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Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#51

Post by numpad0 »

krylon wrote: post #20

The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it. I recently saw a video of a seagull that entered a grocery store through the automatic door, picked up a (non-transparent) bag of potato chips (or something similar), walked out again, opened the bag and ate the chips. Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works, and that t…

I never fully understood why some cultures assume humans must be fundamentally different - it’s not a universal notion.

Some hypothesizes and argues that our ancestors extinguished every other species that showed intelligence by eating them, which I think is a bit too wild of a theory. But maybe the fact that it’s often small birds that shows intelligence is also interesting. They’re among hardest to hunt.

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#52

Post by musingsole »

caddemon wrote: post #38
taeric wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, I went fast on my post. My point was to tighten your numbers to strengthen your point. As it is, I feel lied to when folks say that it takes kids 4 or more years to get language.

How does that strengthen his point? Koko stumbled around frequently, well after the learning period was advertised as done. Kids stumble around less than was claimed, as you mention.

The time window of learning ISN'T THE POINT.

You're asking an animal to internalize a system of communication quite literally designed from the ground up for different hardware. It's like asking why does my Oculus headset take so long to communicate over ZigBee. What would be magical is that it did it at all. Lamenting how long it took to bend the Oculus hardware into some contorted SDR would be stupid.

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#53

Post by open-source-ux »

krylon wrote: post #20

The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it. I recently saw a video of a seagull that entered a grocery store through the automatic door, picked up a (non-transparent) bag of potato chips (or something similar), walked out again, opened the bag and ate the chips. Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works, and that t…

"The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it."

An example of something that might surprise many people: animals can use medicine.

Here is a fascinating podcast that discuss the subject with researchers and experts.

Podcast description:

> Listener Andrew Chen got in touch to ask whether animals use any kind of medicine themselves. After all, our own drugs largely come from the plants and minerals found in wild habitats. So perhaps animals themselves are using medicines they find in nature.

> We think of medicine as a human invention - but it turns out that we’ve learnt a lot of what we know from copying the birds, bugs and beasts.

This podcast is highly recommended - I guarantee you'll come away amazed and humbled by the intelligence of animals.

Do animals use medicine?: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszv77

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#54

Post by outworlder »

gonehome wrote: post #5

There 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.…

Alex, that's the one who called an apple a "banerry", right? :)

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#56

Post by tomjupiter »

ducktective wrote: post #22
krylon wrote: post #20

The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it. I recently saw a video of a seagull that entered a grocery store through the automatic door, picked up a (non-transparent) bag of potato chips (or something similar), walked out again, opened the bag and ate the chips. Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works, and that t…

I think this is parent's seagull: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMVKymf9yA There is another one fancying cold sandwiches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZZ822Za-nE

I thought it might be this[0], which surprised me how clearly the bird seems to know what it's doing is "wrong" and how it tries to act unsuspecting.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/i69mu1/no...

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#57

Post by dang »

lngnmn2 wrote: post #8

Is 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 c…

Could you please stop breaking the site guidelines so we don't have to keep banning you? If you'd make your substantive points thoughtfully, we'd appreciate it.

The problem with the way you're posting is that it pushes the forum further in the crap direction which is already the internet default, which we're trying to stave off here—not for moral reasons but simply because it's uninteresting.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#58

Post by throwaway192874 »

popctrl wrote: post #32

The idea that zero was "invented" at a certain time by recent humans and not in use until then has always seemed absolutely absurd to me. I will admit I haven't read deeply into it, but there's just no way people didn't have a concept for "none of a thing" until a couple millennia ago. One of the justifications used for this reasoning is "You don't go to the market and buy 0 fish". But all that tells us is: There's n…

There's a book called "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" that goes into the history of zero in detail, admittedly I haven't finished reading the book myself but got at least partway through and it was fascinating to read about it and I'll one day finish it :)

What you said about it not being in the numeric system is definitely part of it (ex: roman numerals not having it) but also all the problems that come up with zero have to be dealt with (e.g allowing dividing by it allows you to prove anything, and there's a great proof that winston churchill is a carrot in the book showing as such), and there's some overlap with religions in fearing "nothing" and what that might mean

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#59

Post by bsza »

gonehome wrote: post #5

There 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.…

There was this horse named Clever Hans whose trick was that you could give him a math problem and he would tap out the answer with his hoof. Of course, his powers were fake, but the way he actually did it is brilliant.

When the number of taps approached the correct answer, his trainer became excited. Hans picked up on this and stopped right when the trainer's excitement reached its peak. The trainer had no idea this was happening. He was fooled by a horse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#60

Post by inglor_cz »

josefx wrote: post #30
krylon wrote: post #20

The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it. I recently saw a video of a seagull that entered a grocery store through the automatic door, picked up a (non-transparent) bag of potato chips (or something similar), walked out again, opened the bag and ate the chips. Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works, and that t…

> The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it. It goes both ways, in the past we had Clever Hans[1]. People believed Hans could perform simple math, when his cleverness was actually watching his owners expression for small changes. So any observed intelligence ends up under suspicion of them acting on information gained from a much simpler side channel. [1] https://simpl…

The thing about animal intelligence is that it is probably significantly different from ours. In studying it, we must avoid antromorphization of animals.

Mammals are somewhat close to us, but we have diverged from birds over a hundred million years ago and we still struggle to understand how a tiny and smooth brain such as corvids have can produce such an observably intelligent behavior.

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