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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.'"
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..
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.
On the other hand, by the time my daughter was three, while she still wasn't much for taking instruction, she could converse, reason and had enough abstract thinking to laugh at Shel Silverstein in the right places.
Don't get too excited. I've no idea who Shel is, if it matters, but in my experience, kids laugh when adults laugh; they are always looking for cues for social behaviour. This is the case even with early teenagers. And, in fact, some adults.
If you want to please or get on with someone, you will laugh when they laugh.
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.
here'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
Ten thousand years ago your ancestors hadn't even come up with an idea as simple as the wheel, let alone linear algebra or calculus.
The really scary thing is that those were genetically modern humans, every bit as smart as you or me, except that they didn't have access to the education that we do. If you had had their education -- if you had been raised by cavemen -- the concept of the wheel would likely be completely beyond you. If you had to move a heavy object, it would simply never occur to you that you could do something other than drag or carry it. If it's too big to drag or carry, it stays put.
It took tens of thousands of generations for humans to make those first simple steps -- fire, the wheel, agriculture. So you might want to think about that when considering just how much difference there really is between you and a really smart animal.
Hint: it's probably not as much as you like to think.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
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!
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
Did it take the grandparent poster thousands of years to learn calculus or linear algebra or about the wheel? No, it didn't. Take the same amount of time it took him to learn those things, and try to teach a dog the same things. The dog won't be raised by cavemen. You could even send it to the university of your choice.
The gp has been taught a large part of human civilization in his lifespan, which can't be done with a dog. There's your big difference.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.