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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

#81

Post by burnished »

fsckboy wrote: post #66
numpad0 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> some cultures assume humans must be fundamentally different - it’s not a universal notion. Are you referring to hunter gatherers doing a mystical bear or eagle dance? Reincarnation as an ant? in those cases, it is belief in a non-corporeal spirit-being that underpins the other belief. Do you believe in non-corporeal spirit-beings, and if you do, aren't you more mystified by people who don't believe in them; or vice…

Like, judeo-christianity? Western societies viewpoints on human intelligence and how it relates to animal intelligence for centuries? The notion, typically, is that while humans are animals our intelligence is not just different in degree but different in kind. I think it comes from that bit in the bible where their god places humans as above all other life forms, just a guess though.

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

#82

Post by solaxun »

lhorie wrote: post #44
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…

Seagulls eat clams. They break the shells by dropping them onto rocks from a height. They're able to learn to steal food from other birds when they see a chance, and conversely, to regulate from which height to drop clams of different sizes. All of these require planning and risk assessment abilities. Being able to take a bag of potato chips away from human-infested buildings and opening it is not really that far out…

A few years back I was walking along the SF bay down in the marina with a friend when suddenly I heard a "clunk" and felt a splash of water on my legs. Initially I thought some drunk idiot threw a beer bottle out the window of their car, but a few seconds later a Seagull swooped down, grabbed a clam it had dropped from who knows how high up, and fly off with lunch. I had no idea they did that, I just stood there dumbfounded for a few seconds.

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

#83

Post by taeric »

musingsole wrote: post #52
caddemon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My point is you shouldn't fudge auxiliary data in making a point. I don't know if I can believe your actual argument due to that.

Consider, my dog can fumble around trying to make me happy with really good emotional understanding of my reactions and basic mimicry. I wouldn't claim that is a usage of language, though. From the counters here, there is an argument that if my dog was dextrous with his arms and hands, he could pass off similar results.

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by burnished »

martincmartin wrote: post #46
OscarCunningham wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the thing which came surprisingly late in history wasn't having a concept of 'none' but rather of allowing it to be considered a number with the same status as 1, 2, 3 and the rest. Indeed some of the ancient Greeks were of the opinion that 1 was not a number (since numbers were for counting a plurality of things). It's quite the realisation that you can use the usual rules of arithmetic for 1 and 0, and not…

You see this in programming languages too. Many languages distinguish between one of something and a collection of them, e.g. int x vs vector x. In other languages, like Matlab, everything's a vector, and a scalar is just a vector of length one.

Well, its not that they distinguish between one of something and a collection, its that one of something is different from a collection of things. So, int x is a handle to an integer value, whereas an array handle (your collection) is a handle to a pointer, which points to the start of your data structure and you can get the other elements by using an offset etc. etc. My point being that they are differentiated because they are different things.

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

#86

Post by ocimbote »

abecedarius wrote: post #79

This is the new bit, if you've already read about the basics of animal counting: > The crows mixed up a blank screen more often with images of a single dot than they did with images of two, three or four dots. Recordings of the crows’ brain activity during these tasks revealed that neurons in a region of their brain called the pallium represent zero as a quantity alongside other numerosities, just as is found in the…

I agree. I have read it all to really learn not that much (animal cognition is a pet peeve of mine) until this paragraph.

I don't know anymore if we should salute the efforts of the author to contextualize the news, to the detriment of the news itself, or I'd we should blame them for lengthening artificially the article...

Probably a bit of both, as always.

That being said, thanks for the summary of the article, great tl;dr; ;)

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

#87

Post by mikestew »

zestyping wrote: post #68
agumonkey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

crows do team work to figure out machines monkeys can team up to resolve non trivial coordinated tasks (vaguely related: gorillas still have the zero lag face recognition) beside not speaking, often when I look at animals, it feels that they got wiser than us.. they could do more smart things but they just coast.

I have been training the crows in my neighbourhood to solve puzzles. They visit me every day now. One goal I'm really excited about is to see if they can solve a puzzle that requires two crows to work together, because I've only seen videos of individual crows solving puzzles online. Can you tell me more about the teamwork that you're referring to? Are there videos or papers I can look at? I'm super curious! Thanks!

Yes, adding a +1 to sibling comment: do tell about your puzzles. We've got some crows that just get bitchy if their bird bath gets dry, I'd like a more positive interaction if possible. :-)

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

#88

Post by fsckboy »

burnished wrote: post #81
fsckboy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some cultures assume humans must be fundamentally different - it’s not a universal notion. Are you referring to hunter gatherers doing a mystical bear or eagle dance? Reincarnation as an ant? in those cases, it is belief in a non-corporeal spirit-being that underpins the other belief. Do you believe in non-corporeal spirit-beings, and if you do, aren't you more mystified by people who don't believe in them; or vice…

Like, judeo-christianity? Western societies viewpoints on human intelligence and how it relates to animal intelligence for centuries? The notion, typically, is that while humans are animals our intelligence is not just different in degree but different in kind. I think it comes from that bit in the bible where their god places humans as above all other life forms, just a guess though.

you're telling me what I know, where I'm asking about the commenter's claim that there are cultures that do NOT do this

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

#89

Post by DiggyJohnson »

srean wrote: post #72
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if they're thinking "zero" but just don't have the word for it. I.e. what if this is just a linguistic deficit? Please err on the side of me understanding your question well.

Even the question whether one can 'think' of something without having a linguistic representation is a topic of active debate. My personal take is that its possible, predators plan ambush, but do they have a linguistic representation ? Its not clear that they do.

I agree with the context that you described. In fact, I'm delighted that we agree on that context.

I agree its not clear, though I might lean the other way. Who knows.

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

#90

Post by dasil003 »

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…

One time when my daughter was 2 years old, riding on my wife's back in an Ergo baby carrier while we were walking up the Brighton Pier eating an apple, a seagull came stealthily hovering in from behind on the strong winds and took a bite out of the apple from my daughter's dangling arm before any of us could react.
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