[HN Gopher] Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
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Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim
Author : kposehn
Score : 99 points
Date : 2022-11-05 18:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| recuter wrote:
| Well, this makes them more capable than some project managers.
| frithsun wrote:
| One more threat to javascript developers trying to make it in
| today's economy.
| mmplxx wrote:
| Seems to me that more is at stake here for lisp developers.
| youguyssuck wrote:
| This actually proves that crows are smarter than JavaScript
| developers
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Reminds me of the "game journalist vs. pigeon" video:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vfIn9OqhZWo
| tanseydavid wrote:
| I struggled with the exact same move in Cuphead training. I
| had the exact same reaction as the game journalist.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Were you not able to read the instructions on the wall?
| tanseydavid wrote:
| My immense frustration was largely due to the fact that
| yes (of course) I was able to read the short instructions
| on the wall.
|
| What I could not do (for more than 3 minutes straight,
| iirc) was execute those instructions in the proper manner
| to get Cuphead to do what I wanted.
|
| disclaimer: I am old as hell and phased out of any
| serious video gaming in the era of 2D, 2 button and an
| 8-way joysticks
| aulin wrote:
| now they just need to learn memoization and they're ready to
| master the FAANG interview
| tengbretson wrote:
| Meh. Until they can figure out a stack-safe trampoline, forget
| about it.
| harrykeightley wrote:
| def caw(): print("Crow on the tower of Hanoi say...")
| caw() caw()
| agumonkey wrote:
| cawrecursive scheme
| bbarnett wrote:
| All that work, and with no rest(sleep)?
| uranium wrote:
| Why is this evidence of recursion rather that evidence of
| recognition of symmetry? The sequences they show are all simple
| symmetrical ones, e.g. {()}.
| kragen wrote:
| NSFW!
| elcapitan wrote:
| "Crows demonstrate that crows are capable of recursion"
| yamrzou wrote:
| https://archive.ph/zLgN0
| perihelions wrote:
| Other thread:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454205 ( _" Crows found to
| be smarter than we think"_)
| JimBlackwood wrote:
| Kind of ironic, but the picture used seems to be of a raven - not
| a crow.
|
| Feathers on the beak are quite far out, the shape of the head
| isn't as "streamlined" and the top beak is more curved and
| longer. Or am I mistaken here?
| cercatrova wrote:
| > _Here 's the thing. You said a "jackdaw is a crow."_
| kzrdude wrote:
| I didn't read the paper but it talks about "Corvids (jays,
| jackdaws, crows and ravens)" first but it seems like they did
| experiments using carrion crows (Corvus corone corone).
| b3morales wrote:
| I believe the extended overhanging curved tip is just the sign
| of a captive crow that is, sadly, not taking good care of its
| beak. Raven beaks are generally much broader.
| [deleted]
| hoosieree wrote:
| Not surprising. Crows around here are always making a Racket.
| tasuki wrote:
| So are cauliflower and broccoli?
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Linguistic recursion, rather than algorithmic recursion (?)
| adrian_b wrote:
| Yes, it appears that they have taught the crows to write some
| kind of LISP-like expressions with nested parentheses, which is
| what is meant here by recursion.
| vintermann wrote:
| "They do not seem to possess anything similar to human language"
|
| They definitively have ways of telling each other things. Just
| how they do it and what the limits of it are, I guess we don't
| know.
|
| What I'd like to see is trying these tasks on a flock, rather
| than individual birds.
| zaidhaan wrote:
| > Adapting the protocol used in the 2020 paper, the team trained
| two crows to peck pairs of brackets in a center-embedded
| recursive sequence.
|
| > Two of the three monkeys in the experiment generated recursive
| sequences more often than nonrecursive sequences ...
|
| I'm no academic but aren't those extremely small sample sizes to
| make any reasonable deductions from? This looks to be even
| addressed in one of the papers cited...
|
| > While a sample size of two is not enough to infer that any crow
| in the population may generate center-embedded recursive
| sequences, we present a "proof of existence" showing that this
| cognitive capacity is, in principle, within the reach of carrion
| crows.[0]
|
| [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq3356
| zaidhaan wrote:
| Not sure why I got downvoted. If my assumption is wrong then
| I'd be really curious to hear from someone that knows better.
| goto11 wrote:
| It is unclear what your complaint is. As the second quote
| states, you only need a sample size of one to prove that a
| certain ability can exist. You just cant say much about how
| widespread the ability is.
