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“Horses don’t plan though[...]” Can you expand on this statement? While I have no way to “debug” a horse’s brain in real-time, my experiences suggest they abso

by Mtinie 7y ago

“Horses don’t plan though[...]” Can you expand on this statement? While I have no way to “debug” a horse’s brain in real-time, my experiences suggest they absolutely conduct complex decision-making while engaging in activities. Two examples which immediately come to mind where I believe I see evidence of “if this, then that” planning behavior: 1. Equestrian jumping events; horses often balk before a hurdle 2. Herds of wild horses reacting to perceived threats and then using topographic and geographic features to escape the situation.

username90 7y ago
The context was this quote: > intelligence is mostly about getting through the next 10-30 seconds of life without screwing up In this context horses don't plan or have much capacity for shared learning, at least not as far as I know. Quote: “This study indicates that horses do not learn from seeing another horse performing a particular spatial task, which is in line with most other findings from social learning experiments,” https://thehorse.com/16967/navigating-barriers-can-horses-watch-and-learn/ https://thehorse.com/16967/navigating-barriers-can-horses-wa...
- Mtinie 7y ago
  Thank you for the context and new resources to learn from.
- LanceH 7y ago
  In my experience they learn to open gates. They certainly aren't trained to do this, but learn from watching people or each other. They will also open a gate to let another horse out of their stall which I would count as some form of planning. Beyond that I can't think of anything in all the years around them. They can manage to be surprised by the same things every single day.
  - riversflow 7y ago
    >They can manage to be surprised by the same things everyday. Sounds like most human beings, given an unpleasant stimulus, for example a spider.
- visarga 7y ago
  > intelligence is mostly about getting through the next 10-30 seconds of life without screwing up This is probably a variant of Andrew Ng's affirmation that ML can solve anything a human could solve in one second, with enough training data. But intelligence actually has a different role. It's not for those repeating situations that we could solve by mere reflex. It's for those rare situations where we have no cached response, where we need to think logically. Reflex is model-free reinforcement learning, and thinking is model-based RL. Both of them are necessary tools for taking decisions, but they are optimised for different situations.

by Mtinie 7y ago

username90 7y ago

The context was this quote: > intelligence is mostly about getting through the next 10-30 seconds of life without screwing up In this context horses don't plan or have much capacity for shared learning, at least not as far as I know. Quote: “This study indicates that horses do not learn from seeing another horse performing a particular spatial task, which is in line with most other findings from social learning experiments,” https://thehorse.com/16967/navigating-barriers-can-horses-watch-and-learn/ https://thehorse.com/16967/navigating-barriers-can-horses-wa...

Mtinie 7y ago
Thank you for the context and new resources to learn from.
LanceH 7y ago
In my experience they learn to open gates. They certainly aren't trained to do this, but learn from watching people or each other. They will also open a gate to let another horse out of their stall which I would count as some form of planning. Beyond that I can't think of anything in all the years around them. They can manage to be surprised by the same things every single day.
- riversflow 7y ago
  >They can manage to be surprised by the same things everyday. Sounds like most human beings, given an unpleasant stimulus, for example a spider.
visarga 7y ago
> intelligence is mostly about getting through the next 10-30 seconds of life without screwing up This is probably a variant of Andrew Ng's affirmation that ML can solve anything a human could solve in one second, with enough training data. But intelligence actually has a different role. It's not for those repeating situations that we could solve by mere reflex. It's for those rare situations where we have no cached response, where we need to think logically. Reflex is model-free reinforcement learning, and thinking is model-based RL. Both of them are necessary tools for taking decisions, but they are optimised for different situations.