Hacker News Reader

Comment by steve_gh | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting, because it seem to be a start at solving the Fulmar Problem.

A fulmar is a cliff nesting sea bird (with a defensive habit of noxious projectile vomiting). They spend their early life on a ledge, but one day they have to start flying. And if you are a fulmar you have a very limited time to learn to fly.

So the question is, how does a baby fulmar learn to fly in 10s!

It would be interesting to know how much computing power is required for training (compared to the power reqùred to run the controlling NN).

My own view is that the network architecture is important, so fulmar brains have evolved with a neural architecture that enables extremely quick learning to stable flight.

I played around with a few ideas on using GAs to evolve NN architectures for rapid learning during my PhD 25 years ago, but ended up going in another direction.

View on HN

What's the problem? It's inherent to the hardware. We don't have to learn how to breathe. Animals don't have to learn to walk. It's the same thing. Are you suggesting that behavior can't be hardwired? I don't think anyone believes that.

What am I missing? Genuinely confused.

Edit: After googling, I can't find any "Fulmar problem". This is just basic evolution 101.

> Animals don't have to learn to walk.

Have you seen baby deer?

Yet without any external inputs, the deer will eventually learn to walk by itself, suggesting some kind of internal hardwiring.

I guess I don’t understand what you mean “with no external inputs”. It’s in the physical world, with gravity. Isn’t that an external input? Driving the feedback loop of “I fall on my face if I do it wrong”?

I think it's more a "if I fall I'm gonna get eaten/injured and not be able to reproduce" kind of thing

That falling on the face is irrelevant, as it's just a byproduct of some pre-determined programming that is not learned. Surely if this was a learned experience the deer after failing on its face would quickly learn it's best to not try and stand up. Why am I standing when I just keep hitting my face into the ground? The reality is the drive programmed into the brain is to stand up at all costs, even if that means landing flat on your face once in a while.

I guess in my mental model, the deer continues to try and stand because it wants to things like food and water, and it sees other deer standing and walking around. Psychologists do talk about a state of "learned helplessness" if a living creature fails too often.

I don’t know anything about the state of research here, this is just what I always assumed. I’m sure there are built in drives and reflexes, etc. It seems perfectly reasonable that they could be "higher level" than the ones I assumed (food, water)

Yeah but deer are legitimately bad at walking.

Yeah, they "learn" to walk pretty quickly. Far too fast for it to be purely learning.

Animals that are ready to go shortly after birth are called precocial. This includes chickens and most of the equines.

If you've ever seen a newborn foal stand up for the first time, it's clear that's a built-in behavior. Standing up on those long spindly legs usually works the first time. So does walking, and within hours, running.

Lying down, however, is not built-in. I've seen a foal try to get back down on the ground, which is clearly trial and error, often ending in a fall. There's no evolutionary pressure to have that work right the first time.

A baby deer is standing within minutes of being born and walking later that day. I don’t think humans are in any position to insult a baby deer’s ability to walk. A human takes about a year and is also terrible at it when starting out.

Shouldn't humans have far longer gestation periods (due to it being born 'early' as it otherwise would not fit though the birth canal) and maybe that's the issue at fault?

It seems there are two different classifications for species when it comes to how mobile they are near birth and how much care the newborns need.

Deer are precocial, while humans are altricial.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precociality_and_altricialit...

"Are you suggesting that behavior can't be hardwired?"

Like others mentioned, there is a difference between species who can learn it more easily and those who learn slower.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precociality_and_altricialit...

But some sort of learning (or callibration) is always required, because no individual is the same, so you cannot have it prehardwired everything. The basic movement of the muscles to fly, yes, but the exact movement and coordination needed to fly, needs the information of the specific mass and lengths of the wings etc. which are going to be different.

In short, "the hardware" is organic and not standartized.

A paper airplane can learn to fly on a breeze in being folded. I posit that a fulmar is closer to a paper airplane than to a drone.