| zaidhaan wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification. That seems fair, I suppose
| the title of the article gave me the impression that they
| were claiming such an ability would be widespread in all
| crows (despite the study being done on two carrion crows),
| when in fact it seems the intention was to state that the
| ability _can_ exist in any crow given that they proved it
| exists for those two specific crows.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Some scientists remain skeptical. Arnaud Rey, a senior
| researcher in psychology at the French National Center for
| Scientific Research, says the findings can still be interpreted
| from a simple associative learning standpoint--in which an animal
| learns to link one symbol to the next, such as connecting an open
| bracket with a closed one. A key reason, he explains, lies in a
| feature of the study design: the researchers placed a border
| around the closed brackets in their sets--which the authors note
| was required to help the animals define the order of the
| brackets. (The same bordered layout was used in the 2020 study.)
| For Rey, this is a crucial limitation of the study because the
| animals could have grasped that bordered symbols--which would
| always end up toward the end of a recursive sequence--were the
| ones rewarded, thus aiding them in simply learning the order in
| which open and closed brackets were displayed.
|
| Doing this seems to make this more of a linear problem than a
| recursive problem. Place all the non-bordered symbols. Then place
| all the bordered symbols in reverse order of the non-bordered
| ones.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I thought what followed was equally thought-provoking:
|
| "In Rey's view, the notion of "recursive processing" as a
| unique form of cognition is in itself flawed. Even in humans,
| he says, this capacity can most likely be explained simply
| through associative learning mechanisms..."
|
| AFAIK, this contrasts quite markedly with Chomsky's position
| that recursion is central to his universal grammar.
| jeffmcmahan wrote:
| Yes, as usual, our pop science writer with a dim
| understanding of the issue quotes critics of the Chomskyan
| paradigm (the study aims to falsify Chomsky's suspicion that
| a symbolic operation called "merge" gives humans a unique
| capacity for deep recursion) and for balance quotes _other_
| critics of the Chomskyan paradigm - and never do we hear from
| the syntacticians (who study recursive grammatical structure
| as a career).
| hairofadog wrote:
| I feed the crows cashews as I walk the dog, and I find their
| behavior fascinating.
|
| They "commute to work" each day. Crows all live in a community
| that they go home to each night, and then each morning they all
| come back to their specific areas, usually in pairs. If you're in
| a place where you see crows every day, it's almost certainly the
| same pair of crows you're seeing each day.
|
| Each pair has a strict territory. I don't know how it works in
| rural areas, but in my neighborhood the territories are
| demarcated by streets and cover one or two neighborhood blocks.
|
| They definitely recognize me and follow me for the peanuts.
| Usually they'll follow me from one block to the next, and another
| pair will come up and chase them off.
|
| They do seem to set aside their territorial fighting when there's
| a lot of food; a guy up the street from me throws ridiculous
| amounts of food onto his front lawn, like whole loaves of bread,
| to feed the birds (probably rats and coyotes too), and the crows
| all gather peacefully there every morning before heading back to
| their territories.
|
| I would love to know how they determine who gets what territory.
| I assume it's handed down; every year there's a month or so when
| the adolescents come out (they're a little bit ganglier and
| pester their parents for food all the time rather than foraging
| for it themselves) so I think they're there to learn the ropes.
| Are there crow dynasties that have owned certain city blocks for
| generations? How long do they last?
|
| Lots of interesting stuff to watch in the lives of crows.
| onos wrote:
| Which is it peanuts or cashews?
| hairofadog wrote:
| They prefer cashews but until the economy gets a little
| better it's peanuts.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Around where I live (southern New York), the crows seem to
| gather in groups of twenty or so as sunset approaches, and
| appear to be socializing (and making quite a lot of noise in
| the process.) There does not seem to be any fixed location
| where this happens, and it seems different from when they are
| mobbing a raptor, where the target of their ire can quickly be
| seen from the way the crows are directing their attention
| towards it.
|
| I can't say whether it occurs only at certain times of the
| year, and I have not paid any attention to where the birds go
| afterwards.
| hairofadog wrote:
| It looks like there's a pod in Poughkeepsie, but it's an
| annual gathering place rather than nightly?
|
| https://www.scenichudson.org/viewfinder/poughkeepsies-
| massiv...
|
| Some other reporting about crows in your neck of the woods:
|
| https://www.ithaca.com/news/seeing-spots-nope-those-are-
| crow...
