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Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
- samatman 5y ago> Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of zero. No they didn't. All human cultures I'm aware of have, at least, the concepts of none, one, two, three, and many. They all understand that none is exactly one less than one, and most of them (but not all!) understand that there's no natural limit to the counting numbers, and have a way of expressing some amount of those numbers. But zero is a human invention. It comes from India (probably, might be China) and is probably related to the abacus: but the abacus came to the West without the zero, which followed it later. Zero is both a symbol for null and a placeholder used for writing numbers modulus the radix. This is a conceptually powerful force multiplier, making all arithmetic operations dramatically easier. It also lets us make up a "name" for any integer we want. We can just add more zeroes; when this gets awkward we can start counting the zeroes using exponential notation, and when that becomes inconvenient we can develop ↑ notation, which gets us further than we really need for any practical purpose. It should be obvious that crows neither know about this nor care. It's interesting and cool that they understand none, but so did the Ancient Greeks, who had no idea about zero and could have gotten much further in mathematics if they did.
- NoOneNew 5y agoI watched a thing about how Koko the guerrilla didnt really understand sign language. They showed extended, unedited clips of koko fumbling and just brute forcing a whole series of signs until she got a treat. A lot of her "understanding", along with other apes undergoing the same treatment, were all heavy interpretations of the "researchers". She never actually learned a real version of sign language either. It was made up by "researchers" who never learned sign language either. Honestly, when you watch the videos, it feels like watching the unedited videos of those tv psychics who fumble at cold readings. Cherry picking editing does wonders as "scientific proof". Moral of the story, after reading this article, I agree with you. This isnt as groundbreaking or interesting as it seems. I'm pretty sure they're finding patterns that dont exist and are over rationalizing. Of course an animal would have the concept of none, a little, a bit more and a lot, especially when applied to the idea of scavenging for food. Appling the idea of mathematical concepts to them, with little support just feels like a cheap attempt for grant money. Which, surprise surprise, was the same sham pulled with Koko. That and some of these tests they talk about, either they're shit at describing them or even I would fail to prove I could count or do arithmetic.
- musingsole 5y ago> They showed extended, unedited clips of koko fumbling and just brute forcing a whole series of signs until she got a treat. ...what do you think human children are doing for the first ~4 years of their life? Also, different learning methods are used by the subject depending on their mood -- most importantly frustration -- and other context. Brute force learning tends to be the last stage before they're so frustrated they give up or become aggressive. It's also a common exploratory tactic. Teaching human sign language over a variant organically developed by the subject and team would have what advantage, exactly? It may be nominally more interesting to know a gorilla could adopt a purely human communication system -- very interesting. But it's also such a corner case of studying communication and particularly interspecies communication that to call it out as a problem is nothing more useful than a nitpick. We're coming from an age where all animals were by default assumed to be a sort of squishy -- sometimes tasty -- automaton. We have a long way to go in unlearning that particular arrogance. Assuming that intelligence can only be demonstrated in the purely human terms you seem to be looking for is just another vestige of that same arrogance.
- taeric 5y agoI think you are grossly underestimating how well kids can pick up sign language. Two year olds can easily pick up some basic sign use.
- musingsole 5y agoOk...2 instead of 4. I think you are grossly missing the point.
- taeric 5y agoApologies, I went fast on my post. My point was to tighten your numbers to strengthen your point. As it is, I feel lied to when folks say that it takes kids 4 or more years to get language.
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- elliekelly 5y agoUnrelated to animals, this really surprised me: > Moreover, he added, “When you look at the history of mathematics, it turns out that [zero] is an extreme latecomer in our culture as well.” Historical research finds that human societies didn’t begin to use zero as a number in their mathematical calculations until around the seventh century.
- crazygringo 5y agoThere are huge differences between zero as the concept of "none" (I had five cows and someone took them all away, how many do I have?), zero as a more formal integer value (e.g. solution to 2 + 7 - 4 + x = 5), zero as unit placeholder (e.g. 101 dalmations), and zero as a real number (on the continuum from positive to negative rationals and irrationals). When people make claims about "zero" they're essentially meaningless unless they specify which meaning of zero they're talking about.
- agumonkey 5y agoI really wonder how zero came to be, was it a need to homogenize the algebraic tools (we have nice operations and want to reify the 'nothing' dead end into something that can be kept chugging along) or something else /
- dragontamer 5y agoThe ancient Greeks understood division and reciprocals from the perspective of inverting multiplication. I have to imagine that the multiplicative identity (1) and additive identity (0) were also known at that time. They really figured out everything else there is to integer-based math. They failed at irrational numbers (like sqrt(2)). But their mastery of integers was outstanding. Perhaps 0 wasn't used on the number-representation yet, but the concept had to have been known.
