Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

news.northeastern.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 168 posts

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#31

Post by davidmurphy »

abruzzi wrote: post #3

My pet Mitred Conure (Leonard) loves to mess with my iPad while I'm reading. On the other had, Leonard >hates< my iPhone. If he's on my shoulder he'll engage in a agressive display waving around and violently biting my shirt. If the phone is close enough to him he will attack the phone. I'm an extremely light phone user so its not like I ignore him when using the phone, but I do expect it is the size makes it competi…

Does it have FaceID? Could it be the sensors emitting things bothers the birb?

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#32

Post by simonklitj »

tombert wrote: post #27
tocs3 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> humans are still the smartest animal on earth obviously I think this is correct but not obvious. It could be we (I am assuming you are also human :) are just the most ambitious.

I am human (at least as far as I am aware), though I guess with the advent of LLMs that's becoming less evident. It seems obvious to me, though I might be redefining "smartness" in a very human-centric way. It seems pretty clear to me that humans are the smartest in terms of analytical ability; you hear things in the media all the time like "crows are smarter than 7 year old humans", but I think that really depends o…

Is this more of a limitation of our ability to communicate with the animals? If we could talk intelligibly with a crow, maybe we could teach it? Conversely, if our communication with a 7-year-old child were limited to the level we achieve with crows, could we teach the child and know for sure that they understand it?

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#33

Post by 082349872349872 »

tombert wrote: post #27
tocs3 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> humans are still the smartest animal on earth obviously I think this is correct but not obvious. It could be we (I am assuming you are also human :) are just the most ambitious.

I am human (at least as far as I am aware), though I guess with the advent of LLMs that's becoming less evident. It seems obvious to me, though I might be redefining "smartness" in a very human-centric way. It seems pretty clear to me that humans are the smartest in terms of analytical ability; you hear things in the media all the time like "crows are smarter than 7 year old humans", but I think that really depends o…

> are all equal to the same amount

This may be modern schooling at work. I've heard that one motivating factor for the ancient egyptian's strange-to-us mathematical style ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_fraction ) is that when they divvied stuff up, they needed to do it in a way that was more obviously fair than we do.

Example: we have four workers on our gang and need to pay them with 3L of beer and 3 loaves of bread at the end of the day. The beer is easy; just pour equal levels in three similar containers. For us, the loaves are easy too: give 3 workers 1 * 3/4 loaf and the last one 3 * 1/4 loaf. For the ancient egyptians (who might complain the last one either got smaller portions or more things) it'd be important to give everyone obviously the same portion: 1 * (1/2 + 1/4) loaf.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#34

Post by Veserv »

tombert wrote: post #27
tocs3 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> humans are still the smartest animal on earth obviously I think this is correct but not obvious. It could be we (I am assuming you are also human :) are just the most ambitious.

I am human (at least as far as I am aware), though I guess with the advent of LLMs that's becoming less evident. It seems obvious to me, though I might be redefining "smartness" in a very human-centric way. It seems pretty clear to me that humans are the smartest in terms of analytical ability; you hear things in the media all the time like "crows are smarter than 7 year old humans", but I think that really depends o…

There is a pretty profound communication gap that you seem to be discounting.

A closer analogy might be trying to teach a 7 year old who speaks a different language. Or even deeper, a 7 year old child who only knows sign language and you do not.

The communication gap makes it very hard to figure out how much is a “intelligence” difference versus just being unable to even communicate the contents of the test.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#35

Post by 082349872349872 »

kibwen wrote: post #30
ethbr1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube UX: "We have this one weird cohort that's responding abnormally to all our UI A/B testing..."

Only until enough parrot owners find out about this, at which point parrots overtake the human population of Youtube and the metrics start catering to them.

> and the metrics start catering to them

"in order to access this functionality, you must first chew through the charging cable"

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#36

Post by static_motion »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #19
I_Am_Nous wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rage quitting or issues with rage WHEN quitting? I can imagine a game-addicted bird might get upset if you turn off the tablet or remove them from the gaming area. Similar to a toddler throwing a tantrum if you turn off a movie they are watching.

Birds totally experience rage at inanimate objects like humans. If an objects get in their way or doesn't behave the way they want for long enough, they'll start smacking it. Vicious and intelligent things.

I, too, have watched that one video of a bird getting angry at a box of blueberries whose lid wouldn't stay up.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#37

Post by Waterluvian »

ideasphere wrote: post #22
superkuh wrote: post #17

What a wonderful site design. Everything, even the video clips, work without javascript execution. This is a site that a parrot itself could load and use. On that topic, I recently saw a video of flocks of parrots that learned to manually spin a water pump windmill by flying up and sitting on the top of it on windless days.

I thought the exact opposite from a UX angle. Swiped down and it started scrolljacking and then I read the line about touch screens helping us “to snag Lightning deals on Prime Day” and it was enough for me to just stop reading and close the tab.

I hated it but reader mode fixes all.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#38

Post by tombert »

Veserv wrote: post #34
tombert wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am human (at least as far as I am aware), though I guess with the advent of LLMs that's becoming less evident. It seems obvious to me, though I might be redefining "smartness" in a very human-centric way. It seems pretty clear to me that humans are the smartest in terms of analytical ability; you hear things in the media all the time like "crows are smarter than 7 year old humans", but I think that really depends o…

There is a pretty profound communication gap that you seem to be discounting. A closer analogy might be trying to teach a 7 year old who speaks a different language. Or even deeper, a 7 year old child who only knows sign language and you do not. The communication gap makes it very hard to figure out how much is a “intelligence” difference versus just being unable to even communicate the contents of the test.

Sure, but even then isn't that making an assumption that animals have the same capacity for communication that we do?

Let me try and explain; I don't speak Spanish, but if I had teach a 7 year old who only knew Spanish, presumably I, as a human, could learn Spanish and then teach the 7 year old whatever I needed to.

I'm not sure there's an equivalent "crow" language that is even possible for anyone to learn, at least in the same way that humans have language. I know that animals "communicate" in some senses with mating calls and the like, but I don't think they have anything even approaching "grammar" and "syntax".

But I suppose if you're going on a deeper level, if you had some way of directly communicating with a crow (like beaming information directly into their brain already translated in a form that they could understand), I still don't know that you could teach them that money equivalence analogy I used.

Again, I'm speaking out of my ass here, I don't know anything about this stuff, just spitballing.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#39

Post by crooked-v »

cracoucax wrote: post #9
amatecha wrote: post #5

Made me think of this video where a parrot is watching YouTube videos it likes, changing to different ones, and seeming angry when ads (or the owner lol) interrupt its video-watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZSNhJcKFf4

Actually much more impressive than the research videos, he clearly knows his way around youtube

And on top of that, can obviously recognize parrots in the video thumbnails.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#40

Post by MarcoZavala »

Loughla wrote: post #25
numbers wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, so impressive that the parrots knows how to minimize the video and browse for other stuff.

I don't know if that is sarcastic, but it is legitimately impressive to me. That parrot looks almost exactly like a 4 year old using youtube. It's sort of astonishing to think about. From both the fact that the parrot can figure it out, and that the function and use of youtube is so intuitive to users that a parrot can learn it.

[dead]
Post reply on HN