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| I've observed a daily rollcall at evenings in our
| neighborhood. They don't necessarily gather together, but
| they sit atop tall trees and then caw to tally everyone up in
| a radius of a few blocks without fail at sunset.
| geewee wrote:
| How did you manage to get started? The crows close to me are so
| skittish that if I try to throw a peanut at them they just fly
| off and never come back. I've only managed to not have that
| happen once.
| carapace wrote:
| Crows are companions-to-hunters (wolves and humans mostly.)
| They interpret your behavior through that "lens".
|
| If you set out food and then watch them that means (in crow)
| that you are a hunter, and a lousy one, and you're trying to
| hunt _them_.
|
| Toss out some food and "forget" it and they'll think you're
| such a successful hunter that you don't even need to every
| scrap. Someone worth knowing.
|
| In the old days, crows would go on the hunt with us and fly
| over hidden game in the bush dipping a wing in a certain way
| to let you know where it is, then you share the meat with
| them. They still remember even if most of us have forgotten.
| ;)
| voidz wrote:
| I love this. Can you earn their trust, as in, become pals
| with them? Or is this more of a human desire. It's probably
| mostly food based priorities to them.
| nomel wrote:
| I had a pair of crows that I was somewhat close to. I
| could get within a couple feet of them, before they would
| back away.
|
| It definitely seemed food based. But, observing how they
| interact with their (lifelong?) companion, I don't think
| I'm able to perceive crow emotions.
| carapace wrote:
| > Can you earn their trust, as in, become pals with them?
|
| It's a very human question.
|
| All living things are friends (except sometimes at
| mealtime) because we are all part of one singular
| organism. The separateness and individuality of
| multicellular organisms is a perceptual illusion.
|
| (This sound metaphysical, and perhaps it is, but it's
| very literal: all cells use the same chemical language,
| the same bio-molecular machinery of thought. Cf. Michael
| Levin's lab's work. Also "wood-wide web", etc. The way I
| sometimes put it is "We are Solaris". but that only makes
| sense if you've read the book or seen the movies...)
|
| Anyway, all animals already trust each other. When you
| can understand how that's true and share that trust then
| you can "talk" with animals. Like Dr. Doolittle or some
| fairy tale princess, they will come up and hang out with
| you.
|
| > It's probably mostly food based priorities to them.
|
| Yeah, but that's the same for _everybody_? Don 't you and
| your friends spend a lot of time discussing food? Cooking
| and eating together? "Com-pan-ions" are literally those
| who eat bread together: "com" is community, etc. and
| "pan" is bread.
|
| Live long and prosper.
| [deleted]
| Wistar wrote:
| I have tried, and over a fairly long period of coaxing
| with popcorn, and they remain extremely wary. Only once,
| out of a group of 15-20 crows, did I earn the trust of a
| single crow enough that he, or she, would come within 10
| feet of me to pickup kernels I had strewn on the ground.
| The rest stayed far away.
| hairofadog wrote:
| Hmm, if you're literally throwing it _at_ them, yeah, they
| don't like that. You just kinda have to throw it where they
| can see it, then walk away, and they'll come running over to
| scoop them up. Do that for a week or two and they'll start
| looking for you. Also, cashews are their favorite (based on
| watching them pick the cashews out of trail mix and then come
| back for the other stuff later).
|
| They don't let me get close to them, but sometimes they do
| fly up from behind and tap me on the back of the head to get
| my attention.
|
| Also, unlike the guy up the street, I only throw out a few at
| a time so they have to sort of follow me to get anything.
|
| My ultimate goal is to be able to point at someone and have
| the crows attack them like in Bioshock. It'll be my thing for
| when society collapses. So far, however, I think our
| relationship is much more "let's get some peanuts off this
| sucker" than "I'll loyally follow this peanut person into
| battle".
| lioeters wrote:
| > point at someone and have the crows attack
|
| I imagine this would be a conceptual leap for their
| intelligence, to understand the meaning of "pointing" and
| to make a connection to the target, what's being pointed
| at. But then again, I suppose hunting dogs have achieved it
| - they know what to attack - so it might be possible for
| smart crows too.
|
| Now that I think about it, there are cultures where people
| train hawks for practical hunting purposes. So taming crows
| may not be too far-fetched, though it might take a few
| generations..
| prox wrote:
| I few times I made a pointing "forwards" gesture and then
| went ahead to where I pointed, although they probably knew
| my route already. But halfway there ;)
| colechristensen wrote:
| Crows really like Cheetos.
| prox wrote:
| Just place a few fav seeds where they can see it clearly,
| soon they will figure it out. Once they start recognizing you
| (which is very fast, few times tops) they will come. Don't
| look or make sudden motions when they are near enough. They
| don't like that.
|
| In time some might become more interested in you, depending
| on mood, and will come closer to you.
| fullsend wrote:
| I'm always amazed how low supposedly smart people's opinion of
| animal consciousness is.
