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Dog Trained on 200-Word Vocabulary
An anonymous reader writes "The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany is reporting in Science Magazine today on an example of successful human to non-human communication: Rico, a collie trained on a vocabulary of 200 words. Their conclusion is that 'brain structures that support this kind of learning are not unique to humans...[Rico has a] retrieval rate comparable to the performance of three-year-old toddlers'. In case you ever wondered if your dog understands what you are saying, Rico 'can learn the names of unfamiliar toys after just one exposure to the new word-toy combination.'"
Sorry, but I've never met a dog (even an extremely smart dog) that could follow instructions like a 21-month-old child. Don't give me this BS about a dog being as smart as a 3 yr old (that's 36 months). Granted, it is possible that all the 21-month old kids I've encountered have a 170 IQ (traditional definition: mental age / chronological age), but I doubt it.
But then... isn't that precisely what humans do? React on their surroundings as dictated by their instincts? Because you, are just a bunch of instincts using memories.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
OK, be my guest. Try to engineer a dog with the properly complex vocal chords. I want to see that.
It would make sense that the dogs that could understand their masters best would be the one that would be bred and thus their genes would be passed on. So maybe it's natural selection.
The article comes as no big surprise to anyone who has lived with a Border Collie. They are definitely smart dogs, and can understand what you're saying to them. And better than a three year-old child, they'll actually do what you tell them to do.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
I'm not sure if anyone out there has every worked with a Collie before. They're really amazing.
The difference here is that they are HIGHLY motivated. I think we could learn a lot from this lesson.
Collies are able to have such an impact on our lives because they really really REALLY want to make us happy.
I've always wanted to own one but they are a LOT of work. It's almost a full time job. If you don't have work for them they will just go insane. Better to keep them on a farm...
This seems more impressive.
koko.org
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
There is no such thing as a sentient non-homosapien.
Prove it. When's the last time an ape told you he wasn't sentient? There are many ways to determine if an animal is intelligent. One is being self aware. Only larger primates and dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror. Another aspect is knowing of ones' lifespan. Only humans and a few primates are aware of our own demise. I believe one famous gorilla, Coco, had a sign language vocabulary of a couple thousand words and phrases. She also cried when her pet cat died and began asking about her own death when comforted by her trainer.
And what do you mean by "There may be varying levels of intelligence among the animals, but no animal can reason, they can only react to their surroundings as dictated by their instincts." What do you mean by reason? I've seen competitions between hunting dogs to retrieve a marker at the end of a field full of fallen trees and large puddles. The winner was not always the fastest runner or best swimmer, but the one that could navigate the best route with no help from its' handler.
And many animals can do more than react based on instinct. Many higher order animals are capable of using basic tools (like a long curved stick to get ants out of a nest). Some parrots have been tested by setting a piece of fruit at the top of a clear cylinder and several traps between the fruit and exit. In a matter of minutes they learned how to get the fruit out by sliding, rotating, moving, and removing blocks of wood in the proper order. Surely that goes beyond basic instinct. Does learning and problem solving not indicate some level of intelligence?
By what standard do you judge intelligence? Many people who post on Slashdot would not pass my test, but that gorilla does. Does something have to act like humans do, pursuing a more efficient means to destroy yheir species, before it is recognized? Does it have to communicate through spoken word?
This is really the reasoning part. You don't need to tell the dog what the toy's name is - the dog will figure it out himself. If you tell him to look for something he's never heard of, he will have a look around and if there's something new and unusual, he will guess that's what you meant. Isn't that sort of the way humans learn? At least it's certainly not the way dogs are normally trained.
I didn't know that they did it this way. I am not as impressed as I was before. The dog is going to realize which one is out of place just by the smell of the toy which obviously doesn't fit w/the rest. Trained dogs sniff out stuff that they recognize all the time. What's so different about them picking the one thing that is different?
There is no such thing as a sentient non-homosapien. There may be varying levels of intelligence among the animals, but no animal can reason, they can only react to their surroundings as dictated by their instincts.
