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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

#151

Post by b0rsuk »

elliekelly wrote: post #3

Unrelated to animals, this really surprised me: > Moreover, he added, “When you look at the history of mathematics, it turns out that [zero] is an extreme latecomer in our culture as well.” Historical research finds that human societies didn’t begin to use zero as a number in their mathematical calculations until around the seventh century.

You don't appreciate zero until you try to invent a positional number system. In the past, when they used positional system they would often just leave a blank spot in the place of zero. This inevitably leads to errors. Is that two numbers or one number with zero between? How do you distinguish between 1 and 10?

Source:

A popular science book

"The history of numbers or the history of a great discovery" (Georges Ifrah)

Contains some fun chapters like "How to count if you can't count". For example if natives in a stereotypical jungle want to count numbers to a holiday. They memorize a sequence of items, for example body parts: little finger of one hand, palm, wrist, forearm, arm, shoulder, neck.... then they measure once and conclude one needs to wait as many days as there are from the little finger on left hand to, say, navel.

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

#152

Post by b0rsuk »

According to one book I read...

Cheyennes divide birds into 3 groups: plain, great and sacred. They count magpie in the sacred ones :-). There's a magpie on my fence as I'm typing this.

They like magpies because they're smart, talkative, they announce guests, they live close to humans.

Australian "magpie" is not even a corvid.

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

#153

Post by stormdennis »

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'm a little disgruntled about skimming a longish article to find this 2/3 of the way down.

Me too, the title felt a little click-baitey

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

#154

Post by zestyping »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #74
zestyping wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

What are the puzzles? How did you entice them to start?

It all began just before the pandemic, when I saw some YouTube videos about crow intelligence that blew me away. There were crows all over my neighbourhood, so I left out peanuts on my balcony, and eventually a crow started coming by to get them. I would replenish them at night and the crow would come the next day.

After I did this consistently for a while, the crow came every morning. So then I decided to hide the peanuts in a container. I had a retainer case that springs open when you press on a button; I taped it to the railing and left it open with a peanut in it. The crow was very suspicious of it at first, giving it a wide berth while examining it from all sides. It took about a week for it to work up the courage to steal the peanut from the open container, and then another week for it to get used to the idea that the container wasn't going to cause it harm. Then I closed the container.

The crow learned to peck the button to pop open the retainer case, and that's when I got hooked. The crow brought over its partner, and later in the spring as I was stuck at home in lockdown, its fledgling came along too, and they would show the fledgling how to get the peanuts. I started putting out a series of different containers, and then eventually got them a dog intelligence toy, which they aced. I think these crows aren't as smart as the New Caledonian crows in the videos; it takes them a few days or weeks of experimenting to figure out a puzzle. It got to the point where I had four or five crows basically chilling at my house on most days, playing with the toys and taking baths and discussing the puzzles. I have way too much webcam footage of all this, which I've been meaning to post but haven't had the time to sort through and edit.

I have since moved to a new house and had to say goodbye to those crows. :( I have new crow friends now, though! I toss them peanuts whenever I see them on my street, and now they will follow me for a couple blocks if I walk by. This time I've made them a nice platform to land on, and they're learning to open containers, and are starting to play with a dog intelligence toy now.

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

#155

Post by ajuc »

ummonk wrote: post #103
ajuc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are smart but TBH that crow already did all the sub-puzzles independently, he knew what the possible moves are just had to execute them in some order.

To be fair, that's how most of us approach puzzle games. "Okay I've learnt the individual tricks, now let me just try piecing them together in the order that they become available."

Yes but usually you have 100s or millions of possible combinations, in that crow puzzle he had to do 5 things and the order between 2,3,4 didn't matter. Effectively permutation of 3 so 6 possible orderings :)

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

#156

Post by dang »

lngnmn2 wrote: post #145
dang wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/?…

How does one show a flaw in a proof or a logical argument? A single contradiction or a plain error is enough. This is the core of science - a single flaw is enough to throw away the whole argument. Not just that, having the lack of basic understanding been exposed, a "scientist" should be marked as incompetent. Yes, you systematically ban people like me and have narcissistic imposters and bullshitters instead. Millio…

An internet forum isn't a math journal. You're leaving out the possibility, and the necessity, of relating to other people. Perhaps this thread would help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162386.

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

#157

Post by msravi »

None of the experiments in the article seem indicative of animals/crows understanding the concept of zero as a symbol for nothing. All animals understand the concept of "none" or "not present", and can possibly count, but they don't necessarily map a symbol to represent absence.

> 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.

This can very well happen even if there is no understanding of zero as a symbol. You're looking for nothing, and the screen with 1 dot is almost that - in terms of the existing symbol occupying the least space, closest to nothing. Not evidence of a mapping of nothing to a symbol at all.

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

#158

Post by 3opaH »

"An understanding of numbers is often viewed as a distinctly human faculty ... sets us apart from all other animals." Then it goes into animals that count. My, oh my.

Mom hen knows if a chick is missing. Can she count? Of course she can, how else would she know it. But show me a chicken that will abstract number 5. As 5 chicks, 5 pieces of grain, 5 drops of rain or 5 whatever, so that five becomes an object by itself. I thought it is common knowledge that our ability to abstract is what separates us from animals, but seeing people interested in horses and crows able to count I am starting to doubt it really is so. Animals (mammals at least) feel like us...love, anger, pleasure...they might not hate as us though. Animals can build...spiders, beavers and so on. They can think, communicate, count, have social structures, dream... It is ability of our intellects for abstraction that differs us from them.

Animals can not abstract numbers, they miss faculty for it, whatever that faculty is.

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

#159

Post by mkaic »

lngnmn2 wrote: post #146
inglor_cz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Animals cannot, in principle, use abstract concepts because it requires language and brain centers which never been evolved in these branches of evolution." [citation needed] Also, bird brains are very different from ours and knowledge of brain centers in mammals cannot be easily transferred to birds. In another universe, a bird with your attitude could claim that flight requires feathers and thus non-birds cannot i…

My friend, the whole "study" is based on false assumptions and consist of interpretation of the data in the way which confirms these assumptions. This is not even science, this is some blog posting kind of crap. Every bit of observable behaviour could be explained in terms of habitual behaviour and physical pattern matching, exactly what a trained NN will do - it will perfectly accurately separate patterns which corr…

"Every bit of observable behaviour could be explained in terms of habitual behaviour and physical pattern matching, exactly what a trained NN will do - it will perfectly accurately separate patterns which corresponds to different quantities, while posses no notion of any abstract concepts whatsoever."

I think this is interesting -- what's stopping us from making that exact assumption? For all we know, higher consciousness and "humanity" is simply an emergent property of lots and lots of rote pattern recognition stacked on top of itself. I think there's an argument to be made that there's no line between "pattern matching" and "abstract concepts" -- it's more of a smooth, emergent gradient.

Just my two cents.

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

#160

Post by uuddlrlr »

ben_w wrote: post #18
uuddlrlr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a term for it but I can't easily find it. https://neurosciencenews.com/neuron-counting-9898/ This article goes into it and mentions "numerical distance effect", which looks appropriate but not what I remember. I did learn that people who play first person shooters can usually recognize more objects at once instantly; 6 or 7 instead of a more typical 4 or 5, if I recall correctly. They used number of grapes in…

I think ‘subitizing’ is the word you’re searching for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing

Thanks!
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