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Baby Chicks Have Innate Mathematical Skills
Hugh Pickens writes "Chicks can add and subtract small numbers shortly after hatching, says Rosa Rugani at the University of Trento. Rugani reared chicks with five plastic containers of the kind found inside Kinder chocolate eggs. This meant the chicks bonded with the capsules, much as they do with their mother, making them want to be near the containers as they grew up. In one test, the researchers moved the containers back and forth behind two screens while the chicks watched. When the chicks were released into the enclosure, they headed for the screen obscuring the most containers, suggesting they had been able to keep track of the number of capsules behind each by adding and subtracting them as they moved. It is already known that many non-human primates and monkeys can count, and even domestic dogs have been found to be capable of simple additions but this is the first time the ability has been seen in such young animals, and with no prior training in problem solving of any kind."
They can smell plastic/chocolate residue really good.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Yah, like geeks can get any type of chick, Turing or otherwise, turned on.
rewriting history since 2109
Imagine a bewolf cluster of these.
And if you need more power, you just need to pick up more chicks.
how long until
can they count before they're hatched?
Hopefully these guys work out better than ducklings, because it was too easy to get stuck in inf loops with ducklings
http://xkcd.com/537/
Chicks dig math. Slashdot rejoices until they RTFA.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
What's to say the chicks just aren't recognizing a simple pattern? Just because they could see that the larger group had moved from one side to the other doesn't mean they were counting, it just means they recognize the pattern, and went to the one they were familiar with.
Kinder Surprise isn't sold in the United States because FDA food safety regulations prohibit the importation or sale of candy that encloses something inedible. The closest counterpart in the United States is probably Wonder Ball, a Nestle product with hard candy inside a hollow ball of milk chocolate.
Associating a certain screen with more incidents of objects recently disappearing behind them doesn't necessarily indicate the ability to add or subtract. The idea that moving the objects back and forth is confusing to the chicks and thus requires math to sort out the answer might be a false assumption. If the chick is responding to the stimulus of objects disappearing behind a screen, and the effect of the stimulus is cumulative as more objects disappear behind the screen and the effect of this stimulus is strongest for the most recent stimuli and decreases over time I think that the result would be what is observed in the experiment. I think what is more interesting about this experiment is that the chicks have an innate sense of object permanence which is an ability human beings are not born with.
It's already proven that chicks can do math.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".