Slashdot Mirror
Alex, The Brainy Parrot Who Knows About Zero
Roland Piquepaille writes "Alex is a 28-year-old grey parrot who lives in a lab at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., and can count, identify objects, shapes, colors and materials. And now, Alex has grasped the concept of zero, according to World Science. In fact, Alex can describe the absence of a numerical quantity on a tray containing colored cubes. When a color is missing, Alex consistently identified this 'zero quantity' by saying the label 'none.' You might think that this is just a parrot trick, but this research about 'bird intelligence' might also help autistic and other learning-disabled children 'who have trouble learning language and counting skills.' This overview contains other details, references and a picture of Alex counting his colored cubes."
zeroth post!
That's good. Now if only they could fix the problems and not just the symptoms.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
hey...this really is an accomplishment. This isn't people we're talking about, it's [i]parrots[/i]. Even if they did have the intellectual capacity to grasp "sedenions", they certainly haven't had a high enough level of education.
Le français vous intéresse?
So parrots grow grey hair just like us too?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
This just goes how much we underestimate animals and overvalue ourselves. We'd like to believe that the evolution gap between us and every other species is too broad to be even fathomed, but it's simply not true. I know some people will reply and say that we all know that we came from apes, but I'm not talking about what we know, but how we act. We treat animals like they don't have emotions and that they aren't capable of the same types of understanding as us. In the future I imagine we are going to see that animals can do a lot of things we never though and are even better than us in some areas of intellect.
NJ Local Music Scene
Rather than downloading the ads, I will use wget to download the html, and download the pictures. No money to RP.
I have freaks! I did something right...
Alex The Brainy Parrot says:
Roland Piquepaaaaaaaille went from <none> to $500 in three minutes.
Instead of polly want a cracker, maybe we will start saying polly want to do a math problem?
Alex is a 28-year-old grey parrot who lives in a lab at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., and can count, identify objects, shapes, colors and materials. And now, Alex has grasped the concept of zero, according to World Science. In fact, Alex can describe the absence of a numerical quantity on a tray containing colored cubes. When a color is missing, Alex consistently identified this "zero quantity" by saying "none." You might think that this is just a parrot trick, but this research about 'bird intelligence' might also help autistic and other learning-disabled children "who have trouble learning language and counting skills." Read more...
One of the really interesting things about Alex is that it had learned in the past that "none" meant a lack of information. And without any training, when Alex was asked to say how many green or red cubes were on a tray in front of him, he spontaneously said "none" when there was no cubes with this color. In fact, he was able to connect two different concepts, a lack of information and the absence of a quantity. Pretty brilliant parrot, isn't?
Before going further, below is a picture of Alex in front of his counting blocks (Credit: Brandeis University). And here is a link to a larger version (193 KB).
A 'cultured' hamburger
Now, let's look at how the researchers made the discovery that Alex possessed a "zero-like concept."
The story began when researchers started testing Alex to see whether he understood small numbers, between one and six. Zero wasn't expected of him. The researchers would lay out an array of objects of different colors and sizes, and asked questions such as "what color four?" -- meaning which color are the objects of which there are four.
Apparently, Alex was pretty good on these tests, until he got bored. So the researchers "found some more interesting toys to give as rewards." And here came the decisive experiment.
One of these apparent lapses occurred one day when an experimenter asked Alex "what color three?" Laid out before Alex were sets of two, three and six objects, each set differently colored. Alex insisted on responding: "five." This made no sense given that the answer was supposed to be a color.
After several tries the experimenter gave up and said: "OK, Alex, tell me: what color five?" "None," the bird replied. This was correct, in that there was no color that graced exactly five of the objects. The researchers went on to incorporate "none" into future trials, and Alex consistently used the word correctly, they said.
A few days after this article was published, Brandeis University decided to issue a press release adding that Alex was the "first bird to comprehend numerical concept akin to zero."
"It is doubtful that Alex's achievement, or those of some other animals such as chimps, can be completely trained; rather, it seems likely that these skills are based on simpler cognitive abilities they need for survival, such as recognition of more versus less," explained comparative psychologist and cognitive scientist Dr. Irene Pepperberg.
Dr. Pepperberg's research, which uses a training method called the model-rival technique, also holds promise for teaching autistic and other learning-disabled children who have difficulty learning language, numerical concepts and even empathy.
So far, results using this learning technique with small groups of autistic children have been very promising.
The latest research work about Alex and his comprehension of zero has been published by the Journal of Comparative Psychology in its May 2005 issue (Volume 119, Issue 2) under the name "Number Comprehension by a Grey Parrot (Psittacus erithacus), Including a Zero-Like Concept." You'll get to the abstract from this page (scroll to number #8).
A Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) that was able to quantify 6 item sets (including subsets of heterogeneous groups, e.g., blue blocks within groupings of blue and green blocks and balls) us
What about that raven which understood the concept of 'nevermore'?
I read a book a while back about the history of the idea of zero. It tooks humans quite a while to get zero right, it's quite cool that a bird got it.
Modern science = Stupid parrot tricks
I always knew David Lettermen was onto something with stupid pet tricks, I'm surprised he never got a grant.
