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There was this horse named Clever Hans whose trick was that you could give him a math problem and he would tap out the answer with his hoof. Of course, his powe
by bsza 5y ago
There was this horse named Clever Hans whose trick was that you could give him a math problem and he would tap out the answer with his hoof. Of course, his powers were fake, but the way he actually did it is brilliant.
When the number of taps approached the correct answer, his trainer became excited. Hans picked up on this and stopped right when the trainer's excitement reached its peak. The trainer had no idea this was happening. He was fooled by a horse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fossuser 5y agoAnd there’s that famous computer vision story of a model that was supposed to detect tanks in images but actually just detected whether or not it was sunny (all the tank pictures in the training set were sunny, non tanks overcast). Children will make similar classification errors when learning too. None of this means that it’s not possible they can also learn counting, but just that scientists need to be clever about experimental design. The book goes into that.
- heretoruinurday 5y agoThe tank story is urban legend. https://www.gwern.net/Tanks https://www.gwern.net/Tanks
- fossuser 5y agoThanks - good to know the truth around that specific story. The example and class of failure (even if it didn't actually occur in this specific case) is still the point I was trying to make. Those types of failures can happen - even if the specifics of the tank example are urban legend.