Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454205 ("Crows found to be smarter than we think")
What I could not do (for more than 3 minutes straight, iirc) was execute those instructions in the proper manner to get Cuphead to do what I wanted.
disclaimer: I am old as hell and phased out of any serious video gaming in the era of 2D, 2 button and an 8-way joysticks
They "commute to work" each day. Crows all live in a community that they go home to each night, and then each morning they all come back to their specific areas, usually in pairs. If you're in a place where you see crows every day, it's almost certainly the same pair of crows you’re seeing each day.
Each pair has a strict territory. I don't know how it works in rural areas, but in my neighborhood the territories are demarcated by streets and cover one or two neighborhood blocks.
They definitely recognize me and follow me for the peanuts. Usually they'll follow me from one block to the next, and another pair will come up and chase them off.
They do seem to set aside their territorial fighting when there's a lot of food; a guy up the street from me throws ridiculous amounts of food onto his front lawn, like whole loaves of bread, to feed the birds (probably rats and coyotes too), and the crows all gather peacefully there every morning before heading back to their territories.
I would love to know how they determine who gets what territory. I assume it's handed down; every year there's a month or so when the adolescents come out (they're a little bit ganglier and pester their parents for food all the time rather than foraging for it themselves) so I think they're there to learn the ropes. Are there crow dynasties that have owned certain city blocks for generations? How long do they last?
Lots of interesting stuff to watch in the lives of crows.
They don’t let me get close to them, but sometimes they do fly up from behind and tap me on the back of the head to get my attention.
Also, unlike the guy up the street, I only throw out a few at a time so they have to sort of follow me to get anything.
My ultimate goal is to be able to point at someone and have the crows attack them like in Bioshock. It’ll be my thing for when society collapses. So far, however, I think our relationship is much more “let’s get some peanuts off this sucker” than “I’ll loyally follow this peanut person into battle”.
We may wipe ourselves out through war and climate destruction, but the crows will survive and evolve, and CAWrchaeologists will discover our final gift to corvidkind and - hopefully - remember us fondly.
I imagine this would be a conceptual leap for their intelligence, to understand the meaning of "pointing" and to make a connection to the target, what's being pointed at. But then again, I suppose hunting dogs have achieved it - they know what to attack - so it might be possible for smart crows too.
Now that I think about it, there are cultures where people train hawks for practical hunting purposes. So taming crows may not be too far-fetched, though it might take a few generations..
In time some might become more interested in you, depending on mood, and will come closer to you.
If you set out food and then watch them that means (in crow) that you are a hunter, and a lousy one, and you're trying to hunt them.
Toss out some food and "forget" it and they'll think you're such a successful hunter that you don't even need to every scrap. Someone worth knowing.
In the old days, crows would go on the hunt with us and fly over hidden game in the bush dipping a wing in a certain way to let you know where it is, then you share the meat with them. They still remember even if most of us have forgotten. ;)
It definitely seemed food based. But, observing how they interact with their (lifelong?) companion, I don’t think I’m able to perceive crow emotions.
It's a very human question.
All living things are friends (except sometimes at mealtime) because we are all part of one singular organism. The separateness and individuality of multicellular organisms is a perceptual illusion.
(This sound metaphysical, and perhaps it is, but it's very literal: all cells use the same chemical language, the same bio-molecular machinery of thought. Cf. Michael Levin's lab's work. Also "wood-wide web", etc. The way I sometimes put it is "We are Solaris". but that only makes sense if you've read the book or seen the movies...)
Anyway, all animals already trust each other. When you can understand how that's true and share that trust then you can "talk" with animals. Like Dr. Doolittle or some fairy tale princess, they will come up and hang out with you.
> It's probably mostly food based priorities to them.
Yeah, but that's the same for everybody? Don't you and your friends spend a lot of time discussing food? Cooking and eating together? "Com-pan-ions" are literally those who eat bread together: "com" is community, etc. and "pan" is bread.
Live long and prosper.
Similarly, while plenty of people pan (pun intended, on multiple levels) American multiculturalism for being seemingly limited to food, it remains evident that food is a sort of universal language - a gateway to shared understanding even among those who share nothing else in common. Cuisine is a window into cultural tradition and history, and is a leading indicator of the formation of new cultures through the intersection of existing ones. To share food is to share what makes us human.
If we discover intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, I reckon this will be a key factor in whether we have any hope of ever truly understanding them and their motivations.
- - - -
Also, I clicked through your profile to your website and you mention you're a sysadmin, do you have any experience with OpenBSD?.
I sure do! It runs my web and mail servers, and on my main laptop.
(I'm starting a corporation, a little one, and I'm going to need some computers.)
I can't say whether it occurs only at certain times of the year, and I have not paid any attention to where the birds go afterwards.
https://www.scenichudson.org/viewfinder/poughkeepsies-massiv...