He's pining for the fjords
Thank you for the offer, Timothy.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Guess I'll have to rethink my intent when I call someone a bird brain!
On a side note, why is the concept of zero considered so advanced on the intelligence ladder? I know it was well after Greek times that man came to terms with it. But could it be the case that we were over-thinking its concept?
Maybe someone can better describe this article's subject's significance... all I know, from my own observations, is that my dog certainly demonstrates a form of awareness whenever there's zero food in its dish!
Who do you think gave the concept of the Zero to the Europeans, along with the current system of 10 digit numerals?
(I'm assuming, of course, that your post was not intended to be ironic. If it was, my Irony Meter just blew itself to bits.)
Here. He can't count too good though, Norwegian blues stun easily....
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
My relatives have a african grey parrot and they are in fact really smart. They even seem to answer your questions (and complete sentences or phrases). Only thing is that they bite real hard so you might want to keep a distance while talking/playing with them.
What does your Credit Report look like?
Scientists have reported today that Holand Piquepaille, perennial Slashdot whore and troll, has finally grasped the concept of $0.
"It's amazing", reported one scientist. "Although usually it takes human-level intelligence to grasp the concept of submitting news articles without any chance for a monetary return, we were able to teach the concept to Holand Piquepaille."
Unfortunately, the results are not yet conclusive, and it remains to be seen whether or not Holand Piquepaille will return all the money he duped out of people for looking at primidi.com. Scientists are hopeful, but note, "This is the first time that this concept has ever been documented in this particular species of whore, so we still need lots more evidence for the data to be conclusive."
Another researcher pointed out: "Holand has demonstrated the concept of $0, but we're not sure if he's grasped what he wanted him to, or if he's just hit on related themes like 'The amount of value my posts add to Slashdot'."
Scientists hope that further research will prove that Holand is destined to lead a life of future altruism. Keep your hopes up!
Le français vous intéresse?
The Hindus?
A parrot that counts 0 blue blocks is all fine and dandy. But can he count --3 red balls? Or 5i yellow chips?
See, you're not so smart are you, eh, bird-brain?
But if it had coloured balls moving rapidly so it couldn't count them, would it be able to comprehend a difference (if taught the vocabulary) between "None" and "Unknown"? That needs to be tested, otherwise this is just another example of bad science.
Professor: Alex, tell me what color 4?
Alex: Blue, no Yelllllllllloooooooooooooooowww
And I for one welcome our new feline masters...
Blender And Linux Fan
Actually, I'm not convinced of that. The question was still "what color five?", and "none" is a numerical answer, not a color answer. The bird had previously spat out a different nonsensical answer to the question "what color three?"
As the article says, "zero" and "none" are not quite identical. Perhaps the bird is showing substantial insight and playing a new game; perhaps it's just bored and throwing out random stuff.
Among humans, the "invention" of zero is a lot more than being able to count zero objects. It comes with at least some basic arithmetic, like 0+x=x, x-0=x, and perhaps even x*0=0. Without that, I'm also tempted to dismiss it as a "silly parrot trick".
Personally, I think it's easy to anthropomorphize a creature with a human voice. I'd expect many other creatures, especially mammals, to be smarter than birds. Biologically speaking it's not much different from a chicken. So I'd like to see a lot more research before I'm prepared to grant the bird more than some lucky guesswork.
>>'bird intelligence' might also help autistic and other learning-disabled children 'who have trouble learning language and counting skills.
Yeah, turn them into Alex the parrot.
And the winner of the 2005 Ig Nobel prize in the field of psychology goes to...
Help us build a better map!
Try asking your dog what color of which there are five objects. The parrot correctly said "none".
It's fine to be unimpressed with Piquepaille, but this is real stuff in the research.
In fact, Alex can describe the absence of a numerical quantity on a tray containing colored cubes. When a color is missing, Alex consistently identified this 'zero quantity' by saying the label 'none.'
Newsflash: Roland Piquepaille is dumber than a parrot!
Zero is not the absence of a numerical quantity. Zero is a numerical quantity. The absence of a numerical quantity is when you don't know how much there is of something.
It's like the difference between 0 and NULL in a database. This parrot is smarter than both Roland Piquepaille and MySQL developers.
I would expect money not to come from reading the HTML, but from requesting the images... oh well, better than nothing. I should get to that...
I have freaks! I did something right...
Having reluctantly allowed my wife to keep cockatiels for the past 8 years or so, I must say, I'm impressed with their intelligence.
Intelligence is such a vague term -- but here I mean the ability to adapt to new situations and learn. I had a dog growing up, and I would say (without any scientific study) that the cockatiels are at least as intelligent. I've seen them learn to deal with all sorts of new challenges and become comfortable with them. It is amazing given the tiny size of their brain.
For context, I'm not naive enough to think they understand the meanings of the words we've taught them... I've got them calling out "I'm hungry" whenever they hear us getting their food. They're just associating a sound pattern with an experience -- I'm confident they're not understanding symbolic constructs like "I" and "hungry".
Still, they're impressive little things. I've seen them overcome instinctual fears, like learning that a clear glass table was safe to walk on. I've seen them recognize complex imprecise actions, like knowing that any container we lift to our mouth has something to drink in it (despite the anatomical differences).
