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Picture-Sorting Dogs Show Human-Like Thought
ComputerDog writes "A new study shows they can sort photographs into categories in a similar way to humans. In experiments, dogs were shown photographs of a landscape and of a dog, and were rewarded if they selected the latter using 'a paw-operated computer touch-screen'. Later they were able to correctly categorize dogs shown on an unfamiliar background landscape. '' "
Picture-sorting Humans show Dog-like thought. Who are we to claim that dogs behave like humans? Humans behaving like dogs makes just as much sense.
Everything is subjective.
... the dogs are learning provide whatever results the higher-ups want them to provide, and are rewarded or punished accordingly?
Sounds like doing science for the U.S. government.
http://outcampaign.org/
Any animal that couldn't tell the difference between another animal and a rock or between different types of animals would soon become some carnivores dinner or fall off a cliff. Why would anyone (least of all supposedly intelligent researchers) find this ability to differentiate objects surprising? I'd imagine you'd probably have to go much further down the evolutionary tree to find an animal that couldn't do this.
Seeing eye dogs are more intelligent than the editor of this article.
Trackball users will be first against the wall.
At last! We've found a way to break Microsoft's new CAPTCHA! Who is better at telling a cat apart from a dog than a freaking DOG? Brilliant!
All I can say is finally! We are starting to break through the chains. We are a smart respectable species, one worthy of inclusion among the most intelligent of all. Now I know we have things to be ashamed of, like the toilet drinking, the vendettas against postal workers, the fetch syndrome, but we are working to improve ourselves. If we could just get a little help a long the way, we could make things so much better. This article is proof positive that we dogs are honorable. So please pay us respect as we pay you respect.
P.S. Thanks to all those who bow to their new photograph sorting, canine overlords, but it's really not necessary. We are a humble species and have no designs on taking over earth. Unless... a mailman should ever come into power, then of course we would have no recourse but violence. Until then, thank you but no thank you.
I got a catholic block.
Dogs can identify other dogs as dogs?!? OMG! What a mind-blowing revelation! OTOH, if you could get CATS to do that, I'd be impressed.
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
Now can the dogs determine the gender of the other dog ... without having to resort to sniffing the other dog's butt?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
if you punish them with tasers, right? That's how we treat humans anyway. It would be kinda nice if people were rewarded for being good instead. But punishment is a turn-on for authority figures. And it's cheaper. It's that power! Oh yeah!
What?
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
So they can be trained as Google's meta data creators - The Doogle powered by huffinpuffinsniffinclassifier!
Ill read one of these studies when they can get a dog to pass the Turing test until then it's just trained repetition which is not human like at all. (no matter how much high school teachers believe it to be)
I thought the linked article was going to show us some sort of new insight into the canine cognitive mechanisms. Nope. The article goes into zero detail and basically makes a statement equivalent to: "Yep, we've confirmed dogs can tell the difference between other dogs and a stop sign." Wow. Given the fact that dogs are highly social animals, capable of complex coordinated behavior like hunting in packs, that's such a shocking new insight.
Don't waste your time clicking on the TFA.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Of course they do. I'd go so far to say that most predators should show similar tendencies. We use our sight for a lot of things that the average mutt wouldn't use it's sight for, but at the most basic level, it has the exact same function for both of us. Predator/Prey identification, basic navigation, threat recognition and response.
The examples in the article are all "A dog can tell the difference between a landscape and a dog, even if the dog is on a landscape" which just shows that, like us, their eyes are drawn to the animal before the scenery. Classic response for an animal concerned with predator/prey responses. The mountains are nice, but you have to make sure of the animal first.
The main differences in visual perception would be dealing with stuff like ranging, depth perception, night-vision, day-vision, etc...All stuff to do with the actual hardware of the eye, not in the basic ability to distinguish between two similar objects.
This should be obvious from a dog's ability to tell one person from another. I've witnessed similar behavior in herbivores as well, so I'd not be surprised to find that they had the same sort of abilities, though it would be difficult to test.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
...computer scientists have found a new tool in the fight against image spam which runs on dog biscuits.
I saw a show on a Discovery-like channel in which during WW2 they successfully trained birds to recognize different makes of vessels and peck a steering panel in the right direction. They were trying to build a guided bomb. I don't remember why they canceled the program, but it was not due to the bird's skills.
