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Nothing would seem to stop the crows from throwing rocks into the machine instead of the pieces of garbage that we want them to pick up.
by oakwhiz 8y ago
Nothing would seem to stop the crows from throwing rocks into the machine instead of the pieces of garbage that we want them to pick up.
- devoply 8y agoMachine learning to the rescue. Actually do a image analysis on each piece of rubbish deposited. You can use machine learning to induce learning in crows. Just imagine this sort of thing being in every park, it could significantly cut down on litter. Who knows maybe we can get birds to weed our yards for us using these sorts of methods.
- oakwhiz 8y agoI guess you could have a higher "spot price" in peanuts for particular types of litter that recover the most value or cause the most trouble.
- OscarCunningham 8y agoThere's a similar story about dolphins who were trained to pick up any litter in their pool and give it to their trainer in return for fish. The dolphins began to hide the trash and tear off pieces so that they could get multiple fish.
- kiallmacinnes 8y agoThat's pretty impressive! I wonder how long it took them to figure this out :)
- diggan 8y agoAlso shows the dangers of optimizing for metrics without thinking really hard about what kind of metric your optimizing for and what kind of side-effects it can have.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- csomar 8y agoWould like to read more about that story?
- misnome 8y agoI think it’s this article, which I remember seeing here a few times: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.sci...
- barking 8y agoSame business model as DeBeers, control the supply of rubbish/diamonds.
- OscarCunningham 8y agoPresumably the trainers stopped rewarding the dolphins once they realised what they were up to.