I've read somewhere that birds' brains have a different structure than mammals' brains. It may be more size efficient somehow. Anyways, I don't know if this bird really gets "zero", but I don't think it's impossible. Birds can be pretty darn smart. Certainly smarter than I would have thought.
Cheers.
I meant the advertiser's images
I have freaks! I did something right...
From the article: The scientists also said it will take further study to determine whether Alex--who has been the subject of intelligence and communication tests throughout his life--really understands zero.
Zero and none "are not identical," Pepperberg wrote in a recent email. But since Alex never learned "zero," the researchers said, it's impressive that he started using a word he knew to denote something like it: an absence of a quantity.
Also unclear, though, was whether by "none" he meant no colors, no objects or something else.
So, in effect, the bird "knows" of 'none,' not 'Zero,' according to Mr. Pepperberg.
Sorry. Everyone is using Zero as a word to describe what this bird knows, and it's just not the case. Details, people.
Maybe if half of the posts weren't Roland-Bashing, you would have bothered to click on the direct link to the original article.
(Don't get me wrong, Roland is a whore.)
But does the parrot run linu...uh, nevermind...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
There is a great deal (imho) of underestimation of animal intelligence, and it's interesting how many religious people I meet are animal intelligence deniers because of their need to believe that humans have some unique status.
Anybody with a background in experimental psychology who has ever actually worked with a grey parrot, a cockatoo, a macaw or one of the more intelligent dog breeds (e.g. spaniel) will realise that, although it is possible to argue that animal behavior is in some way fundamentally different from ours, the simplest hypothesis is that, in a simpler way, they think the same way that we do. The resemblance of some aspects of behaviour of, say, a two to three year old child and a labrador or cocker spaniel is very marked.
Therefore my own view of this particular bit of research is that it acts as a pointer of how far down the human aptitude chain a bird can get in one particular skill. If you accept that animals, birds and humans have mental ability that fits on a continuum, though with different aspects at different points, this research is interesting not only in itself but in the light it could throw on aspects of human development. Which seems to be what they're saying...
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
If you can ask questions involving grammar, adjectives and nouns, and be able to change them around and STILL get correct answers, it is clearly not simple comparison tricks.
Autistic tricks are about simple store/recall of rote information, but there is no evidence here of simple store/recall mechanisms being involved. This is not some piece of amateur research over a weekend, this has been going on for 15 years with consistant and repeatable results.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
And it is an incredible animal already without the concept zero. It labels objects by name and properties like color and shape. But also recognize objects which are similar like keys. There is no way for the researcher to hint the solution unconsiously like what happens with the famous counting of horses and dogs (The horse taps the foot X times for the correct answer, but in reality just looks for the right signs in the face or behaviour of the owner (smart too though, sociology (-: )).
The parrot is in this case better then men in understanding language. The researchers can not talk "parrot language", but this bird can talk human language. What would be great for research if they are able to find out if this parrot has a concept of language and can translate some more familiar environment things (like trees instead of keys) and see if that translates to other parrots in the wild.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
So the parrot can signal when the tray is empty.
You need to RTFA. The parrot can look at a tray full of objects and signal when there are zero objects of a given color. You're probably not intending to troll, but posting blatantly incorrect statements has the same effect as trolling.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
Don't diss ravens, they can make tools, sometimes more proficiently than apes ! I've seen one of these birds cut a small rectangle of spiky leaf to use as a hook to pull some juicy worms from a dead tree bark; and another cut a stick from a tree, remove the leaves then make one end into a hook for the same task, in mere seconds.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
- "where's the cube?"
- "hurry up with those cubes!"
- "i can't find it."
- "next question! I want to win another cookie."
It's easy to say people were late discovering zero, but a neanderthal yelling "where's my !*#&*$?! brontosaurus steak?" (1) sure had a concept of absence of something. The concept of zero is about equations and using location of a digit in a number to indicate increasing amounts.
(1) in comics, it's almost mandatory that dinosaurs and neanderthals live in the same period.
"Alex, tell me...."
"Forty two."
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
The missing element is the mind of an anonymous coward, luckily for the Chinese this is such a tiny thing it does not have any effect on their abilities.
Don't give it a mouse (IO peripheral), or the dinosaurs will finally recover from their temporary setback.
--
make install -not war
... to think that you are so advanced you can change your basic behaviour and instincts.
:-)
Face it, you're an omnivore, like it or not. Whether you choose to eat meat or not is irrelevant - you have evolved to eat a variety of foods, including meat. Humankind is the most general of species on this planet - we survive in extreme heat, extreme cold, and everywhere in-between precisely because we can adapt to changing circumstance. Eating meat is a part of this general behaviour. I see no reason to be ashamed of what we do when it's in our nature to do it.
It may even be (given that it's generally the meat-eaters predatorial requirements for advanced tactics that drive this) that you *had* to eat meat for thousands of years before you'd evolve to the state where it was optional...