Birds rely heavily on their eyesight to find or distinguish food and prey. Thus, they may be as good or better than dogs, who use mostly hearing and smell. Plus, dogs are partly color blind.
Table-ized A.I.
Even better, any animal that can't distinguish between members of its own species and rocks, would probably have a hard time passing such stupidity on to the next generation, no?
.. Cats refused to take the tests.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
...can't tell the difference between a dog and your leg.
One hopes that "Friederike Range at the University of Vienna" lives at the University of Vienna—with his parents—who subsequently helped him understand the difference between research and parlour tricks. If not, standards at European universities must be a great deal lower than we've been told.
Without any training at all, my dog can recognise other dogs on TV, though she gives a little bark rather than pushing a switch with her paw. I'm going to guess that it has more to do with being a pack animal than any kind of "reasoning ability".
Anyone suspect Friedrike is a member of PITA?
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Google Images engineers were swarming Silicon Valley pet stores today, buying every puppy they could find.
:D
The wise follow a damned path, for to know is to be forsaken.
I apologize for that behavior hiccup. It's just hard sometimes to control ourselves. Blame evolution not us. Your leg probably just looks "appetizing." I would suggest wearing wiskers on your pants leg or painting a picture of a rolled up newspaper on your pants leg. Either of those should alleviate the problem. Alternatively, you could try being the bigger person and speak to your dog, but I understand the deserved apprehension you might have about this.
I hope this has helped. BTW, I'm working on a gpl'ed evolutionary firmware update that moves the urge in question from the leg to the shoe, as this is less disturbing. I've tried to get rid of the trait altogether, but it's tough. A lot of the code is proprietary, and well God just doesn't like to give the darn stuff up. We're working on it though. Link to our project www.opensourceevolutionarydogimprovement.org.
I got a catholic block.
We need more semiotics taught in the schools.
The animals weren't responding to other dogs and landscapes. They were responding to _photographs_ of dogs and landscapes. And dealing with them accordingly.
Do not confuse the finger with the moon, Grasshopper.
Just asking.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Now I can teach my dog to sort my pr0n collection... :D
Maybe we can get dogs to scan the surveillance images from the 2008 Olympics. Surely it would be cheaper than IBM's Smart Surveillance System. Heck, I know a dog that will work 20 minutes just to lick the crumbs off someone's face.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Previously it was thought that dogs could only catagorize other dogs or people by the tried and true butt sniffing technique. This experiment shows that dogs, possibly due to their proximity to human DNA, have evolved more advanced ways to perceive others.
It's hotly debated whether mosquitos have transferred blood and DNA from humans to dogs to give them this power, as there are many other methods of transmission. Needless to say, the Bird Flu has helped that process greatly among many other species, but it has yet to be shown that is has factored into the human-dog element.
As for the dog to human question you posed... Have you seen furries?
"Anyone suspect Friedrike is a member of PITA?"
While I'm sure Friederike is indeed a Pain In The Ass, I didn't think membership in a society was required.
Very apropos typo.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Up until very recently, I always thought of dogs as generally being playful but incredibly stupid animals outside of spirit-breaking intensive training... at least, until we just got our recent dog, a pit bull/boxer mix. Unlike most dogs I've owned over the years, this one isthe first I known to preemptively develop strategies on the fly under ever-changing conditions. (In other words, she doesn't do the whole "repeat the same process over and over expecting a different result each time" thing.)
For example, take a piece of food being dropped on the floor just out of her reach behind a barrier. Most dogs would simply shove their snout under the barrier and root at it with their tongue for hours. With this dog though, she only did the snout rooting thing once, stopped, reached under the barrier with her paws trying to grip the food, stopped and finally removed the barrier itself to get at the food.
In my previous experience, only a cat would have ever made it to step 2.
Needless to say, the dog is now quite an escape artist, having deciphered how to use doors, removing collars like houdini and bypassing six foot tall chain-link fences.
8==8 Bones 8==8
...we already know that they have exhibited the ability to distinguish images on paper while playing poker.
Too bad the wagging tail is a dead giveaway tell.
The project to which you are referring was the work of Skinner, and called Project Pigeon. It was canceled.
