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Comment by bwang29 | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or someone else thought about the 2016 movie Arrival talking about time in languages (no spoiler - I think it is a great film for NLP folks)

I remember there was a research claiming babies have innate ability to perform simply addition and subtraction (1+1=2 for example), and here is a reference to babies innate ability predicts their math skills

https://today.duke.edu/2013/10/babymath

P.S. I was also told the hardest part of researching babies is to get clearance and approval from their parents

So it seems like we as human have the basic building block for math built-in, and it takes practices and further development to create complex concepts based on those simple blocks.

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Referring to your baby ability remark, it is in fact true of most mammals and most birds. You can check out the works of Stanislas Dehaene on the subject.

That's interesting. I wonder how far back in evolution this goes and where is the common ancestor that first came with basic math abilities programmed in. And what sort of advantage it creates in the natural environment.

I'll be honest, I'm not going to look up the work.

Do those experiments show definitively that babies and animals understand that 1 + 1 = exactly 2 and nothing else? Or do they understand that 1-ish + 1-ish is more than 1 -- because this isn't that much different from what anumeric groups understand. Less and more are different from discrete arithmetic, strictly speaking.

For instance, 1 fish + 1 fish might be > 3 fish, if the first two fish we're talking about are 20 and 40 lbs respectively, and then the second set of three fish are ten pounders each. In the "real world", hunter-gatherers deal with continuous mass problems at least as often as they deal with standardized, discrete units.

Did these babies and animals understand that 1 + 1 = 2 and only 2, and not 2.5? Or 3?

The abstract idea of arithmetic is something on the scale of reasoning about an idealized circle, say, which doesn't exist in nature on a day-to-day basis.

The experiment involved putting teddy bears behind a blue screen. Two bears enter the screen and when the screen is lifted with one bear or three bears, the baby will express a lot more anxiety than seeing two bears

That just shows that they understand different or more than/less than.

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