Frankly, those who espouse that we shouldn't eat other animals are mainly hypocrites. Humourous note: while checking the spelling of that, I typed "hypocr" into OSX's dashboard dictionary and it guessed at 'hypocretin'. Although it's not applicable (it's a hormone!), I'd love to adopt it instead of hypocrite. It just fits so well
Put a tethered lamb in front of a cave with fresh running water and see if the human would rather die than kill and eat the lamb. If you kill the lamb, if you'd rather die, then well and good - I respect your principles whilst simultaneously denouncing you as a fool. If you kill and eat the lamb, everything comes down to a matter of degree - when is it acceptable to eat meat and when is it not? That's an arbitrary decision made by an individual based on his/her preconceptions. No one decision is any more "right" than any other since the decision is a personal one. So stop telling me I can't have a bacon sandwich at the weekend!
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
_
Ron dies in chapter 9 of book 7.
hey...this really is an accomplishment. This isn't people we're talking about, it's [i]parrots[/i]. Even if they did have the intellectual capacity to grasp "sedenions", they certainly haven't had a high enough level of education.
;)
It appears that they can't quite grasp HTML yet, either.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
Doesn't anyone realise these creatures are only an opposable thumb away from slaughtering us in our beds? Stop teaching them stuff!
You must think in Russian.
Of course I mind if you kill and eat a pet of mine - I have an emotional attachment to the animal - it's a PET!
Do I mind if you kill and eat a scorpion in the desert ? No. Knock yourself out.
It's the emotional attachment that's important - not the animal. As a child, I had a pet rabbit. If you'd tried to kill and eat it, I'd set the dog on you! I couldn't care less if you go out into the foothills and kill and eat a rabbit. I dare say there are (vegetable) farmers who would actively encourage you...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Don't ask me, I know nothing.
The majority of PHBs that I know consider themselves quite brainy - and they know zero as well.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
And I for one welcome our new feline masters...
You missspelled 'avian'.
A lot of schmucks will probably treat these sorts of interesting things like novelty party tricks and move on.
:P
Most people can't even treat other people with respect, so to me it's unrealistic to expect them to ever care about anything outside their own species except for personal gain or as lunch.
Of course, there are exceptions.
What can I say? I'm just a cynical bastard.
BytesTemplar.com
"Hey" said Shadow, "Huginn, or Muginn, or whoever you are."
The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side,and it stared at him, with bright eyes.
"Say Nevermore." said Shadow.
"Fuck you." said the Raven.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
When his bowl is empty, he says "meow". Is that an understanding of zero?
I can understand and be amazed by the understanding of zero and negative numbers as a mathematical concept
Sounds like Roland needs to pay some extra bills this month. We don't need his F'ing bird brained "overview" laden submissions.
Halfway to understanding binary, halfway to being a living computer!!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Ask it what's better out of BSD and GPL
So, I'm amazed at the avian capability, but surprised at humanity's clunky, late, and worshipful grasp of zero. I read, "Zero: The Biography Of A Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife, and it took us a hell of a long time to get a simple survival idea to cross from instinct into formalized intellect.
I'm not a behavioral science PhD. Yet, How surprising is it that any animal can recognize zero in respect to color? How many yellow fruits are on that green tree? "None, next tree." How many gray mates are there on the brown branches? "None, next area." We have to think that the loser parrots who hung out at the tree with zero fruit didn't do so well in the evolution crap shoot.
Zero is not so mystically intelligent as we think. Our belly and lungs definitely understand zero. But zero came late to our number systems. Our formalization of zero might well be a mystical leap of intellect, but only history will prove if we are as smart as we think we are. There are a lot of zeros out there we aren't grasping; zero dodos left, zero ozone defense in places, and zero vaccines for modern plagues.
I look forward to the day when Alex and Mr. Bean learn to solve calculus. Then he can exclaim that the limit of e^x as x approaches infinity is infinity. Negative numbers and imaginary numbers and he'll be doing better than most undergrads.
It should be noted Mr. Bean's QWERTY typing is abominable. So his C programming is not as strong as other posts might have suggested.
but the fact is that what he said was not insightful, it was a bad joke reflecting upon people condemning other people for being more morally consistent than them.
My new blog
African Grey's are the Einstein's of the bird world. They are very bright and enjoy mischief. They do not make good pets for the impatient as they often throw temper-tantrums. I've read that African Grey's have intelligence akin to the average two-year old. Maybe in 100,000 years or so they will evolve to develop an intelligence on par with people -- that is, if we don't kill them all first.
Alex has mastered the art of being a "smart ass"
Slightly OT, but is any one else here an educator in Japan using the "Unicorn" book? (They have a chapter about Alex and Pepperberg. There's nothing quite as fun as getting a room full of Japanese high school students to say, "ayuur," in imitation of a parrot's broken English.)
Yes. And a sperm whales brain is much much larger than yours. This explains the burgeoning sperm whale civilization, and their recent journey to colonize the stars...
no, wait...
- sarcasm is just one more service we offer -
Brain size has nothing to do with it. Organization, surface area, and the RATIO of brain-volume to body-mass all show trends towards how 'intelligent' we will perceive a SPECIES to be. On individual levels these things don't show us squat.
