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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

#41

Post by jakear »

Article seems to resolutely believe that the entities 600MM+ years ago could not understand numbers and thus counting emerged recently many times over in parallel across a variety of species [1], but provides nothing to back up this claim ([2] is not supported beyond “an expert said).

This is an odd claim —- based on the neural network experiment (which showed that gradient descent applied to object detection problems naturally results in the development of “counting” signals), it seems much more likely that for as long as beings have been interacting with their surroundings they’ve been able to count, and any modern slight differences in counting infrastructure are simply a divergence of the original counting machinery rather than the same thing being invented over and over by evolution in many different ways, but only recently (for some reason..?)

> The fact that those three species are from diverse taxonomic groups — primates, insects and birds — suggests that certain numerical abilities have evolved over and over again throughout the animal kingdom.

> Their last common ancestor “was [barely] able to perceive anything,” Avarguès-Weber said, much less count.

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

#42

Post by taeric »

caddemon wrote: post #38
taeric wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, I went fast on my post. My point was to tighten your numbers to strengthen your point. As it is, I feel lied to when folks say that it takes kids 4 or more years to get language.

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.

I didn't say it makes it a strong point. But deceitful numbers greatly weaken it.

That is, with how off the idea that 4 year old can't take language is, I didn't make it to the argument. And I am sympathetic to the idea that animals can pick up on language.

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

#44

Post by lhorie »

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 outside the scope of their adaptations.

Still, crafty little bastards they are indeed.

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

#45

Post by Finnucane »

the-dude wrote: post #19

I have always assumed one of our cats could count. Our cats got the desert plates at the end of our meal. One of the cats left when he had them all, while other cats kept waiting ( or begging ). Sometimes they needed to be shown there were none left. But that one cat, no matter how many people were at the table, always seemed to know when he had them all.

If I don't give my cats the usual number of treats, they look at me like they know they're being cheated. I never thought they could count, but I figured they have a sense of relative quantity ('enough', 'more', 'less' and so on).

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

#46

Post by martincmartin »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #36
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…

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.

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

#47

Post by jaclaz »

Finnucane wrote: post #45
the-dude wrote: post #19

I have always assumed one of our cats could count. Our cats got the desert plates at the end of our meal. One of the cats left when he had them all, while other cats kept waiting ( or begging ). Sometimes they needed to be shown there were none left. But that one cat, no matter how many people were at the table, always seemed to know when he had them all.

If I don't give my cats the usual number of treats, they look at me like they know they're being cheated. I never thought they could count, but I figured they have a sense of relative quantity ('enough', 'more', 'less' and so on).

It depends on cats, I have had a few in the past and currently have one that always tries to convince me when I get home that for some reasons my wife forgot to feed her.

Clearly she has clear the negative concept of "not enough".

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

#48

Post by belter »

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…

This one impressed me so much, I never looked at Crows again the same way:

"Are Crows the Ultimate Problem Solvers?"

https://youtu.be/cbSu2PXOTOc

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

#49

Post by UI_at_80x24 »

agumonkey wrote: post #26
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…

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.

To expand on your mention of crows.

Not only do crows learn to recognize PEOPLE by their FACES, they teach their offspring to avoid/mistrust those same people. Those offspring teach their offspring. So the "grandchild" of the original bird learns to avoid a specific person. *(Note the documentary I watched with this revelation didn't follow any further generations. We don't know how many generations are taught this lesson.)

Think about that for a minute. I don't recognize the people that live 2 houses away from me, these birds teach their young that SPECIFIC humans are dangerous.

This isn't the study I watched, but it's close. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/grudge-holding...

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

#50

Post by lhorie »

Gravey wrote: post #39
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…

I once watched several seagulls peck at a closed clamshell container containing pizza crusts for over half an hour. Clearly there is an upper bound to their intelligence.

It's been reported that younger gulls initially try to open clams (the animal clams, not plastic containers) by pecking. I believe they learn the dropping-from-a-height tactic from observation, and suspect that the pecking at a plastic container is merely due to them not having seen it being open by a gull before. Also, worth considering that in their natural habitat, the only transparent things around (jellyfish) are squishy and stingy.
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