Introducing DiG and the Discovery Community
A new benchmark for discovery, and a community built around exploring it.
Thinking About Thinking has always been built around a simple belief: some of the most important scientific discoveries emerge when curious people come together to ask difficult questions, challenge assumptions and explore the unknown.
Today, we are delighted to share the next step in that journey.
An independent group of researchers, including Thinking About Thinking founders Dr Ruairidh Battleday and Professor James Whittington, has released DiG: Discovery in Games, new research exploring how discovery can be measured in humans and frontier AI systems.
Alongside the research, the group has developed DIG.bench: a benchmark designed to test whether an AI system can work out an unknown rule through experimentation.
Rather than asking a system to reproduce something it may have encountered before, DIG.bench places humans and machines into unfamiliar interactive environments. The only way to succeed is to experiment, form hypotheses, learn from failure and discover the underlying rules.
Alongside DiG is DisCo, the Discovery Community, a space for researchers, scientists, engineers, students, mathematicians and exceptional problem solvers interested in discovery, reasoning and intelligence.
Thousands of people have already joined the community to explore discovery worlds, test their problem-solving abilities and compete on the leaderboard.
Thinking About Thinking is proud to join DisCo as a Founding Community Partner.
For the Thinking About Thinking Fellowship, DisCo creates a new place for the conversations we begin through our seminars and events to continue: through shared experiments, scientific puzzles, collaborative problem solving and opportunities to explore the science of intelligence together.
Following the first DisCo competition, applications for Cohort 002 are now open.
The new cohort will introduce new environments, a new competition and a new leaderboard.
As a member of the Thinking About Thinking Ambassador programme, you are already a member of cohort 001, if you would like to join as a community captain feel free to email clare@thinkingaboutthinking.org
Whether your work is in machine learning, neuroscience, mathematics, cognitive science, physics, engineering or another field entirely, DisCo is an invitation to test how you approach problems nobody has explained to you.
Explore the worlds. Form a hypothesis. Test it. Get it wrong. Try again. Discover something.
And help build a community around one of the questions at the heart of Thinking About Thinking:
How do humans — and machines — discover?
Fellows and Ambassadors
The people who carry this work into their own institutions and communities.
Read more →Our partnerships
The standing partnerships we keep with universities, societies and public-interest organisations.
Read more →AE Global Summit
Three days on the open problems of artificial intelligence, 25 to 27 November 2026.
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