You are to a goat as a parrot is to a chicken. It is actually a very good parallel. The mass of your body is about the same as (some types) of goats, but your brain is bigger. The size of a parrots brains is about the same size as a chickens, but the parrot weighs a lot less.
On the other hand, I've never liked the ratio argument; too many variables get ignored. Still a good analogy though - as good as any other anyway.
While it's really cool that this parrot can understand the concept of something being missing, or not existing at all within it's limited scope of numbers and objects, I think it would be more interesting to find out if the parrot could understand the concept of "I."
Another interesting question would be, does the parrot "miss" things when they aren't there? People, toys, etc. or develop some sort of attachment to something, and show something akin to emotion?
Daddy I want a Parrot that knows about zero!
The Setting: Woman works as a receptionist at a veterinarians. Part of her job is to have a look at the new arrivals in the waiting-room so the veterinarian knows what's up next. In comes a woman with a bird cage. Content: a parrot. Receptionist kneels down, takes a peek in the cage, and the following dialogue ensues:Disclaimer: If you don't think this is funny, I'd like to know what you're doing in my universe (or, alternatively, how the hell I got into yours).
sig? Oh, that sig...
What's interesting is that while most animal minds can think "there are no predators," it's a completely separate thing to think "there are zero predators." Zero is a quantification of none, and it's a step that, as the articles said, took us humans quite some time to figure out. At the moment, it seems that the only conclusion we can draw from the experiment is that the parrot knows a new way to represent the concept of "none." And while this is quite a feat in teaching, it isn't quite as impressive a feat as actually teaching the concept of zero to an animal whose intelligence supposedly can only grasp the concept of none. Knowledge of zero heralds the beginning of numeral systems. It might be a good test for such knowledge.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I agree that zero is not so exciting as a "none" identifier. It's much more interesting as an abstract concept when used in the place value system, though.
The Romans, lacking zero could only express large numbers by inventing new magnitudes, which sucks.
The Greeks did create a zero and used it as a "none" identifier at first. The exciting part is when it enabled infinitely large magnitudes by using a set number of magnitudes (1-9) and changing their meaning with position. The introduction of 0 allows this ordering by position.
Pretty cool stuff!
I can see it now: Rain Parrot. The bird is on the screen and looks at anything where something is missing and says: "quantity zero. judge wapner. brawwwwwwk!!!"
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
A few years back, I was trained to be a facilitator. We learned about the 4 stages of group behavior: Forming (everybody is nicey nicey but ignores the issue at hand), Storming (fighting for position and roles within the group), Norming (getting work done, finding a process that works), and Performing (really grooving and getting lots of work done). Key to the concept is that if you change the group at all, you go back to Forming.
During the training, I flashed back to a camping scene from years ago. A flock of birds was settling in for the night in a tree across the river. As they settled in they, quite literally, established a pecking order - knocking neighbors off a prize perch and the like. As the order became more to everyone's liking, they settled down. After about an hour, everybody had a place. ONE bird drifted in from elsewhere and settled on a branch. The tree erupted in noise and fury and they started all over again.
The more I observe animals, the less special I feel about my human-ness.
Doug
Still dunno if it is reasonable to take behavioural style into account when handing out moral status. That sounds like the kind of thing that has got humans into no end of trouble over places like Kurdistan.
And it all has to be balanced against the delights of ham, bacon, roast pork and pizza. For now I think I'm still stuck with "it's better to have lived and fed the hungry than not to have lived at all." If only the plight of fish stocks and omega-3 was so simple.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Birds are smart. Parrots especially so. So this comes as no surprise to me, who lives out in the sticks and observes many kinds of bird going about their daily lives, several species of parrot included. Clearly bird intelligence is a reality to anyone who has actually bothered to observe them, but equally clearly it's an intelligence quite different from ours. This might seem obvious but it seems that one of the central paradigms of biology since the renaissance is that "intelligence" must mean human intelligence, and anything else is not worthy of the name. Indeed, I have seen it repeated quite often that birds and other animals cannot be conscious and are some kind of automata. This is obviously baloney! Ask any cat or dog owner.
Until science can accept that intelligence is a sliding scale and comes in degrees, we are unlikely to make much progress, it seems to me. There is no "sudden breakthrough" to consciousness once brains reach a certain size, birds are as conscious as they need to be to be a bird. Likewise cats and dogs.
Here are some amazing feats I've observed in birds: A gull hovering at about 30-40 ft above the ground in a high wind above heavy traffic (the flight control alone this involves is pretty impressive) but the bird is scanning the ground - a noisy field of gravelled tarmac and moving cars - and can pick out among this noisy field a dot of matter on the ground that it knows to be edible. Consider the image processing task this is - we cannot even begin to write a program to do this, let alone "know" that the one dot among millions is edible. The bird will then swoop down among the traffic and pick up the morsel without breaking a sweat.
Australian Magpies in a colony in my garden regularly communicate among themselves with different sounds. These sounds have definite and distinct meanings; they understand them, we do not. One one occasion a particular squawk from the nesting tree brought a sudden urgent rush of Magpies from all over the area flying in to assist - it was obvious from the very direct and unusually effortful flying that this was an emergency. I have no idea what was up, but they did! Not only intelligent but socially organised and with a meaningful language.