Some other reporting about crows in your neck of the woods:
https://www.ithaca.com/news/seeing-spots-nope-those-are-crow...
I'm no expert but it seems like the birds are identifying visual symmetry. Maybe they are remembering the mid-point of nested symmetrical symbols, and that's still interesting, but is that "understanding recursion"? Recursion is the idea of repeating an algorithm or a function calling itself. Visual symmetry is a little simpler than that.
If a crow peels an onion layer by layer that doesn't mean it understands recursion. It's doing something recursive. Understanding recursion, in my mind, involves being able to describe a recursive function or make a prediction based on understanding the function.
Doing this seems to make this more of a linear problem than a recursive problem. Place all the non-bordered symbols. Then place all the bordered symbols in reverse order of the non-bordered ones.
"In Rey’s view, the notion of “recursive processing” as a unique form of cognition is in itself flawed. Even in humans, he says, this capacity can most likely be explained simply through associative learning mechanisms..."
AFAIK, this contrasts quite markedly with Chomsky's position that recursion is central to his universal grammar.
The elephants never forget.
tldr is ancient elephants manipulating the environmemt at scale and enslaving ancient humans. Short worthwhile read with fun details to justify the narrative.
humans have a solid combination of dexterity, life span, and verbal communication. Dexterity allows for manipulation that allows intelligence to be used to maximum effect in an environment, life span allows for time to learn and share knowledge, and verbal communication allows to share knowledge effectively which allows group work and knowledge to pass through generations.
crows and elephants seem to be the most limited by lack of dexterity, crows actually try to use tools to get around the limitation. If Elephants had some octopus style multi-trunk tentacles that could be used like hands they'd be set I think
Is there a source for that? Because I think you mean knowledge there and not intelligence. I'm not aware of anything that says modern humans are any more intelligent than the oldest archaic humans (homo sapiens). Modern humans just have more accumulated technology and knowledge, something very distinct from intelligence.
We do have a term for animals that do manipulate the environment: ecosystem engineering. Which includes a variety of species, including trees. Which to that extent, it's our scale of engineering that pales in comparison.
I mean, cyanobacteria is implicated in an extinction event, and the initiation of the great oxygenation event, and the rise of complicated metabolic systems using oxygen as the terminal electron acceptor. Very cleverly (intelligently, smartly?) they evolved [by chance,] a metabolic niche that was totally vacant which coincidentally could also positively amplify for some extraordinarily long period.
I've always thought that recursion, specifically the ability to apply abstraction to itself, was a unique human trait. We don't just abstract one level, we keep going - building tools that help us build tools, building social structures that facilitate the production of these meta-tools, etc.
So while we see other animals using tools that they find in their environment, I don't know of any evidence that they recurse on that, i.e. they always use tools for their primary purpose but never engage in systematic production of tools, or tools that make other tools. But given this article, maybe it's not mental capacity or linguistic recursion that limits tool making but something more mechanical like simply dexterity?
That's a tool to make a tool, and I bet there are other cases.
In fact, I recall a video of a monkey, using a sharpened stone, to break the window of its habitat. To sharpen the stone, it used something else (the video did not say anything other than the monkey sharpened the stone).
So that is another case.
And parents share their cache with their young, naturally. And some animals have a larger definition of "family", than just young. Some have communal concepts.
So I wonder, how close is the next step?
The behaviour is there.
I bet if a tool was rare, or hard to find, they would cache it. And that would leave the door open for communal caching.
But my point is, animals "get" caching. Frankly, human caching behaviour must be instinctual to some degree.
I wonder.
A few things are required to have it even make sense. Take growing food. It requires a way to keep other animals at bay, otherwise, your work is all lost.
But I think, it also requires the ability to clear land.
Well anyhow. Enough rambling.
> Two of the three monkeys in the experiment generated recursive sequences more often than nonrecursive sequences ...
I'm no academic but aren't those extremely small sample sizes to make any reasonable deductions from? This looks to be even addressed in one of the papers cited...
> While a sample size of two is not enough to infer that any crow in the population may generate center-embedded recursive sequences, we present a "proof of existence" showing that this cognitive capacity is, in principle, within the reach of carrion crows.[0]
Three pairs of brackets still seems like setting the bar very low... But even if they got great results with 10 pairs of brackets, wouldn't that be more easily explained by "understanding symmetry" rather than "understanding recursion"?
But then, I'm not sure that many humans would figure that out.
They definitively have ways of telling each other things. Just how they do it and what the limits of it are, I guess we don't know.
What I'd like to see is trying these tasks on a flock, rather than individual birds.
Feathers on the beak are quite far out, the shape of the head isn’t as “streamlined” and the top beak is more curved and longer. Or am I mistaken here?
[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-scarlett-howard-learns-f...
def caw():
print(“Crow on the tower of Hanoi say…”)
caw()
caw()