I’ll believe it when they can solve Tower of Hanoi to arbitrary depth.
Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
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Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#82I’ll believe it when they can solve Tower of Hanoi to arbitrary depth.
But if they were to, would they not have discovered the iterative solution?
Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#83Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#84We know that crows and many other animals use tools, which represents at least one level of linguistic abstraction ("It's not just a rock, it's a member of a more general category of things capable of smashing open food"). I've always thought that recursion, specifically the ability to apply abstraction to itself, was a unique human trait. We don't just abstract one level, we keep going - building tools that help us…
One comment, re: tools to build tools. I've seen animals use rocks, in videos, to debark sticks, to be used to perform another task. That's a tool to make a tool, and I bet there are other cases. In fact, I recall a video of a monkey, using a sharpened stone, to break the window of its habitat. To sharpen the stone, it used something else (the video did not say anything other than the monkey sharpened the stone). So…
Yes - but have you ever seen a troop of monkeys organize themselves to produce a surplus of sharp stones for their collective advantage? Thankfully, monkeys do not have this recursive ability. Sadly, humans do.
Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
They prefer cashews but until the economy gets a little better it’s peanuts.
Do the crowd demonstrate a preference or behavior difference when fed the different nut varieties?
I haven’t noticed a change in their behavior. I think the real test would be the “trail mix” setup (drop various options on the ground and see which ones they go for first). I haven’t done it mostly out of laziness, but now I think I might just to see.
Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, if you’re literally throwing it at them, yeah, they don’t like that. You just kinda have to throw it where they can see it, then walk away, and they’ll come running over to scoop them up. Do that for a week or two and they’ll start looking for you. Also, cashews are their favorite (based on watching them pick the cashews out of trail mix and then come back for the other stuff later). They don’t let me get close…
Crows really like Cheetos.
Which is why humanity is preserving Cheetos for future corvid civilizations to discover 10,000 years from now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33500525
We may wipe ourselves out through war and climate destruction, but the crows will survive and evolve, and CAWrchaeologists will discover our final gift to corvidkind and - hopefully - remember us fondly.
Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love this. Can you earn their trust, as in, become pals with them? Or is this more of a human desire. It's probably mostly food based priorities to them.
> Can you earn their trust, as in, become pals with them? It's a very human question. All living things are friends (except sometimes at mealtime) because we are all part of one singular organism. The separateness and individuality of multicellular organisms is a perceptual illusion. (This sound metaphysical, and perhaps it is, but it's very literal: all cells use the same chemical language, the same bio-molecular ma…
> "Com-pan-ions" are literally those who eat bread together: "com" is community, etc. and "pan" is bread.
Similarly, while plenty of people pan (pun intended, on multiple levels) American multiculturalism for being seemingly limited to food, it remains evident that food is a sort of universal language - a gateway to shared understanding even among those who share nothing else in common. Cuisine is a window into cultural tradition and history, and is a leading indicator of the formation of new cultures through the intersection of existing ones. To share food is to share what makes us human.
If we discover intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, I reckon this will be a key factor in whether we have any hope of ever truly understanding them and their motivations.
Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Environmental “engineering” by ancestors of elephants is a possible factor that contributed to the environmental change that likely lead to the extinction of Gigantopithicus, the enormous, ancient ape.
So they warred on our cousins! Thus, we shall place them in caged enivros, to be starred at by our young, pointed at, fed token treats, their humiliation complete.
The elephants will have their revenge. We might not remember the before-times when the elephants triumphed over us, nor might we remember the systematic extermination of their wooly comrades, but the elephants?
The elephants never forget.
Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#89Re: Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
One comment, re: tools to build tools. I've seen animals use rocks, in videos, to debark sticks, to be used to perform another task. That's a tool to make a tool, and I bet there are other cases. In fact, I recall a video of a monkey, using a sharpened stone, to break the window of its habitat. To sharpen the stone, it used something else (the video did not say anything other than the monkey sharpened the stone). So…
Yes - but have you ever seen a troop of monkeys organize themselves to produce a surplus of sharp stones for their collective advantage? Thankfully, monkeys do not have this recursive ability. Sadly, humans do.
No on organizing themselves, but!, they do cache food. Most animals do.
And parents share their cache with their young, naturally. And some animals have a larger definition of "family", than just young. Some have communal concepts.
So I wonder, how close is the next step?
The behaviour is there.
I bet if a tool was rare, or hard to find, they would cache it. And that would leave the door open for communal caching.
But my point is, animals "get" caching. Frankly, human caching behaviour must be instinctual to some degree.
I wonder.
A few things are required to have it even make sense. Take growing food. It requires a way to keep other animals at bay, otherwise, your work is all lost.
But I think, it also requires the ability to clear land.
Well anyhow. Enough rambling.