Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.
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