I have made many similar observations in passing. When you consider that the human genome is not as large as we thought, and the higher birds' genome is not much smaller, it seems to me that science has a lot of rethinking to do on the subject of brain size and intelligence. And surely the time has come to drop the arrogance of assuming trhe superiority of human intelligence - simple observation will give you plenty of data that refutes this hypothesis. Thus the parrot in the article is really fairly unexceptional - the difference here is that somebody has thought it worthwhile (spuriously in my opinion) to teach it to use its brain in a way it probably doesn't bother to or need to in nature. That its brain is capable of this tends to show me that what birds do with their brains in nature must be equally impressive, and a darn sight more useful for the bird. Contrary to the popular myth, our brains are not 3/4 unused - they are 100% used (well, perhaps not in some of us). And that goes for every living creature too - evolution gives us all exactly the brain we need to survive in the environment we live in.
It sounds like the parrot may have learned the concept of "nothing". This is quite a different thing than understanding "zero", the Hindu invention which lead to an effective base-10 system of representation by having a placeholder symbol to represent "nothing". This was a conceptual leap that few of us would have made, let along a bird.
"And I for one welcome our new feline masters...
You missspelled 'avian'."
You misspelled "misspelled"...
_____________________________
Dyslexics of the world untie!
Ever notice that Cobra Commander sounds an awful lot like Star scream?
But can he count --3 red balls?
Parrot: "Let's jump off a skyscraper while I'm counting your balls."
See, you're not so smart are you, eh, bird-brain?
Parrot: "Smart enough to be able to shit on your head and not a damm thing you can do about it."
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
No big deal. My cat knows the concept of zero too. And she lets me know that every time her food dish has zero kibbles in it.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
As former caretaker of the late "Eugene," the pig, I've come to beleive that what people dislike about pigs is how closely their behavior resembles human behavior. Pigs are at least straightforward and unapologetic in their greediness.
BTW I'd also like to mention ants, bees and wasps (Hymenoptera) whose hive-like "intelligences" maybe as sophisticated as our own individual human intelligence. It may be impossible to compare the two, but it does give one pause in trying to define non-human intelligence.
i saw a crow drop a walnut into an intersection from a street light. the crow then flew down to the side walk, WAITED FOR THE LIGHT TO CHANGE, then walked into the intersection to collect the edibles from the car-crushed walnut. he let out a loud in disapproval of how quickly the light had changed again as he was forced to retreat from the street and his score.
"There was no sex." - hoggoth
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Alex has zero and little prairie dogs - the universal lunch - have a complete language, including words for color!!!
i on.htm
http://www.prairiedog.info/Prairie_Dog_Communicat
"Basically, prairie dogs are a universal lunch item. Everybody likes to feed on prairie dogs," says animal behaviorist Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University. And the prairie dogs know that. When a predator approaches they emit a series of warning chirps.
Prairie dogs can talk. At least that's the startling conclusion reached by Slobodchikoff. His research flies in the face of conventional scientific thinking on the subject of animal intelligence. He maintains that prairie dogs can convey complex information through a language more sophisticated than that of any animal ever studied. Slobodchikoff has documented more than 100 prairie dog words all revolving around the same subject: predators. From his observation tower on the edge of a prairie dog colony outside Flagstaff, Slobodchikoff operates a directional microphone, a tape recorder and a video camera. From this vantage point, he can spot intruders, such as hawks, cats, dogs, and men and record the alarm calls these potential threats trigger in the prairie dogs.
"Each time we do experiments I'm surprised because each time even I don't think these animals have the capabilities that our experiments show them to have," says Slobodchikoff.
Back at his lab he digitizes his audio field tape into sonograms which show what each alarm call "looks" like, complete with adjectives.
The professor has discovered that prairie dogs use adjectives to differentiate objects. For example, they can describe the color of clothes on a human and whether he is tall or short. They can also describe how fast a man is moving or whether he is carrying a gun. And there's evidence that the animals can remember that specific person for up to two months.
Each prairie dog colony appears to have its own dialect, much like New Yorkers sound different from Southerners. But researchers believe the basic language is the same. That is, a prairie dog from Arizona could talk to a prairie dog from New Mexico.
"'survival of the fittest' is not a moral philisophy in any sense of the word."
This is simply not true. Survival of the fittest is strongly linked to morals in two ways.
First, moral behavior is simply applying the survival behavior to all of society.
Second, societies develop morals which make society stronger, or fail to develop morals and then fail to thrive.
-Z
Now I happen to be a vegetarian. A morally consistent one? Probably not. After all, I drink milk and eat eggs. Tsk, tsk. I don't think I've used bug spray yet this summer, but if I go somewhere with ridiculous bug coverage, I probably would. It would be for protection from bugs that are trying to bite me and could be carrying diseases. Yeah, some of them aren't. Tough to make that kind of thing selective. But there's some "need" to do this, or at least I would benefit from it. There's no need for humans to eat meat; in my mind it doesn't benefit me or enrich my life in any way. So why do it?