If that were true lots of young fulmars would drown in the sea at the bottom of a cliff when they fledge. That doesn't happen. They fly, with control, and enough understanding to land safely on water.

Human babies are born knowing how to swim, I suppose they learn that in 3 seconds as well? Both of these are far more likely to just be genetic memory. If you can encode how to fold proteins to make wings, then packaging a control algorithm along is completely trivial in comparison.

It's a false believe. Throw a baby in water and he won't survive.

Are you not aware of the throwing babies in pools fad that comes and goes in popularity? They do better than you'd think.

Infants do have a "diving reflex" but that is very different from knowing how to swim. If you throw a baby in a pool, the baby will drown and die.

There are undoubtedly similar reflexes that assist fulmars in learning to fly quickly, but that doesn't mean that rapid learning isn't also required.

On a very special episode of MythBusters…

The swimming isn’t what you think. It’s also called the diving reflex for good reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_swimming#/media/File:Ba...

As a baby I fell into a pool and needed to be rescued. I didn’t inhale water, but as generally happens I very much did just sank to the bottom. Babies can be taught to float at around 5 months, but it’s not reflexive.

I mean they kind of have to when they're part of a species that's curious enough that they'll hear 'babies can swim' and throw babies in a pool en masse to see if it is be true.

I'll test that out and get back to you /s

I can't say what the extent of those swimming reflexes really is, but water births are not unheard of. Besides there's literally countless examples of this sort of thing, most prey animals can walk or even run mere moments after being born, cetaceans and ram ventilator sharks all know how to swim immediately or they would literally drown, insects can fly as soon as they hatch, etc.

All good examples, but humans are relatively underdeveloped at birth compared to most mammals due to the necessity of limiting skull size to allow an easier birth. An infant cannot lift its own head or locomote for several months, for instance. Just like marsupials finish up outside the womb in a pouch, we have own external phase.

The paper plane has a lot less extending the wings and then flapping them to learn to avoid death.

I would imagine it activates some motor neuron ganglia that is somehow connected to a flap reflexive action, and then sometime afterwards fine motor control is gained by practice; akin to plantarflexor muscles in a walking stride.

How baby deer learns to walk in a few hours after birth? It needs to control four limbs to keep balance. Animals tend to have some forms of behavior that they learn in a few tries or even from the very first try. But at the same time they may be very bad at learning other kinds of behavior that seem no more difficult for us.

Homo Sapience is special in this regard with almost all their firmware broken. Homo Sapience needs to learn hard how to focus their eyes or to hold head or to walk and even how to crawl. Seems like our abilities to learn are linked with brokenness of our innate software, probably it is a double headed causal arrow: our software is broken because we could overcome it with our general abilities to learn, and our general abilities to learn evolved because without them and without working genetic programs for specific forms of behavior we would be doomed.

I can't help but think that autism is the next step at breaking innate software and developing more robust general learning mechanisms.

I remember something like humans are born earlier underdeveloped compared to other mammals because are pelvis is smaller to allow standing up. As a side effect some brain development happens after birth.

This allows for more social/environmental impact on development than pure genetics, and we have developed better language and understanding.

There are no "because", just speculation.

There is no physical limit why we can't have both. .. and we don't have datapoints for time to evolve for every trails.

I hate it when biologists talked as if they knew it all

Practically speaking humans are born relatively underdeveloped and spend much of their first year catching up to where other animals start. If we spent more time baking we would have trouble getting out of the birth canal because we have such large heads (we already have enough trouble as is). It's easy to conjecture how that may have come to be. Marsupials are an interesting comparison with similar but different traits.

For what it's worth there are also countless animals which start out very helpless, including many birds which are wholly incapable of flight for some time, and for which learning is not always an easy process. The bird in question is closer to an exception than a rule.

> if we spent more time baking we would have trouble getting out of the birth canal because we have such large heads

Human birth seems strangely difficult. If you’ve never witnessed a live human birth it’s very traumatic with lots and lots of things that can/do go wrong. I can’t think of another mammal that struggles as hard as humans do during birth. It makes me wonder how humans have survived as long as we have.