This is simply wrong. The higher apes show clear evidence of reason, as do many dogs, elephants, cetaceans, and even some birds - the parrots and corvidae. Many of these animals demonstrate something called 'theory of mind' - they can put themselves in the place of others, figure out what those others are thinking, and practice deception. Its easy to show that apes and dolphins can recognise themselves in mirrors, indicating a sense of self-awareness. Even octopuses and squids can relate to each other in complex ways and communicate.
A good demonstration that things are not instinct is because many of these behaviours can be learned and passed on as a form of culture. This is shown in apes, with food-washing, bathing and tool-making. There is recent evidence that such cultural patterns may be present in birds, with some crows learning how to design and use simple tools to get at food.
There's still a big difference between working for years to teach an animal something that most human toddlers pick up almost accidentally from exposure...and getting an animal to reason about things like religion, philosophy, infinity, the possible existance of the soul, calculus, etc..
The first dog that teachs another dog a language...I might be impressed...the first dog that teaches words to a human child, I'll be a bit more impressed.
The first dolphin that can solve a linear algebra problem or contemplate the age of the universe...*that* will impress me
this doesn't. just glorified animal tricks
It doesn't matter if an animal can learn 200 words or 10000, it's still not comparable to a human language.
How many of you dog owners have to spell words like "ride", "walk" or "out" lest your canine go flippin' nuts?
Come on, be honest.
We all know a cat would just sit there.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
So?
Why do you care?
If you simply accept that languages have always changed, and will always change, you'll probably be a lot happier.
There's a difference between using language incorrectly according to the culture you live in, and the meaning of a word changing over time....
be descriptive, not prescriptive.
i don't read slashdot anymore.
And dont forget that by being the overwhelmingly dominant species, we are destroying any small chance for any other species to become more intelligent.
Given the proper numbers, chances and time, maybe some primates might move to higher levels of intelligence in 100K years?
(If we witness this, it would destroy, imho, all notions of a "soul", if not a god.. but I digress...)
Why are you hung up on changing meanings? It has happened continously since the dawn of time and it hasn't hurt anyone.
In the case of "decimate", its far more useful in the general sense of "destroy". How often have you wanted to say "destroy one in ten"? Odds are, very infrequently or never. So the benefit gained from another word for "destroy" - variety in language - outweighs the loss of a word inhabiting a vanishingly small niche.
What gets me annoyed is the use of "of" instead of "have" in the forms "should have", "would have", etc. I heard someone only today arguing with their child, and deliberately pronouncing "should of", to emphasise their point. This isn't a case of shifting semantics, its a fundamental misapprehension of grammar. It makes me want to weep.
So while I understand your pain, I feel mine is greater!
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
...recursively combine words into a meaningful sentence
This is not a useful distinction, as its hard to define 'meaningful sentence'. There are stages in language development in children, and many animals seem to show equivalent word combinations to young humans.
Its a continuum: Human language capacity did not appear suddenly fully-formed. Its likely that humanoids before us had some language ability, perhaps with less complex grammar and vocabulary.
However, language is a highly controversial indication of sentience. It's possible to imagine self-awareness, and the ability to conceive that others exist and they are like you (a theory of mind) without the need for any language at all.
Its also possible that language, like vision, has evolved independently many times. Whale song is complex, and we have no idea yet if it has anything we would understand as words or grammar, but maybe that's just putting our interpretation on things. Its clear that chimps and parrots are able to combine words in innovative ways to form something that seems like a 'proto-sentence'.
because animals can't communicate meaningfully using only single words.
Why not? Humans can do this. It's usually obvious what I mean if I say things like:
'Yes', 'No', 'Stop', 'Hungry', 'Busy', 'Bored', 'Whatever' etc. Some animals show a similar meaningful single-word use.
This argument seems to me to be self-fulfilling: if you defining sentience in terms of human attributes, then you will of course define anything lacking those attributes as non-sentient.
And it wouldn't really be too hard to program a robot that could recognise itself in a mirror.