On the other hand, virtually the same experiment as the one conducted with dogs was conducted with pigeons, in 1964, by Herrnstein and Loveland. So, someone beat you to it. =)
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Can herbivores distinguish humans. Yes. Horses do it. They tend to have a one-on-one relationship with humans. Probably camels are similar.
I did think the news article was particularly bad. We have a pet bunny which thumps if a cat is nearby. Any cat, even new ones, any shadings. (Bunnies are colour blind.) So it has an abstract concept of a medium sized threat that it can afford to watch and warn. Birds, humans, trees, etc are ignored. The cat can be crouched behind a tree or moving, and at any angle. Programming that capacity into a computer would be a nasty problem.
The research might make sense if they worked for a TV company, and were working towards selling toys to rich owners. Then you get Negreponte to design a drool proof screen with chewable edges. Sell them in pairs, one for the owner.
Try with cats. They can eventually teach you to respond to a word or two in their language ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I, for one, welcome our four legged canine overlords.
...welcome our new picture-sorting, human-like thought showing canine overlords.
To hell with iPhoto etc., these doggies help us to rid ourselves of one massive problem: those countless digital photographs we never have time to browse through! We might finally get some printed on paper!
Flash! New barking to English translator heralds new era in call center outsourcing!
My brother taught our parents' cat to play fetch. She loved it, in fact.
It's a bit harder than teaching tricks to a dog, because, well, the cat doesn't have the reflex to try to please the alpha at all cost. Although stray cats do form packs, they hunt separately and being the alpha is more like "first advisor" than anything like a "master."
So, well, the whole trick is that you have to keep the cat's attention by other means. Making it all a game is a good start, for example, because cats love to play. (But also eventually have enough of it, so you have to know when to stop. You don't want it to turn into torture.) Various kinds of rewards also help.
Punishment doesn't work well with cats, and doubly so when trying to make them do something. As I was saying, being the alpha is more of a first among equals status. So punishing a cat won't make it try harder to please you, it'll just nuke all interest in whatever you're trying to make it do.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A dog can find a dog in a two-dimensional landscape photograph.
In an experiment far removed from the ordinary way in which he experiences his world - and do it with no other sensory or behavioral cues.
That does not strike me as an insignificant achievement.
It would be interesting to know if a dog could recognize a painting of a dog, a sculpture, a cartoon or caricature.
Even more interesting, perhaps, if he could sort the results. Recognize different breeds of dogs. Recognize that one dog appears in several pictures.
If for one welcome our new dog overlords...
:)
Or how about:
Now imagine a beowulf cluster of them...
At least I think I'm funny
No kitty, this is my pot pie!
Scientist teach new trick to an old dog. Wow!
Dogs think they are stupid little people. Cats think people are big stupid cats.
Dogs have Masters. Cats have Staff...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
What appears to have been missed in all the comments here is that this wasn't just dogs recognizing other dogs. Dogs, as a whole, use far more of their senses than we do to gather information about themselves and other individuals. The dogs in question were being shown flat, 2D images of dogs. We have all probably seen dogs react to movement or sound on television, as if they understood the image they were seeing minus the smells of the thing. This was a static image, no sound, and no smell. How it is human-like is that they can fall back to just eyes alone, instead of the sense-rich environment they normally operate within. They don't even need movement to separate the image from the background and, further still, can repeatedly show aptitude in categorizing these images.
Wow. A study proving that dogs can discriminate between things and make decisions.
No doubt owners of sheep-herding dogs everywhere will be greatly relieved.
Good thing for all these science-fair-level studies that most of the important problems are already solved.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
So then, how come dogs still hump human legs if they can tell the difference?
Help Me! I'm trapped in the tubes! Oh noes! Here comes a internet!
It's well known outside the scientific community that all men are dogs, and all women are bitches, so the similarities are to be expected.
Yet another example of taxpayer money wasted on rediscovering the obvious.
I have a 3 year old Lab/Pit mix. When he was a puppy he used to charge the TV snarling and barking if another dog showed up on the set.
He would sniff the air and not pickup their scent which would calm him somewhat. It was still fun to watch him try to 'defend' his territory against the invaders.