Well, historically, we didn't. Infant mortality is continuously at record lows. Modern medicine means that we can handle many things that can/do go wrong.

We're effectively propagating that difficulty and it compounds generationally (imagine your bloodline has unusually large heads...) but we're smart enough to circumvent fate and the net result would appear to be positive.

Much of what humans do approaches the limit of cutting off the nose to spite the face. Is life better than it has ever been, practically speaking, everywhere? With some exception granted to the last couple of years, yes, and even without, probably yes.

I find it rather disturbing to think about. Diversification is really our only long term hope (hedging so to speak) and in many ways we're constantly moving away from that. If we were suddenly space faring colonizers, or if there were another dark age, then that would cease to be true, for better or for worse.

Our heads are big to fit our brain. Our pelvis is shaped and structured for upright gait, and so not big. The struggle is indirectly due to the traits that drive or success.

Are our heads actually unusually big, for a mammal scaled to our size? I've often wondered about this.

Especially for a mammal with front-facing eyes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain–body_mass_ratio

It's interesting to note our peers in this regard. Mice have a two-piece pelvis, and dolphins have no pelvis at all.

OMG of course there's a wikipedia page for it!

Thank you :-)

"If you’ve never witnessed a live human birth it’s very traumatic with lots and lots of things that can/do go wrong."

I think that is a specific cultural view, to assume it is traumatic. I certainly did not think so.

And that human birth is hard, has the evolutionary roots in going bipedal and walking upright as far as I know. Being upright blocks the pelvis, being down, opens it. Apes who go 4 feet, do not struggle (so hard).

> I certainly did not think so.

Were you the one giving birth?

No, but it was implied, witnessing alone is traumatic. (And I did witnessed other becoming fathers, who couldn't handle it and required medical attention themself)

And certainly quite some women experience it as traumatic, but not all of them.

I don't think it was necessarily implied, actually. Depends how you parse that sentence. For example it goes on to say "and lots of things can go wrong". But that is very much about the birth, not the observation.

Either way, I am not sure that watching a couple of births qualifies anyone to say whether birth being "traumatic" is a question of cultural assumption :-)

"Either way, I am not sure that watching a couple of births qualifies anyone to say whether birth being "traumatic" is a question of cultural assumption"

No, but talking with women who say convincingly, they did not perceive it as traumatic is enough for me to conclude that births are not traumatic by itself. They can be, but I have the suspicion, that is culturally enforced, but that seems to change slowly.

> The bird in question is closer to an exception than a rule.

It doesn't flop out of the nest immediately after leaving the egg, though, right? This is more like a 3 year old child learning to ride a bike on the first go (still impressive) than a newborn infant doing so.

I don’t think firmware is broken. Baby deer also doesn’t have to learn anything - it is just starting up muscles that is hardware problem. The same with baby humans you have to get your hardware so muscles prepared to get rest of the body up.

Of course there is that bit where control of the muscles also has to align so there is building up of neural pathways that can be also more like getting hardware wired up. Getting it wired up takes longer in humans.

Why can’t evolution build in the ability of flight and what it needs to learn in the 10 seconds is not how to fly but which way to go?

Instinct and coordinated muscle memory are two very different things. Animals can evolve to develop that muscle memory faster (i.e. see how long it takes a calf to walk versus a human infant) but it still needs time to develop and that development requires active practice.

A spider does not learn to make a web either. This is arguably more complicated than flying. And its brain is much smaller than a bird's.

A spider spinning web is an emergent behavior built up from a bunch of simpler ones like excretion, simple movement, and electrostatic hopping from point to point. A bird flying requires the coordination of a much larger number of muscles at the same time, which is much more complex from a nervous system perspective.

Spiders reproduce much faster and have a much smaller survival rate so they're well selected for that kind of instinct. Birds less so.

Excretion and simple movement from point to point, accurately describes most of my life.

