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Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim

#61

Post by bmitc »

ren_engineer wrote: post #35
BirAdam wrote: post #6

So, crows, cetaceans, octopuses, and elephants… let’s just be thankful that all of the other smart animals can’t manipulate their environments at scale.

if you look at all those groups you can kind of see what each lacks compared to humans to get runaway intelligence benefits that basically create a continuous selective effect for more intelligence. humans have a solid combination of dexterity, life span, and verbal communication. Dexterity allows for manipulation that allows intelligence to be used to maximum effect in an environment, life span allows for time to le…

I am not convinced dexterity has much to do with intelligence. It is more an enabler of technology development and not raw intelligence.

Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim

#63

Post by Oxidation »

default-kramer wrote: post #43

> To address this limitation, Liao and her colleagues extended the sequences from two pairs to three pairs—such as { [ ( ) ] } Three pairs of brackets still seems like setting the bar very low... But even if they got great results with 10 pairs of brackets, wouldn't that be more easily explained by "understanding symmetry" rather than "understanding recursion"?

Presumably you could check that with non-symmetrical symbols (so unrelated pairs like A/Y, or 1/W, etc)

But then, I'm not sure that many humans would figure that out.

Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim

#64

Post by HideousKojima »

tanseydavid wrote: post #53
HideousKojima wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the "game journalist vs. pigeon" video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vfIn9OqhZWo

I struggled with the exact same move in Cuphead training. I had the exact same reaction as the game journalist.

Were you not able to read the instructions on the wall?

Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim

#65

Post by xkcd1963 »

The recursion example in the article is not good because it is language dependent. One could also say: "running mouse chased by cat in the past" and you would get the same idea as in opposed to "The mouse the cat chased ran". I believe other non-indoeuropean languages like Chinese or Japanese work in some ways much different from ours where you would pretty much derive to similar sentences if you translate without considering grammatical rules (not to say that they dont use recursion). Also one has to make a distinction from recursion and recursion in language as opposed to "if you cant recurse in communication you cant recurse in general".

Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim

#67

Post by goto11 »

zaidhaan wrote: post #58
zaidhaan wrote: post #51

> Adapting the protocol used in the 2020 paper, the team trained two crows to peck pairs of brackets in a center-embedded recursive sequence. > Two of the three monkeys in the experiment generated recursive sequences more often than nonrecursive sequences ... I'm no academic but aren't those extremely small sample sizes to make any reasonable deductions from? This looks to be even addressed in one of the papers cited…

Not sure why I got downvoted. If my assumption is wrong then I'd be really curious to hear from someone that knows better.

It is unclear what your complaint is. As the second quote states, you only need a sample size of one to prove that a certain ability can exist. You just cant say much about how widespread the ability is.

Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim

#68

Post by onos »

hairofadog wrote: post #17

I feed the crows cashews as I walk the dog, and I find their behavior fascinating. They "commute to work" each day. Crows all live in a community that they go home to each night, and then each morning they all come back to their specific areas, usually in pairs. If you're in a place where you see crows every day, it's almost certainly the same pair of crows you’re seeing each day. Each pair has a strict territory. I…

Which is it peanuts or cashews?

Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim

#69

Post by tanseydavid »

HideousKojima wrote: post #64
tanseydavid wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I struggled with the exact same move in Cuphead training. I had the exact same reaction as the game journalist.

Were you not able to read the instructions on the wall?

My immense frustration was largely due to the fact that yes (of course) I was able to read the short instructions on the wall.

What I could not do (for more than 3 minutes straight, iirc) was execute those instructions in the proper manner to get Cuphead to do what I wanted.

disclaimer: I am old as hell and phased out of any serious video gaming in the era of 2D, 2 button and an 8-way joysticks

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