- throwaway192874 5y agoThere's a whole book on this history of zero you may enjoy called "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" that goes into the whole story of how it came to be including problems and resistance along the way (mods I promise I'm not here to shill this book but people keep wondering about the history and that's a great resource that I like XD)
- pmdulaney 5y agoDo the birds and the bees actually count? Or is there some more innate/intuitive process involved. I doubt I could tell the difference between 9 or 10 dots on a page without actually counting them. Many years ago there was a study involving crows, as I recall. N, starting at 2, researchers went into a blind, then N-1 came out. They had to get up to N = 13 before they fooled the birds into thinking the blind was actually empty.
- wavefunction 5y agoBut then what is counting? Is it what we (humans, birds and bees) use to abstract reality?
- pmdulaney 5y agoFor us humans it is a process of establishing a one-to-one relationship between objects and a long-since-memorized sequence of words that requires just one member of the sequence to be remembered in order to represent the number of objects.
- wavefunction 5y agoI think that's part of it to be sure. However I can readily account nine items versus ten items depending on how they are organized. We are counting when we are enumerating, however that occurs in man, bird or bee it seems to me.
- uuddlrlr 5y agoThere's a term for it but I can't easily find it. https://neurosciencenews.com/neuron-counting-9898/ https://neurosciencenews.com/neuron-counting-9898/ This article goes into it and mentions "numerical distance effect", which looks appropriate but not what I remember. I did learn that people who play first person shooters can usually recognize more objects at once instantly; 6 or 7 instead of a more typical 4 or 5, if I recall correctly. They used number of grapes in a hand to measure.
- fossuser 5y agoThere was a funny related example of the African Gray parrot Alex surprising the trainers by silently counting in his head. They were training a younger parrot and trying to get the younger parrot to count to two by tapping twice. Alex overheard the training and got impatient with the other bird. He yelled out “two” and then after two more taps “four” and then “six”. The trainers were just expecting “two” each time. It was this book: https://www.amazon.com/Are-Smart-Enough-Know-Animals/dp/0393353664/ https://www.amazon.com/Are-Smart-Enough-Know-Animals/dp/0393... The book is interesting and goes into how humans need to set up experiments properly to actually test non-human animals in ways that make sense (rather than just in some biased human way). One quick example was testing tool use, the original experimenters left branches on the ground for the monkeys to use, but the monkeys can’t pick stuff up that’s flat on the ground since they’re normally in trees (their hands don’t have thumbs that move that way). When he redid the experiment with the tool raised they were able to grab and use it. Same author also wrote Chimpanzee Politics and did this great video experiment: https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg
- symstym 5y agoYou may appreciate this poignant sci-fi short story/video that references and expands on the story of Alex: https://vimeo.com/195588827 https://vimeo.com/195588827
- fossuser 5y agoLooks like the Ted Chiang short story? Thanks - it’s great. I’d recommend his other stories too if you like that one. I’ve also got a bunch of links to other stories I’ve liked here too: https://zalberico.com/about/ https://zalberico.com/about/
- kwhitefoot 5y agoEven more affecting to me was Alex asking what colour he was: https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/11/27/alex-the-parrot-is-the-only-non-human-to-ask-the-existential-question-what-color-am-i-2/ https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/11/27/alex-the-parrot-is...
- lngnmn2 5y agoIs there a website where this kind of bullshit does not reach the front page? Animals cannot, in principle, use abstract concepts because it requires language and brain centers which never been evolved in these branches of evolution. Also counting is an association (pairing) with instances of an abstract concept of a number which requires a language and a culture. Okay, may be some visual cues, but not zero. Please cut the crap
- dang 5y agoCould you please stop breaking the site guidelines so we don't have to keep banning you? If you'd make your substantive points thoughtfully, we'd appreciate it. The problem with the way you're posting is that it pushes the forum further in the crap direction which is already the internet default, which we're trying to stave off here—not for moral reasons but simply because it's uninteresting. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=stave%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- lngnmn2 5y agoHow does one show a flaw in a proof or a logical argument? A single contradiction or a plain error is enough. This is the core of science - a single flaw is enough to throw away the whole argument. Not just that, having the lack of basic understanding been exposed, a "scientist" should be marked as incompetent. Yes, you systematically ban people like me and have narcissistic imposters and bullshitters instead. Millions of them. This is the consequence of eradication of anonymity and heavy policing to comply with current idiotic pseudo-intellectual narrative of safe spaces or how do you justify it. The next step would be enforced gender-neutral pronouns or something equally nonsensical.
- dang 5y agoAn internet forum isn't a math journal. You're leaving out the possibility, and the necessity, of relating to other people. Perhaps this thread would help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162386.
- Razengan 5y agoIs it even possible to actually “count” without using some form of language in your head?
