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Mathematical Parrot Reveals His Genius With Posthumous Paper

Posted by Soulskill on from the math-is-for-the-birds dept.

ananyo writes "Even in death, the world's most accomplished parrot continues to amaze. The final experiments involving Alex – a grey parrot trained to count objects – have just been published (abstract). They show that Alex could accurately add together Arabic numerals to a sum of eight, and correctly add three small sets of objects, putting his mathematical abilities on par with (and maybe beyond) those of chimpanzees and other non-human primates."

2 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Alex is Dead? by Relic+of+the+Future · · Score: 4, Informative

    It was (you insensitive clod).

    --
    Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
  2. Re:Sea animals? by miknix · · Score: 4, Informative

    How do dolphins and octopuses rank? I tried a search w.r.t. octopuses but didn't find anything (and wikipedia has nothing about it).

    Octopuses are the smartest invertebrates on Earth. I do sparrow fishing as hobby and they don't stop amazing me, from their ability to deploy decoy legs able to walk alone, annoying ink jets and their fantastic camouflage they are pretty good stealing items too! They should join thepiratebay!
    (it's a joke, I know the difference between stealing and copying)