Crows found to be smarter than we think
wsj.com
wsj.com
>she lost a lens cap in a nearby alley while photographing a bald eagle as it circled over the neighbourhood.
She didn't even have to look for it. It was sitting on the edge of the birdbath.
Had the crows returned it? Lisa logged on to her computer and pulled up their bird-cam. There was the crow she suspected. "You can see it bringing it into the yard. Walks it to the birdbath and actually spends time rinsing this lens cap."
Also underrated: scrub jays.
Bengt Heinrich, writing in "Mind of the Raven", found their limit by tying bits of meat to strings hanging where they could reach the string. Some, not all, would grab the string with their beak and tuck it under one foot, and keep drawing it up until they got the meat. But none ever figured it out if the string was hung over a branch so they had to pull down to bring the prize up.
I had a dispute with a pigeon that was finding my car in my employer’s multi-floor garage and it would defecate on my right mirror, every single day. I tried parking in different spots, different floors, no luck.
I had to use my partner’s car for a couple of months to end this.
Hopefully the pigeon is not reading this.
Presumably one significantly less vindictive.
https://www.bioradiations.com/trained-pigeons-read-mammogram...
I had this funny image of crowns writing Lisp using rainbow-delimiters.
I’ll show myself out.
Arrogance seems like the major component but it binds really well with ignorance. As a kid, it never occurred to me that certain creatures appear dumb because they have trouble navigating our world. Well, no shit. Almost nothing is built to help anyone but us. Animals do not have the same vision or hearing as us. Doesn't make them stupid.
To be fair the article doesn't claim anything like that. We already knew that crows are smart, but it turns out they are smarter than we thought.
Other animals are definitely smart in some ways…and probably in ways we don’t understand…but it’s not an overstatement or arrogant to say that we are in a class of our own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fC9uNyhWo
But still, crows are pretty cool.
>After a few days, the crows learned to peck correct sequences using bracket combinations they hadn’t encountered before at rates significantly higher than chance, Dr. Liao said. They pecked correct patterns at around the same rate as U.S. children and outperformed monkeys from the 2020 study, she said.
That was the study
>“Our research suggests that recursion isn’t the sole difference between human and animal cognitive ability.”
I don't think anyone seriously thought this
>Dr. Chomsky said he wasn’t convinced the crow study or earlier work including Dr. Ferrigno’s monkey study demonstrated recursion. He said he believes the ability is innate, not learned.
>Rules people use to understand grammar and math go far beyond a crow’s recall of a few sequential patterns, Dr. Chomsky said. “It’s easy to show that humans have the rule in their heads,” he said. “There’s no evidence that corvids have the rule.”
Not sure if this is what he means but I also believe the crow's recursion here may not be the same as that of a human. It is possible that the crows are doing the recursion in software, so to speak, and this software is compiled into the crows brain differently from the human, which calls the recursion instruction directly, so to speak. Then the crow might not scale to more complex tasks. This said, I'm sure now that they have found this ability of the crow more complex studies will be held to understand the nature and extent of the crow's ability. It has opened a new area of investigation.
Convergent evolution is a thing in nature, some structures evolved independently multiple times. Humans and octopuses have very similar eyes, which emerged from different structures.
I wouldn't be surprised if corvids developed human-like intelligence traits independently.
That he believes in it is irrelevant. His linguistics do not require the feature to be absent in animals, only that humans have it.
Chomsky is famous for having some extremely insightful ideas that are important in several areas; and also for holding a lot of extremely stupid ones that are ridiculed by several areas. We don't throw the first set away because of the second.
It’s nice he has a lot of energy for a 93 year old but I’m not sure WSJ writers really need to ask him for comment on everything. You kind of already know what he’s going to say.
I have this vision that in a year's time we'll walk into Twitter's HQ to find it being staffed by crows pecking at keyboards and spitting out Typescript.
