Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
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Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
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Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#2> Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of zero.
No they didn't.
All human cultures I'm aware of have, at least, the concepts of none, one, two, three, and many. They all understand that none is exactly one less than one, and most of them (but not all!) understand that there's no natural limit to the counting numbers, and have a way of expressing some amount of those numbers.
But zero is a human invention. It comes from India (probably, might be China) and is probably related to the abacus: but the abacus came to the West without the zero, which followed it later.
Zero is both a symbol for null and a placeholder used for writing numbers modulus the radix. This is a conceptually powerful force multiplier, making all arithmetic operations dramatically easier.
It also lets us make up a "name" for any integer we want. We can just add more zeroes; when this gets awkward we can start counting the zeroes using exponential notation, and when that becomes inconvenient we can develop ↑ notation, which gets us further than we really need for any practical purpose.
It should be obvious that crows neither know about this nor care. It's interesting and cool that they understand none, but so did the Ancient Greeks, who had no idea about zero and could have gotten much further in mathematics if they did.
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#3Unrelated to animals, this really surprised me:
> Moreover, he added, “When you look at the history of mathematics, it turns out that [zero] is an extreme latecomer in our culture as well.” Historical research finds that human societies didn’t begin to use zero as a number in their mathematical calculations until around the seventh century.
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#4Do the birds and the bees actually count? Or is there some more innate/intuitive process involved. I doubt I could tell the difference between 9 or 10 dots on a page without actually counting them.
Many years ago there was a study involving crows, as I recall. N, starting at 2, researchers went into a blind, then N-1 came out. They had to get up to N = 13 before they fooled the birds into thinking the blind was actually empty.
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#5There was a funny related example of the African Gray parrot Alex surprising the trainers by silently counting in his head.
They were training a younger parrot and trying to get the younger parrot to count to two by tapping twice.
Alex overheard the training and got impatient with the other bird. He yelled out “two” and then after two more taps “four” and then “six”.
The trainers were just expecting “two” each time.
It was this book: https://www.amazon.com/Are-Smart-Enough-Know-Animals/dp/0393...
The book is interesting and goes into how humans need to set up experiments properly to actually test non-human animals in ways that make sense (rather than just in some biased human way).
One quick example was testing tool use, the original experimenters left branches on the ground for the monkeys to use, but the monkeys can’t pick stuff up that’s flat on the ground since they’re normally in trees (their hands don’t have thumbs that move that way). When he redid the experiment with the tool raised they were able to grab and use it.
Same author also wrote Chimpanzee Politics and did this great video experiment: https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#6There was a funny related example of the African Gray parrot Alex surprising the trainers by silently counting in his head. They were training a younger parrot and trying to get the younger parrot to count to two by tapping twice. Alex overheard the training and got impatient with the other bird. He yelled out “two” and then after two more taps “four” and then “six”. The trainers were just expecting “two” each time.…
You may appreciate this poignant sci-fi short story/video that references and expands on the story of Alex: https://vimeo.com/195588827
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#7Do the birds and the bees actually count ? Or is there some more innate/intuitive process involved. I doubt I could tell the difference between 9 or 10 dots on a page without actually counting them. Many years ago there was a study involving crows, as I recall. N, starting at 2, researchers went into a blind, then N-1 came out. They had to get up to N = 13 before they fooled the birds into thinking the blind was actu…
But then what is counting? Is it what we (humans, birds and bees) use to abstract reality?
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#8Is there a website where this kind of bullshit does not reach the front page?
Animals cannot, in principle, use abstract concepts because it requires language and brain centers which never been evolved in these branches of evolution.
Also counting is an association (pairing) with instances of an abstract concept of a number which requires a language and a culture.
Okay, may be some visual cues, but not zero. Please cut the crap
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#9There was a funny related example of the African Gray parrot Alex surprising the trainers by silently counting in his head. They were training a younger parrot and trying to get the younger parrot to count to two by tapping twice. Alex overheard the training and got impatient with the other bird. He yelled out “two” and then after two more taps “four” and then “six”. The trainers were just expecting “two” each time.…
You may appreciate this poignant sci-fi short story/video that references and expands on the story of Alex: https://vimeo.com/195588827
Looks like the Ted Chiang short story? Thanks - it’s great.
I’d recommend his other stories too if you like that one.
I’ve also got a bunch of links to other stories I’ve liked here too: https://zalberico.com/about/
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#10Do the birds and the bees actually count ? Or is there some more innate/intuitive process involved. I doubt I could tell the difference between 9 or 10 dots on a page without actually counting them. Many years ago there was a study involving crows, as I recall. N, starting at 2, researchers went into a blind, then N-1 came out. They had to get up to N = 13 before they fooled the birds into thinking the blind was actu…
But then what is counting? Is it what we (humans, birds and bees) use to abstract reality?
For us humans it is a process of establishing a one-to-one relationship between objects and a long-since-memorized sequence of words that requires just one member of the sequence to be remembered in order to represent the number of objects.