Whether that's morally consistent or not, there's no way to live life in our society without harming other people, animals, the environment, whatever. I (and clearly you, based on your comment) realize this. We each try to balance the things that are important to us and the things that help other people. Vegetarianism is part of that for some poeple.
Is 'none,' as in "How many oranges are here?" "None," the same as 0?
The article also claims that Alex also used the term 'none' to describe 'no difference' -- essentially thinking outside the box of a stacked question. When presented with two identical objects and asked "what's the difference?" he replied, "None," presumably as in "there is no difference."
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
A few days after this article was published, Brandeis University decided to issue a press release adding that Alex was the "first bird to comprehend numerical concept akin to zero."
I disagree with the blogger, and with the university if the quotation is correctly attributed to them.
Alex is not the "first bird to comprehend [...] zero". Rather, Alex is the first bird to demonstrate his knowledge of the number zero.
For all we know, birds count down to zero all the time, we just have not witnessed it before.
Perhaps all parrots "know" the quantity of zero. This one may simply have learned to communicate its understanding of the concept to humans. For that matter, perhaps all animals know about zero. I know my cats dont try to eat food thats not in their dish. They complain incessantly that it contains zero kibbles of food.
-David
Actually, it's "parrots". The board does allow HTML, but not bbcode.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Are slashdot mods really that fucking dumb so as to give him an insightful?
Reconizing "none" is NOT an indication of grasping the concept of "zero", which is about "zero" sharing proterties similar to other numbers (i.e can be meaningfully added).
As others have pointed out, the Europeans got the formal mathematical concept of zero via the Arabs (who got it via the Persians, who in turn got it from the Hindus). Why do you think those numeric symbols are known as "Arabic numerals" in the west? Hence, at some point of time it was the Muslim Arabs who were wondering if the Europeans had understood the concept of zero as yet.
Therefore it's particularly ironic that you chose this subject for your troll, given that the the word "zero" itself derives from the Arabic word sifr (see the etymology).
Of course, there's always the possibility that you were aware of this irony, but that looks somewhat unlikely to me.
You also misspelled 'overlords'
Now if he can just grasp the concept of NULL, he can do SQL.
Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird -- Proverbs 1:17
So the bird is capable of speaking our language and using our math ideas, but we aren't capable of understanding its own methods of communication... I feel really dumb as a human.
I have to ask... Why is this news again?
...Especially when that identification is associated with food. You think Polly just started spouting off about absence of colors out of the blue? "WoW! We are SO underestimating animal intelligence and humans are so arrogent!" Pah-lease. Get a grip. Alex and its brothers were doing this long before the lab came a long. Along with cows, sheep, dogs, cats, hamsters, etc, etc...
Any animal can grasp the concept of zero. ANY ANIMAL. Quite a few of them can communicate the concept. My dog's dish is empty. The dog identifies this state as ZERO FOOD. It picks up the bowl and nudges me with it until I replace the null value in it's life. Colors, sustinance, whatever, this ISN'T cutting edge animal behavioral science here; nor does it prove anything concerning intelligence since everything from a spider on up will be able to correctly recognize a zero state in it's environment
You need a FREE iPod Nano
...you insensitive clod! Try to eat that!
I just saw something last night on Animal Planet on the "Most Extreme" intelligent animals. Parrots were #1
Did they mention the chimps that were teached how to speak using a "hands language" ? I thought those were #1 . If not what can parrots do that chimps can't ?
Take a look at some of the info on the native New Zealand mountain parrots, the Kea.
There have been numerous studies, plus some fascinating documentaries on how intelligent these wild birds are.
Kea proofing things is an art, usually something that doesn't take long for a kea to "un-kea-proof". Wheelie bins with blocks of wood across the lids, arranged so that removing one block is not enough, doesn't slow the kea down long - they will remove a block and test, then remove the next until they get the lid open.
More complex puzzles were devised, with crossed stings opening flaps - the birds check the contraption out and immediately grab the right pull string. Where it is impossible for one bird to work to get the food, such as having to hold the string or the (remote) flap will close, two or more birds will work together. It is remarkable how these birds work.
The other thing keas are famous for is trashing your car - they will try and remove anything rubber, shiny or just plain interesting, just for kicks it seems. Never leave ski boots outside, or you'll need new inners.
The way they describe their experiments it doesn't sound to me like evidence that the bird understands Zero. It could just as well be indicating "I don't know" or "none of the above."
Here's an idea: they could try to teach the bird to count backwards with a command word like "less." After it answers a numerical question they could give it the "less" command right away and reward it if it selected the number that is one less. If it learns to go consistently from 5 to 4 to 3 with repeated "less" commands, see if it can continue counting down without being specifically trained on the lower numbers. That would demonstrate an awareness of a relationship between the numbers, and if the bird selected the Zero button after the One button without being taught, then I would be more willing to believe it actually has Zero as a concept.
I have a neighbor with two African greys among other pets. No joke, one grey is named "Einstein". Among other mischief, Einstein likes to imitate its master's voice and commands, calling the golden retriever. Then Einstein laughs out loud at the disappointed dog to its face! Poor dog. Perhaps they should have named the grey "Loki", but then Einstein was known to have a sense of humor.