- perfmode 5y ago> This is an odd claim —- based on the neural network experiment (which showed that gradient descent applied to object detection problems naturally results in the development of “counting” signals),
- nwallin 5y agoI haven't counted them, but are a lot of machine learning papers from the past few decades where they've taught neural networks to count things.
- avnigo 5y agoReminds me of this fascinating Numberphile video [0] on how brains, human or otherwise, count. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sPBCxlDQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sPBCxlDQQ
- protomikron 5y agoThanks, that's an interesting video.
- the-dude 5y agoI have always assumed one of our cats could count. Our cats got the desert plates at the end of our meal. One of the cats left when he had them all, while other cats kept waiting ( or begging ). Sometimes they needed to be shown there were none left. But that one cat, no matter how many people were at the table, always seemed to know when he had them all.
- Finnucane 5y agoIf I don't give my cats the usual number of treats, they look at me like they know they're being cheated. I never thought they could count, but I figured they have a sense of relative quantity ('enough', 'more', 'less' and so on).
- jaclaz 5y agoIt depends on cats, I have had a few in the past and currently have one that always tries to convince me when I get home that for some reasons my wife forgot to feed her. Clearly she has clear the negative concept of "not enough".
- srean 5y agoMy dog just does a protest sit-in when I do that. He wouldnt move till he gets his due number (two). I can fool him by splitting a treat into two, so seems he is counting rather than going by mass.
- krylon 5y agoThe more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it. I recently saw a video of a seagull that entered a grocery store through the automatic door, picked up a (non-transparent) bag of potato chips (or something similar), walked out again, opened the bag and ate the chips. Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works, and that there is food inside these shiny bags. When let that sink in, I was thoroughly impressed. I knew seagulls are very opportunistic eaters, but I did not know they were capable of this degree of intelligence and planning. I wonder how much more there is discover, and how that might affect how we view and more importantly treat animals. We might have to rethink our relationship with them.
- ducktective 5y agoI think this is parent's seagull: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMVKymf9yA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMVKymf9yA There is another one fancying cold sandwiches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZZ822Za-nE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZZ822Za-nE
- tomjupiter 5y agoI thought it might be this[0], which surprised me how clearly the bird seems to know what it's doing is "wrong" and how it tries to act unsuspecting. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/i69mu1/note_the_casual_entry_and_hurried_exit_this_is_an/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/i69mu1/no...
- krylon 5y agoThat's the one, yes! Amazing, aren't they? Walking around nonchalantly, like they own the place. ;-?
- agumonkey 5y agocrows do team work to figure out machines monkeys can team up to resolve non trivial coordinated tasks (vaguely related: gorillas still have the zero lag face recognition) beside not speaking, often when I look at animals, it feels that they got wiser than us.. they could do more smart things but they just coast.
- popctrl 5y agoThe idea that zero was "invented" at a certain time by recent humans and not in use until then has always seemed absolutely absurd to me. I will admit I haven't read deeply into it, but there's just no way people didn't have a concept for "none of a thing" until a couple millennia ago. One of the justifications used for this reasoning is "You don't go to the market and buy 0 fish". But all that tells us is: There's no reason to record buying 0 fish or owning 0 acres of land. Another justification given is the difficulty children experience with 0 - but we don't teach children to start counting with 0, so it makes sense that they would get tripped up there. I guess the argument sometimes seems to be that we didn't have a symbol for 0, and that this was somehow more confusing to adopt than other symbols? But if that's the case, then isn't claiming any culture "invented" zero the same as claiming a culture "invented" any concept they came up with a word for? I'd love to hear all the reasons I am wrong and stupid.
- martincmartin 5y agoHaving a concept of "none of a thing" is one thing. Abstracting that to a number is a different thing. Even today, when you ask someone "how many kids to you have," and they don't have any, they say "I don't have any," not "zero." In other words, they respond with a phrase, often one with a negation (not), instead of a number.
- DiggyJohnson 5y agoWhat if they're thinking "zero" but just don't have the word for it. I.e. what if this is just a linguistic deficit? Please err on the side of me understanding your question well.
- srean 5y agoEven the question whether one can 'think' of something without having a linguistic representation is a topic of active debate. My personal take is that its possible, predators plan ambush, but do they have a linguistic representation ? Its not clear that they do.