The interesting thing was, that he would cease barking and putting on a show the moment the channel changed to something that was less threatining to him.
Bought the ticket, taking the ride.
My dog growing up (a miniature collie) was raised by a cat who had lost her kittens (to the CO gas chamber). She used a litter box, or buried her business when relieving herself outside. She wouldn't go in lawns (too hard to dig), but looked for leaf or sand covered areas.
Point taken, and I probably didn't explain well enough. Bully or not, the alpha cat can't really make any other cat _do_ anything. He (or she) may call dibs on this and that, but that's about the whole extent of it.
Wolves (and therefore dogs) have the concept of "I must do this because the alpha wants me to". Unless you want to challenge the alpha for leadership, you follow the gang, go hunt when the alpha wants to go hunt, etc. And if the alpha is pissed off at you, your options are appease him or challenge for leadership. Outside of a certain age and/or extraordinary circumstances, they tend to go with the former. The "I'll just stay out of his way" way out doesn't really exist, because the pack is hard-coded to stay together.
Cats don't have that concept, and are more likely to take ways out like "I'll just stay out of his way" or "screw this, I'll go find another gang" if things just don't work out. That's what I'm trying to say.
Basically, you can teach a dog tricks with punishments. You can't teach a cat anything that way.
It doesn't mean that cats simply can't be trained at all, it just means that the ever popular macho-retard way of "I'll show him who's boss" doesn't work that way with cats. That's all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Otherwise, they are very hard to tell from rocks
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
I hate to be the bleeding-heart liberal here, but I can see this expanding quickly into Matrix-like farms of captive dogs (birds? cats? -whatever has the best performance/cost ratio I'd think) who are fed thousands of images a day to sort-for-food.
I can imagine these facilities as being very out-of-country and very sub-par in terms of quality of life. The truth is that neural nets are just better at some types of analysis than others, and animals are a really really cheap form of self-contained, self-ordering neural nets with zero development cost.
Lets hope (strong)AI research gets up to speed before we see fidonet take on a new sinister meaning.
Another good one is "monkey in the middle". Two humans sit 10 or 20 feet apart, with a small plush toy. One of the humans makes the plush toy wiggle like a small mammal, and peep temptingly from behind his leg or back. The cat crouches low to the ground, his tail lashing with small movements, and his eyes shifting back and forth. When you're least expecting it he springs, and if he caught you off guard, grabs the toy with his claws and stalks triumphantly with it in his teeth and drops it in the middle. The other human then takes the toy and makes it wiggle. If the human has managed to stay focused when the cat leaps, he tosses the toy over the cats head to the other human. The cat then leaps high into the air in an attempt to intercept it - often succeeding.
I have a neutered male cat named "BeBe". That's because he has a bb in his behind, put there by an obviously non-animal lover, who was handy with a Red Rider BB Gun.
Now, on the the intelligent part...
He is constantly on the lookout for "enemy cats" that want to move in on his territory. So, he has no problem with that normal cat function.
Food gathering...
Open the Refrigerator, or try and make something to eat, and he suddenly appears, telling you that he is a good cat, and deserves some of whatever you are fixing. Gets in the way, you have to step over him.
He gets "dry" cat food, it keeps, since he won't eat anything that has "Yesterday" written on it, even if it is still tasty. Mice, Rats and Squirrels are not food, they are something he kills to bring to you to bolster his case that he is, indeed, a "good cat". Still wants whatever you are having for dinner tonight.
Picture sorting?, well I didn't want to mention this, but he has a unique method for sorting the Sunday newspaper according to the advertisement flyers therein for Office Depot, Circuit City, and others that might be hawking Big Screen Televisions, or his personal favorite, those external USB Hard Drives. He's still having real difficulty telling the 160 GB ones from the 250 GB ones, but he and I are working on it. Biggest problem he seems to have is holding the Sharpie Permanent Marker pen that he likes to use to circle the Drives that he thinks I need to take a closer look at, perhaps doing some online research, to uncover any apparent bugs that any may have, that would affect the overall quality of the product. Time and Time again, BeBe has given me a "cat-o-gram" concerning the Per-GB cost factor. Big problem in the Cat World, having ones master pay too much for a given Techno-Toy, only to short the budget for necessary Veterinary care, yearly vaccinations including annual physical exams, intestinal worm tests, heartworm tests, and the all important annual wellness screens.
