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Comment by rtkwe | Hacker News Reader

There was a fringe-y program in WW2 run by Skinner to try to train pigeons to act as primitive guidance computers for glide bombs. It only got minor funding and AFAIK was never tested with actual birds in actual bombs but they were able to train the birds and it seems like it could have worked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

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Let me trump that with the bat (fire)bomb!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

Also, trojan rats:

> During WWII, British Special Forces considered stuffing dead rats with explosives and dispersing them over Germany. They hoped that the Germans would gather the rats and dispose of them in industrial furnaces, producing tremendous explosions that would cause catastrophic boiler failures.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/oct/27/richardnortontayl...

Which inadvertently proved it's own effectiveness when some of the buildings at the base being used for testing were burnt down because some bats flew outside the intended test range and roosted in random buildings. Pretty grizzly story and I'm glad it didn't go to wide spread adoption but that part has always been hilarious to me.

Fun fact, this is the same Skinner that eventually wrote the book on modern autism treatment, aka Applied Behavior Analysis.

FYI ABA, even modified for modern times, is still heavily criticised in most autism circles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_behavior_analysis#Crit...

Yeah, I've heard that ABA is for the parents, not for the children with autism.

I've always figured the birds would probably lose focus once in freefall. They'd surely know they were.

It was for glide bombs which don't free fall. They're, as the name implies, gliders so fly further from the release point and don't fall ballistically. No idea if they got as far as actually strapping the guidance device onto an actual bomb though to see if they would work under stress.

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