- jakear 5y agoArticle seems to resolutely believe that the entities 600MM+ years ago could not understand numbers and thus counting emerged recently many times over in parallel across a variety of species [1], but provides nothing to back up this claim ([2] is not supported beyond “an expert said). This is an odd claim —- based on the neural network experiment (which showed that gradient descent applied to object detection problems naturally results in the development of “counting” signals), it seems much more likely that for as long as beings have been interacting with their surroundings they’ve been able to count, and any modern slight differences in counting infrastructure are simply a divergence of the original counting machinery rather than the same thing being invented over and over by evolution in many different ways, but only recently (for some reason..?) > The fact that those three species are from diverse taxonomic groups — primates, insects and birds — suggests that certain numerical abilities have evolved over and over again throughout the animal kingdom. > Their last common ancestor “was [barely] able to perceive anything,” Avarguès-Weber said, much less count.
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- abecedarius 5y agoThis is the new bit, if you've already read about the basics of animal counting: > The crows mixed up a blank screen more often with images of a single dot than they did with images of two, three or four dots. Recordings of the crows’ brain activity during these tasks revealed that neurons in a region of their brain called the pallium represent zero as a quantity alongside other numerosities, just as is found in the primate prefrontal cortex. (I'm a little disgruntled about skimming a longish article to find this 2/3 of the way down.)
- xcambar 5y agoI agree. I have read it all to really learn not that much (animal cognition is a pet peeve of mine) until this paragraph. I don't know anymore if we should salute the efforts of the author to contextualize the news, to the detriment of the news itself, or I'd we should blame them for lengthening artificially the article... Probably a bit of both, as always. That being said, thanks for the summary of the article, great tl;dr; ;)
- OJFord 5y agoPet peeve?
- xcambar 5y agoOh no! Not a pet peeve! I always thought pet peeve meant a hobby, a specific point of interest, not something you dislike! Sorry for the mistake, I'm glad I've fixed this though! :D
- edgyquant 5y agoWhy do you hate animal cognition ?
- xcambar 5y agoOh no! Not a pet peeve! I always thought pet peeve meant a hobby, a specific point of interest, not something you dislike! Sorry for the mistake, I'm glad I've fixed this though! :D
- PontifexMinimus 5y agoMy cat certainly knows when there is zero food in his bowl.
- bobthechef 5y agoThere's a difference between having the concept of number and reacting to quantities or having expectations that are unmet. There is no need for abstract concepts. All animals (in the phylogenetic sense) other than ourselves perceive reality utterly concretely. I am not sure how these brain scans are supposed to really show otherwise. Show me an animal that can describe and argue and you will have my attention. For now, I only see signalling and expression, but no language showing signs of description and argumentation.
- excalibur 5y ago> Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero You know nothing, Jon Snow.
- rayrrr 5y agoMy understanding is that the crows in the Holy Crowman Empire have no knowledge whatsoever of zero, but the others do. ;)
- InvisibleCities 5y agoWhy are we so surprised that animals understand the concept of zero? Being hungry, searching for food, and finding nothing seems like as universal and visceral experience of zero as anything I can imagine. I don’t think it’s possible to evaluate food sources without some idea of what zero means.
- dougSF70 5y agoI would like to be reincarnated as a crow.
- b0rsuk 5y agoI clicked on the link for fun youtube and streamable videos. There were none. I'm sure (animal intelligence) researchers would be getting more grants if they put more effort into capturing some of these feats on video.
- b0rsuk 5y agoAccording to one book I read... Cheyennes divide birds into 3 groups: plain, great and sacred. They count magpie in the sacred ones :-). There's a magpie on my fence as I'm typing this. They like magpies because they're smart, talkative, they announce guests, they live close to humans. Australian "magpie" is not even a corvid.
- 3opaH 5y ago"An understanding of numbers is often viewed as a distinctly human faculty ... sets us apart from all other animals." Then it goes into animals that count. My, oh my. Mom hen knows if a chick is missing. Can she count? Of course she can, how else would she know it. But show me a chicken that will abstract number 5. As 5 chicks, 5 pieces of grain, 5 drops of rain or 5 whatever, so that five becomes an object by itself. I thought it is common knowledge that our ability to abstract is what separates us from animals, but seeing people interested in horses and crows able to count I am starting to doubt it really is so. Animals (mammals at least) feel like us...love, anger, pleasure...they might not hate as us though. Animals can build...spiders, beavers and so on. They can think, communicate, count, have social structures, dream... It is ability of our intellects for abstraction that differs us from them. Animals can not abstract numbers, they miss faculty for it, whatever that faculty is.
- msravi 5y agoNone of the experiments in the article seem indicative of animals/crows understanding the concept of zero as a symbol for nothing. All animals understand the concept of "none" or "not present", and can possibly count, but they don't necessarily map a symbol to represent absence. > The crows mixed up a blank screen more often with images of a single dot than they did with images of two, three or four dots. This can very well happen even if there is no understanding of zero as a symbol. You're looking for nothing, and the screen with 1 dot is almost that - in terms of the existing symbol occupying the least space, closest to nothing. Not evidence of a mapping of nothing to a symbol at all.