They are fascinating. Gaining their trust and "interacting" with them has been very meditative.
This level of "interaction" took some patience and some time. But it has been worth it.
It's interesting to think about. For the first few times nothing much seemed to happen. So you never really know if the crows are doing stuff by blind luck, or they've twigged that there's a connection between me and biscuits.
I think they're catching on, though. A couple of days ago I approached the post, and the crow dispersed. I put down a biscuit, and I reckon the crows saw what I was doing. I carried on my walk. I had to get some way away, and then a crow went to the post and nabbed the biscuit. I think it bought a friend.
So I reckon that the crows now know what the system is.
One day I shall be King Of The Crows.
Guess I'm not as smart as one...
C. americana is resistant to juglone, btw.
List from a local nursery on resistant plants:
https://www.plantsmen.com/_files/ugd/e44642_67a1c38658fe4e9e...
I'd be much more shocked by a study that provided any sort of evidence that animals cannot understand recursion, but that would probably be more difficult to draw a strong conclusion about.
- Rick Sanchez
I remember when it clicked for me and I wrote a function that conditionally called itself, I had this distinct sense that I already understood this concept perfectly well. I was just struggling to understand it in the way a specific programming language needed me to.
The idea of recursion is very simple, but can be complicated by the rules and syntaxes of their abstractions.
Apologies if this wasn’t your experience and I’m incorrectly assuming it must be similar for other people. I’m really not sure if it is or not.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq3356 ("Recursive sequence generation in crows")
You can read up on a chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky to see one of the more infamous failures in this area (and quite a sad story of animal mistreatment). It also illustrates the dangers of wanting to believe, or of excessive anthropomorphizing - as initially the experiments were deemed successful, until more dispassionate analysis showed that the chimp's signing was far more random and determined than presented.
In the dim and distant past I worked as a programmer at a company that bought an old country estate for one of its offices. As part of the estate there were about a dozen peacocks. There were none left when I joined though. My manager explained that they were completely dumb and kept get run over.
Full text available here: https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia...
The first sentence is true. The second is a meaningless non sequitur.
You could equally claim that bird bones must be remarkably efficient for their size. That is true, but only in terms of mass used to prevent a given amount of bird from degenerating into a puddle. In terms of physical robustness, which is a primary purpose of all bones including bird bones, bird bones are straightforwardly worse than normal bones.
You can't just "be efficient". You have to be efficient in terms of a metric. And optimization for weight does not imply that you're efficient in terms of computational power, whether that be computation produced per unit of sugar consumed, computational capacity per unit of structural mass[1], or any other computation-related metric.
[1] "But it's optimized for weight!" Yes, but that just means it uses (ideally) the minimum weight necessary to support however much computation it wants to do. Using more of a denser material might produce much higher capacity-per-gram figures, but it would also weigh more.
And an important part of optimizing for weight is to reduce the needs that your massy infrastructure must satisfy; by this line of reasoning, you would expect birds to be exceptionally stupid, not smart.
> You have to be efficient in terms of a metric
Since the topic here is intelligence, that is the metric.
What kind of intelligence efficiency do you want? Most efficient use of time? Glucose? Volume? Mass? Highest utilization rate? Are we looking at computational capacity? Computational quality? Economy in computational demands?
> Bird bones are shaped optimally to put the bone where the most stress is.
That is true, but it doesn't distinguish bird bones from the bones of any other species. However, bird bones are uniquely bad at suffering that stress.
> I recall reading once that they were hollow.
Also true. They also have very low density in what you might consider the non-hollow parts. That's why they function so poorly for maintaining physical integrity.
Sometimes two goals are in conflict. Birds need bones to maintain their physical integrity, but in order to fly, they have trouble supporting bones. The fact that their bones are subject to more constraints than those of other vertebrates doesn't mean that they magically have better bones than other vertebrates do. It means they have worse bones, because the quality of their bones had to be subordinated to their unique need to fly.