The Method, You Say?
1. Prepare his litter pan with newspaper advertisement flyers.
2. Wait.
3. Your results will be ready in the morning.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
It's all in the wrist. Take a fencers stance, with the chair in your leading hand and the whip in the rearmost hand. Keep your shoulders and wrist relaxed in your whip arm, and give it a gentle flick forward like you're fishing. Then give it a gentle but rapid flick and CRACK! Smack that cat! Remember to keep the chair raised but try not to tense up - you'll need to be relaxed when the cat disobeys and leaps towards you, if you're tense you won't react in time. CRACK! CRACK! that's how we deal with that.
And they don't need a slime-operated touch screen computer to help them out!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
My mother has a maltese terrier/poodle cross that she's had for years, and is utterly obsessive about...I've always said that the main reason why she loves it so much is because it is able to relate to her intellectually.
;)
The single main reason why I've always hated canines myself isn't because of a lack of intelligence...on that score, they're fine. Said intelligence however is hamstrung by a tendency towards chronic emotional codependency. People call that loyalty, when in reality in most cases it's just that the dog's a wimp.
I'm a cat person. Put a cat's food down, give it a small amount of attention once in a while, and the rest of the time it will do its' own thing and leave me alone. If I could find a dog like that, my opinion on them might change.
Dogs know when other dogs are on TV. Cats know when other animals are on TV. They even sell Cat-Sitter and Dog-Sitter DVDs, and they work because Dogs and Cats have these things called "eyes" that allow them to see shit, and with these eyes, they are able to differentiate between say, a dog on TV, an open doorway, and a wall. Please stop wasting my god damned money. Please?
This research would probably not be necessary if we didn't have so many conservative - oh, use the non-euphemism, backward - elements in our society who still believe that human beings are different from other animals because the pink unicorn sprinkled them with magic oofle dust, and that's why we can think and they can't. Intelligent people in the 18th Century were already familiar with the idea of a graduation of capacity throughout the animal kingdom (the Great Chain of Being), but the religious fundies didn't like it. In fact, the whole denial of the plurality of worlds, of evolution, of the essential similarity of different mammalian families, and of the antiquity of the Universe is, I believe, a mindset peculiar to American protestants. The war in Iraq is being fought between two sides both of whom want to make a holy book more important in explaining the Universe than science. That should scare the rest of us.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
From TFA: "this is the first time we've taught them an abstract concept - 'a dog'"
I'm not so sure 'dog' is such an abstract concept to dogs. Have you ever seen the way a dog reacts to seeing another across the street?
Ori always said that dogs are just People in a Dogs body. Imagine you have a dog body, when you try to talk a bark comes out of your longish mouth. and you're running around on 4 all day. So how would you be? Exactly! like a dog.
Little surprise to anyone who has trained dogs, specially retrievers. They have very good sight recall and of course even better smell recall/use. Retriever hunt tests test a dog's sight memory. With no training, many dogs will reason their way to a fallen bird by going around areas of tall grass, brush, etc. Silly humans, though, then train and grade them on their ability to blindly push their way through these things in order to keep a straight line.
In 1972, I took a Psychology of Learning course at MIT. We had a guest lecture
:-)
from a grad student (at Harvard I think) where they were training pigeons to recognize pictures of pretty girls in a variety of locations, backgrounds, etc.
The pigeons were reliably miscatagorizing a single photo as a positive. When the researchers looked more closely at the photo, they discovered that there was indeed an attractive woman in the photo that they had failed to notice...
It occurs to me that all those security guards watching CCTV cameras could be replaced by flocks of pigeons if we could just train them to look for suspicious activities
Some animals seem to be evolving to the next level. What about us? We seem to have reached a plateau and entered an evolutionary blind alley.
Now my dogs are going to want a touchscreen!!
sic transit gloria mundi
I'm in ur computer, sorting ur picturez!
I wonder if rooms full of dogs could be trained to recognize stupidity? Maybe they could be trained to edit YouTube and Slashdot comments?
(Could you imagine a Beowoof cluster...?)
welcome our new four-legged picture sorting overlords!