Really? Such a thing appears to be capital-h Hard. If you put a little daub of paint on a chimp, it will rub at the spot in the mirror. I don't know of any robots who go about cleaning themselves off when a little paint has spilled on an arm or a tread. Do you? And that's just for starters. A true chimp-equivalent robot would still have to come recognize "that's me" if it's completely covered with paint, or partially covered with a tarp, or if it's been bent or under low lighting. Of course, even humans can be briefly fooled by their own reflections, but not for very long at all.
There is no current test for self-awareness....
Dolphins and gorillas... Well, I'm not too convinced...Though I'll admit that this is mainly due to no-one having inventing a convincing self-awareness test, yet.
The problem here isn't a lack of a self-awareness test per se. The problem is that human beings are not entirely rational. Therefore there is no test that one can use to reliably convince anyone of anything. Mountains of evidence exist that evolution is a real phenomenon, yet many people are still "not too convinced." What would ever convince them? When you get down to it, nothing. They will never be convinced.
Similarly, it seems clear that you can never be convinced that animals are sentient. You seemingly have a mystical belief in the unique status of the human soul (what you call "id"). And there's nothing wrong with that position. Plenty of philosophers, including Penrose who you refer to in all but name, would agree. But don't pretend that the problem is lack of a good definition. Definitions are a dime a dozen, and as good as you want them to be.
For instance, I'd define "self-aware" as the ability to understand, on some level, that others have consciousness, and that you can manipulate their perception of truth. Hence, when my cat ducks out of the way thinking I can't see him, he's aware that there is an I who is looking at him, and aware there is a he, who is being concealed from me. Others would define it in either more or less strictly. (On the lenient side, maybe scurrying cockroaches are borderline self-aware. Or the stricter side, maybe not even human toddlers count as sentient.) But nobody can define it for everyone because it's ultimately a matter of faith.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Why would a linguist have any authority when it comes to animal communications. For instance what does he know about chemical communications between ants? His abusive outburst seems to me primarily motivated by dogma (no pun intended).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
As Douglas Adams said in his infinate wisdom: "It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons"
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
My experience has been that ALL tech support people lie any time they don't know the answer.
Advanced users are users too!
actually, while I'm making broad sweeping stereotypical claims, I'll take it further - as it's certainly not limited to tech support.
It seems to be a very strong thing in a lot of people that they'd rather guess, or lie than be seen to not know the answer to something.
Advanced users are users too!
No other land animal appears to be able to do this. The Tour de France lasts 22 days for a distance of 2,077 miles (info).
I now have the lovely image of a cheetah trying to cycle - thank you for that!
Seriously though, a race that involves tools is a bit unfair, and do you have any proof that no other land animal can run a marathon? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just a bit surprised. I think it's more likely that no other animal is stupid enough to want to run a marathon!
I was born and raised in Dutch as my native language, but read/write and speak several other languages quite well. I do not consider myself as good as a native speaker in any of those languages but I do not agree with you at all.
Even in my native tongue there are a lot of words I do not know and there are several Computer related words that I know only in English, and that do not even have a proper translation in Dutch because the industry is very English-centered.
My point is that every profession has a specific vocabulary and therefore the total word count in a language is huge, and every speaker only knows a small portion of it.
This is different from the everyday common language used in newspapers for example. If you can read a newspaper in another language and you know all the words in it, then I think you have a vocabulary that is comparable to that of a native speaker, everything beyond that is propably proffesion related.
I think I have a very large vocabulary in Dutch as I often use words that people do not know, but in my sisters theology thesis were a lot of words I did not know.
Next to that you have the phenomenon of children of immigrants that have a limited vocabulary in the language of their parents because it is limited to the topics they talk about with their parents, and there is no pressure on them to develop their vocabulary beyond that.
Talking a language is a different matter completely. I knew someone from Spain that could read and write English quite well, but I could barely talk to him, as I was the first one he ever had a conversation in English with. He had no idea how to pronounce it.
To some extent this also applies to me: You would pick me out as a non native speaker whe we would have a conversation in English within a minute, but this has nothing to do with vocabulary, it's experience and skill.
For the record: I consider myself fluent reader/writer/speaker in Dutch and English, almost in German and French, and I know enough of Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian to understand a newspaper even if I do not know all the words.
I know enough arabian, greek and portuguese to do some shopping or ask for directions.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor