Silly thought: if bigger NN's are better, shouldn't more neurons be better? Why aren't elephants smarter than us, despite having more neurons?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
An analogy: what's the difference between a supercomputer, and the same number of CPUs scattered across a few datacenters? It's that in a supercomputer, those CPUs are packed physically as close as possible with expensive interconnects to allow them to communicate as fast as possible. (For many applications, the supercomputer will finish long before the spread out nodes ever finish communicating and idling.) But you need to improve both or else your new super-fast CPUs will spend all their time waiting on Infiniband to chug through, or your fancy new Infiniband will be underutilized and you should've bought more CPUs.
Plenty of animals recognise themselves in the mirror, for instance.
That said even ants pass the test, i.e. they were recently(2015) tested.
But the whole thing can be characterized as: "Let me make up a random test, according to my personal opinion of what defines cognition and then see if a random animal I choose passes it".
Every couple of years we have requests of slews of psychology papers requested to be invalidated because they're unreproducible.
But of course! How do we know that humans are, indeed, the smartest? What if we've been failing every single test that mice have been throwing at us over the past millennia, and they wonder why we are so dumb?
(This is a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in case you're wondering if I've gone mad. Not that one wouldn't presuppose the other :)
Dogs pass the scent-based mirror test for example, their eyes are just simply not the primary way of interacting with the world.
Dolphins and elephants are famous examples, most primates as well. Even many birds show levels of self awareness and theory of mind (they know the difference between what they know and what others know)
This means birds have to keep track of who can and can't see them cheat, who knows and who doesn't. There's even evidence that they rat each other out (2nd degree info) if they think there's a reward to be had. All of this requires immense intelligence, which happens to prove useful in other contexts.
There's also a bird species who does this with food caches. Easier to steal from others than to build their own so a plethora of deceptive tactics developed to ensure others can't see where you're storing those delicious nuts. Complete with fake caches, lying, and espionage.
[1] I learned about it in The Genius of Birds
https://www.labroots.com/trending/plants-and-animals/15629/s...
This is exactly the question the field is about, and I find it fascinating to read about
Most cats and dogs I've seen correctly recognise themselves in the mirror after the novelty of seeing one for the first time wears off.
Case in point: https://openai.com/blog/block-sparse-gpu-kernels/
Bigger animals may require more neurons to handle moving larger and/or more complicated muscle groups.
Interesting related point there is the encephalization quotient which is related to the predicted ratio of brain size to body mass. On the wikipedia page [0] they list the EQ for various animals. Humans are the highest but dolphins and ravens are not far behind.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-b...
> “If something happens very slowly over quite some time, maybe over decades, the different parts of the brain take up functions that would normally be done by the part that is pushed to the side,” adds Muenke, who was not involved in the case.
Exactly. Most of the newer research on this topic suggests that it's neural connection complexity, and specifically frontal lobe volume, rather than overall brain size that determines intelligence or brain power.
https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/ask-neuroscientist-do...
>Luckily, there is much more to a brain when you look at it under a microscope, and most neuroscientists now believe that the complexity of cellular and molecular organization of neural connections, or synapses, is what truly determines a brain’s computational capacity. This view is supported by findings that intelligence is more correlated with frontal lobe volume and volume of gray matter, which is dense in neural cell bodies and synapses, than sheer brain size. Other research comparing proteins at synapses between different species suggests that what makes up synapses at the molecular level has had a huge impact on intelligence throughout evolutionary history. So, although having a big brain is somewhat predictive of having big smarts, intelligence probably depends much more on how efficiently different parts of your brain communicate with each other.
This thread has links to a copy, plus a bunch of related studies in humans and animals. https://twitter.com/markdhumphries/status/107105276276554137...
The whole nail part is basically a single sentence in the paper.
For example, decorticate rats are unable to escape narrow alleyways because they can not turn around due to their tonsils touching the walls and them being unable to ignore that feeling.
Another example is that they take a few seconds vs (!) 5 minutes to groom themselves on average.
FWIW, the nail thing is a bit of a neuroscience meme. I heard--and stole--this quip from multiple people in several different situations. There's also a really striking figure in that chapter (p. 7 or 8).
No argument that the rats' behaviors are affected. I suppose whether you find the slowness of their grooming expected (because of brain damage) or impressive (because it happens at all) is a matter of taste. Glass^W Skull half-empty or half-full, if you will.
They are not slow, they just stop grooming themselves well enough.
I don't think he released them into the wild (would be a tough experiment with 80s tech), but there are a bunch of studies of their interactions with conspecifics. They can mate[0], though less successfully than controls, but playfight a bit better than they do[1].
[0] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1983-29790-001 [1] https://doi.org/10.1159/000114124
OTOH, a three-layer network is a universal function approximator and RNNs are universal dynamical systems approximators, so they are sort of trivially equivalent.
I think we read too much into the complexity of biological neurons. Remember they need to do much more than compute signals. They need to self assemble, self replicate and pass through various stages of growth. They need to function for 80-100 years. Many of those neurons and synapses exist only for redundancy and other biological constraints.
A digital neuron doesn't care about its physical substrate and can be millions of times faster. They can be copied identically for no cost and cheaply fine-tuned for new tasks. Their architecture and data can evolve much faster than ours, and the physical implementation can remain the same during this process.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elephants-never-f...
If so, then your memory is unusually good. I know that this is well beyond my capabilities. Nor do I have the ability to visit a place that I lived 40 years earlier and find my way around.
I recently found myself in a hotel that I stayed in as a 7-8 year old in the 80s for a particularly memorable vacation with my extended family. It was funny that I still remembered the I unusual aspects of the layout and could spot many of the changes that had been made over the years.
But if you asked me to describe someone I met for a few days in a business context in 2020, I’d have a hard time remembering detail.
There also, AFAIK, isn’t evidence they remember _all_ other elephants they’ve shared time with for at least few weeks (I certainly do not rule that out, either, given the low number they likely will meet in their life)
Yeah? Maybe not if they were a kid 20 years ago or their appearance had otherwise changed significantly, but otherwise I don't see why not.
It's like how just getting a bigger faster computer can help with your problem, but its less powerful than a new more efficient algorithm on the same computer.
Also, you're working under the assumption that they are equivalent between mammals which as far as we can tell it's not the case (https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/why-are-human-neur...).
So my guess is that the comparison is much more complex than just number of neurons.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size#:~:text=In%20men%20....
We have very good problem solving ability of course, but a superpowered ability to ask others how they solved the problem. If we wanted to somehow define a kind of 'brain horsepower' type intelligence, it seems to me that the former is closer to it than the latter, and it doesn't seem obvious to me that humans would necessarily take the top spot. Or that there's a reasonable/ethical way to test it -- let's take a human, elephant, crow, and dolphin, raise them in total isolation from the any community to get a measure of their untrained intelligence... we might get some interesting results on intelligence, but mostly we will learn something about ballistics as some ethics review board launches us unto the Sun.
I suspect the question really doesn't make sense if that is true.
We just have this bias/mind projection fallacy that intelligence is a general physical property of the brain that can be measured. I just suspect this is not true.
Like athletic ability doesn't generalize well. Of course, someone not athletic at all is never going to be a great athlete in anything but it makes no sense to compare Lance Armstrong to Patrick Mahomes in some general athletic context. Putting a number on a general athletic ability index between the two would just be total nonsense.
I imagine it's 100% dependent on the cardinal rule of neural networks:
"Choice of training data is 10 times more important than the actual model."
What we have over elephants are opposable thumbs, excellent eyes, and vocal cords. And crucially, we're generally speaking pretty slow, weak and useless.
Except for our elaborate methods of I/O.
Our entire success is based on a feedback loop. "If human uses their IO this way, human will get more food."
Thus, we become ever more sophisticated at this. We are nothing if not a vehicle for using our high dexterity, low gross force, opposable thumbs in inventive ways to get food.
Plus, we have a biological imperative to pass these techniques on as knowledge.
A baby elephant can probably feed itself by eating green stuff at 1 year old (I know nothing about elephants).
A human child realistically cannot independently scrounge up enough solid food to sustain themselves, until they're what, twelve? Twenty-two? Certainly no younger than eight.
We have, almost certainly, the most useless progeny in the animal kingdom.
Hence we invest an enormous amount of time and energy in education to make them able to feed themselves.
So the tl;dr is
1) Human brains are pretty similar to the animal kingdom's. 2) Human opposable thumbs are world class. Pretty close to as good as it gets. Sight is also top notch, many animals have useless eyeballs. 3) Most human food is obtained by doing creative things with thumbs. This is very complex, and takes a lot of practice. 4) Human birth the most useless children in the entire animal kingdom. These children take decades to fully grow, hence we invest an enormous amount of time educating them in opposable thumbs. 5) Over time our education system gets better and better, and our list of clever things we can do with opposable thumbs get longer and longer.
Essentially what we have over the other animals isn't neurons.
What we have over the other animals is a data collection/cleaning/utilization cycle.
Elephants have bodies built like a tank (and used as such by Hannibal), but humans have better I/O ports.
{reading, writing, listening, speaking, singing, typing, doing, going}
Without opposable thumbs, an elephant is probably quite envious of human writing & typing. Let's use the privilege wisely to encourage one another, teach and learn from each other, from Donald Tusk, and give a helping hand.
I did, and still do, believe this to be true. Would love to befriend a bird