I mean. I believe spiders eat lots of much smaller, flying creatures?

It can, obviously.

Well, but then the Fulmar "problem" doesn't seem like much of a problem to me. It doesn't learn. It's born with the knowledge, which was in turn "learned" (indirectly, through natural selection) by the fulmar's ancestors.

Now you've got a different problem! How are things born with knowledge? Where does that knowledge come from? Are humans?

I actually wonder how animals like sea turtles or fish know what to eat...They are not raised or taught by their parents, so is it just trial and error? What stops them from eating poisonous stuff ?

I can offer a example of bird. seem like the toxic butterfly just let birds feel terrible, so they actually learning from trying different butterflies.

Heh - that sounds like a really bad deal for the butterfly ?

warning colors work well. birds don't want to eat distasteful butterfly again. so even just looks like distasteful, butterfly still can enhance fitness.

at least this is a good deal all butterfly have same color...

Your epigenome (the sum of the external changes made to your DNA) affects your DNA with time, and some of these changes are even carried over to your offspring.

Behaviours can absolutely be learned and hardwired, given 1000s of years

As someone mentioned above, a deer is not born with random weights on its NN

How do babies know how to breathe, or drink milk? We're obviously born with some instinctual "knowledge".

I suspect birds don't start with random weights in their NN

Why does it have to be learning? Because we're currently putting all our eggs in the basket of machine learning, so we must convince ourselves that everything that intelligent animals can do is some sort of learning from data?

There is no reason to assume any of that.

Don't most animals innately know how to locomote in their environment? Fish in water, baby deer etc?

No one wants to admit that DNA holds programming because it'll mean there's a Creator.

I have raised animals apart from their kind from birth. They know instinctively how to do things that cannot be taught or learned. How can two spiders for example know how to spin a web without every learning from another being?

I don't see how genetics allowing for instinctual/"inherent" knowledge requires a creator.

Once upon a time there was a bug that had a little sticky bit on it's butt, it had a billion descendants when one of them randomly had a gene that affected it's behavior such that it, I don't know, rested on high surfaces using the sticky bit and was safer from predators or something, and then had slightly more kids than the rest. And one of those kids randomly had a gene that gave it more sticky stuff, and one of it's kids used it a little more effectively, and so on and so forth. And that probably takes somewhere from tens of thousands to a few million years.

That's not meant to be literal, but that's the story in my head, and it doesn't feel like a huge leap to get to complex behaviors like webs.

That's the story. Genetic lottery propagates and amplifies (life-)winning traits forward, but who knows.

Name an example of an advantage spontaneously manifesting outside of directed breeding by humans.

I really don't follow. Define programming in your context? Is it distinct from encoding physical structures like wings? Is it meaningful to separate physical structures and structures invoking physical behavior?

A column of rock erodes, and a piece falls. The piece did not learn to fall. It just _did_, subject to the rules that governed the process of its creation (different meaning) and its environment.

Specifically birds know how to fly or swim without being taught. Having raised birds that haven't seen or known another bird they just "do". They don't practice. It's like they are just waiting. Same with the language. They can understand like kind. When introduced to their own kind they aren't afraid but reunited.

I'd expect aerodynamic stability from wings to have a huge effect. Drones are inherently unstable. A glider is easier to figure out than a helicopter.

On the other hand, I could see a drone being easier for a computer because it behaves the same in any orientation (projectile motion + directional thrust). Unlike birds with their ears and their eyes, computers don't really have an inherent sense of direction.

Based on a lot of bird nesting videos, they most likely practice in the nest ahead of time. One doesn't have to outright fly to practice generating lift.

They don’t all appear to need this practice in order to be able to fly.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.066... is a recentish overview of existing literature and touches upon this in the section Wing flapping before flight.

It can fly in the same way a newborn foal knows how to walk and even run if it has to.

I find your analogy mentally stimulating, I bet the bird wins by a country mile though.

Any pubs in the area? GAs are a super interesting case area for this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com