well as an overhaul of the environment's graphics and processing for significant increases in agent training time and quality of the human player experience. We provide detailed guidance on how to build computational and behavioural experiments with Animal-AI 3. We present results from a series of agents, including the state-of-the-art Deep Reinforcement Learning agent (dreamer-v3), on newly designed tests and the Animal-AI Testbed of 900 tasks inspired by research in comparative psychology. Animal-AI 3 is designed to facilitate collaboration between the cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence. This paper serves as a stand-alone document that motivates, describes, and demonstrates Animal-AI 3 for the end user.