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Comment by dtsykunov | Hacker News Reader

> Magawa retired from bomb sniffing in June 2021 owing to his old age, as is standard for APOPO's HeroRATs.

> He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts".

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa

End to life worthy of being envied.

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I love that Magawa's wikipedia article is structured just like a human: Early Life, Career, Retirement and Death.

A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.

Just missing the "controversies" and "personal life" sections!

"Alleged embezzlement of soft fruit"

Ah, RatKablooey. Yeah, that’s the nickname they gave the old bomb-sniffing rat. Guy was a legend… or at least, that’s what the reports said. His “bomb count” was so high, even the military started double-checking the math when his stats became too explosive for the spreadsheet. Rumor has it that half the “bombs he found” were just suspiciously shaped cheese wrappers. Retired with a medal, a tiny cape, and a lifetime supply of peanuts. Still shows up at reunions, mostly to argue about the “official count,” and reminisce with his old field commander, Agent Cody Banks.

8 years is an extraordinarily long lifespan for a rat, isn’t it? And he got a lot done!!

Apparently it's about as expected for a southern giant pouched rat. But he was indeed a particularly good one!

They are not the same species than rats and mice longers

How does one rat mentor another?

My guess, first they send them links to confluence wiki.

All deprecated pages with outdated info of course. But the comments have links to Slack threads about the incorrect info.

“Feel free to update the wiki to correct anything you find that’s outdated”

Rats are intelligent social mammals. They teach by actions. Imagine training a dog. You have two dogs, one trained and one not. You say "sit" and the trained dog sits and you give it a treat. The non-trained dog will quickly pick up on that.

You can teach a kid to change a tire without saying a word. It’s the same thing. Rats are very smart and very social. Rats that were good at teaching Rathood to their little ones had more that survived.

Put food in a maze and I’m sure rats would teach other rats how to get it. I expect this is similar.

Our dog learned to find tennis balls by smell off a dog that was good at it. This was after me one walk with this dog.

Every trip to the park got us a few.

Then he ate one and have himself a bowel obstruction and me a great enthusiasm for pet insurance.

RatGPT

Human in the loop reinforcement learning

More specifically, fruit in the loop reinforcement learning.

imitation learning is widespread among animals including many nonhuman species

When I was young I saw a rat mentor 4 turtles!

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