Needless to say, you can fool yourself if you confuse rote mimicry for actual understanding.
There is story in Scotland about a crow which would refuse to go back to its nest in a tower, unless it saw all the men that went in, come out again. Until that is, more than five men went in, and the crow lost count.
Being able to understand the concept of zero would be particularly useful to a bird when counting the number of predators around its nest.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Item number one: "I don't like meat." nothing ethical at all, so no argument at all.
Number two: Health. Again, nothing ethical, although whether or not it's easier to be healthier as a veggie is disputable, and I'd argue that this is actually a bad point, since it's obviously possible to be healthy without meat. Still, no inconsistency.
Number three: Farming methods. This isn't about "peace to all animals" and "a cat is a rat is a boy is a dog" or whatever that idiot woman said. It's about waste, about immoral practises such as battery farming et al, and about it being easily possible to farm meat more efficiently.
Please don't blanket statement vegetarians. While I've met a lot who are downright idiots, there are a good proportion who do it for the right reasons.
im in ur
You misspelt "misspelt"...
Go ahead, mod me troll. :P
You confused dyslexia with redundancy.
(unless you want a baby)
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Actually, I know many vegetarians. I don't know any that have made it past the "twelve year wall" though. They get to that point, and suddenly food isn't interesting to them, they start feeling like crap, and they end up eating meat again.
The fact is (well, I believe it is, anyway), we *do* need to eat meat. Maybe not all the time, maybe not a lot, but we are built to be omnivores, not carnivores, and not herbivores.
Though if you eat eggs, you are ahead of the game a bit. Veganism is the worst. Seems like every vegan I know ends up with crazy intestinal problems before long.
I applaud moral convictions. But if you want to be in tune with nature, I suggest being in tune with your own nature first. There is nothing immoral about eating food we are built to eat, just like it's not immoral for a Tiger to eat a Gazelle.
However, if you want to take a stand against factory farming, which I whole heartedly applaud, that's great. Eat free range.
before you hurt yourself.
Every Vegan I've met.. without exception.. ends up with serious intenstinal and food allergy problems.
http://chetday.com/vegetarianarticles.htm
If you want to stand up for morals, do so. But please eat as your body needs to. That includes animal products. Choose them for moral principles if you like (free range eggs, perhaps).
I have come to the conclusion that while you can stand up and walk around and survive without meat, it's *not* good for you. And until I meet people that have passed the "twelve year wall" as vegetarians, or a much shorter span for vegans, and done so in good health, then I have to say the evidence in my own experience is conclusive. We need meat.
Yuo misspelled "untie"...
It is hard to see, from the grammar, exactly what sort of test you could do, but it would probably be along the lines of having objects and boxes, then placing one object in each box, then asking how many boxes are still needed. (This is a simple derivation of your bottles experiment, but based closer to experiments already done.)
A second set of experiments would involve contrasting brain functions. Wire Alex with EEG, then wire an untrained African Grey the same way. The brain functions of the untrained parrot SHOULD be much closer to the "normal" levels, as there is no way for the untrained parrot to know what anything means. Alex' brain functions should, on the other hand, show definite activity that differs markedly in nature and timing. This would not prove that the activity was intelligence-related, but WOULD prove that Alex' reactions were non-random.
The research from a while back, showing that the crow can manufacture tools (not merely make use of available materials as tools) should also be repeated using this EEG test - we don't know where intelligence would be seated in an avian brain, as it doesn't have the layers normally associated with cognitive functions. However, if in both the case of the crow AND in the case of Alex, the same area of the brain shows up as doing "something" at the time intelligence is apparently being used, but that area is NOT doing anything when intelligence is NOT apparently being demonstrated, then we would be able to establish that these demonstrations have a definite non-background brain activity associated with them. A solid piece of evidence for a mechanism would go a long way to validating the claims.
A third approach is to create situations that are theoretical. For example, can Alex do anything with negative numbers? Can Alex count objects that were counted into a container but are no longer visible? If an object is cut into halves and then half is removed, will Alex correctly identify that there is less than there was originally (ie: something has been removed) even though the count of objects currently present is the same?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Five years ago, this parrot and its owner worked at MIT, and I interned with her lab. While it was amazing how smart Alex was, he really was a big jerk. Really. When we were trying to train one of the two other parrots, he'd sometimes throw out the wrong answers. The stupider birds would repeat Alex's answers, and therefore not get any nuts. I swear, Alex thought this was hilarious. That's why it does not surprise me at all that this bird proved he knew the concept of none during a temper tantrum.
You misspelled "You"...
Seriously. That the bird learned to say "none" as in "none of the above" when asked which color block was bigger, and applied "none of the above" to a quantitative question, doesn't mean it "grasps the concept of zero." He's got the concept of "no correct choice," which is cool, but it's just another element of his answer vocabulary, along with red, four, and big.
Let me know when the bird goes "SQUAWK! NEGATIVE FIVE!" The next logical step, when we're not whoring ourselves for media attention, is to see whether he does "all of the above."
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
Professor: Alex, tell me what color 4? Alex: Blue, no Yelllllllllloooooooooooooooowww
To do: Buy parrot with synesthesia. Feed it drugs.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club