| EGreg wrote:
| Chomsky would be surprised
| rojobuffalo wrote:
| > ...the crows still had to figure out the center-embedded order
| where open and closed brackets were paired from the outside
| in...if the birds only learned that open brackets were at the
| beginning of the sequence and closed ones were at the end, you
| would expect an equal proportion of ( { ) } mismatched and
| correct responses. But...the crows chose more of the latter than
| the former, even with the more complex sequences of three pairs
| of brackets.
|
| I'm no expert but it seems like the birds are identifying visual
| symmetry. Maybe they are remembering the mid-point of nested
| symmetrical symbols, and that's still interesting, but is that
| "understanding recursion"? Recursion is the idea of repeating an
| algorithm or a function calling itself. Visual symmetry is a
| little simpler than that.
|
| If a crow peels an onion layer by layer that doesn't mean it
| understands recursion. It's doing something recursive.
| Understanding recursion, in my mind, involves being able to
| describe a recursive function or make a prediction based on
| understanding the function.
| ispo wrote:
| They have some skills better fitting that my younger self! Not an
| exaggeration!
| default-kramer wrote:
| > To address this limitation, Liao and her colleagues extended
| the sequences from two pairs to three pairs--such as { [ ( ) ] }
|
| Three pairs of brackets still seems like setting the bar very
| low... But even if they got great results with 10 pairs of
| brackets, wouldn't that be more easily explained by
| "understanding symmetry" rather than "understanding recursion"?
| Oxidation wrote:
| Presumably you could check that with non-symmetrical symbols
| (so unrelated pairs like A/Y, or 1/W, etc)
|
| But then, I'm not sure that many humans would figure that out.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I wonder is the result owes a lot to visual processing (a highly
| developed trait in most birds.) Arguably, with the symbol-pairs
| used here, each pair look a bit like a single but partially-
| obscured convex object, with the inner ones lying on top of the
| outer ones.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I suppose the next step is seeing if you can train bees to get
| the concept. May seem farfetched but I was recently reading how
| they can be taught to understand basic arithmetic and the concept
| of zero. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-scarlett-howard-
| learns-f...
| syllablehq wrote:
| Crow Recursion is the name of my new nerdcore death metal band
| "Crows will claw your face if you mess with crows will claw your
| face if you mess with crows will claw your face if you mess with
| crows will claw your face if you mess with crows will claw your
| face if you mess up the END CONDIIITTTTIIIIOOONNN!
| prgammer wrote:
| Was it tail recursion?
| eckza wrote:
| Tail-caw optimized.
| shafyy wrote:
| I also love how crows put a walnut on the road, wait until a car
| drives over it and cracks it open, and then they go collect it.
| Smort.
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| The recursion example in the article is not good because it is
| language dependent. One could also say: "running mouse chased by
| cat in the past" and you would get the same idea as in opposed to
| "The mouse the cat chased ran". I believe other non-indoeuropean
| languages like Chinese or Japanese work in some ways much
| different from ours where you would pretty much derive to similar
| sentences if you translate without considering grammatical rules
| (not to say that they dont use recursion). Also one has to make a
| distinction from recursion and recursion in language as opposed
| to "if you cant recurse in communication you cant recurse in
| general".
| perrygeo wrote:
| We know that crows and many other animals use tools, which
| represents at least one level of linguistic abstraction ("It's
| not just a rock, it's a member of a more general category of
| things capable of smashing open food").
|
| I've always thought that recursion, specifically the ability to
| apply abstraction to itself, was a unique human trait. We don't
| just abstract one level, we keep going - building tools that help
| us build tools, building social structures that facilitate the
| production of these meta-tools, etc.
|
| So while we see other animals using tools that they find in their
| environment, I don't know of any evidence that they recurse on
| that, i.e. they always use tools for their primary purpose but
| never engage in systematic production of tools, or tools that
| make other tools. But given this article, maybe it's not mental
| capacity or linguistic recursion that limits tool making but
| something more mechanical like simply dexterity?
| bbarnett wrote:
| One comment, re: tools to build tools. I've seen animals use
| rocks, in videos, to debark sticks, to be used to perform
| another task.
|
| That's a tool to make a tool, and I bet there are other cases.
|
| In fact, I recall a video of a monkey, using a sharpened stone,
| to break the window of its habitat. To sharpen the stone, it
| used something else (the video did not say anything other than
| the monkey sharpened the stone).
|
| So that is another case.
| BirAdam wrote:
| So, crows, cetaceans, octopuses, and elephants... let's just be
| thankful that all of the other smart animals can't manipulate
| their environments at scale.
| vintermann wrote:
| Elephants can rip up trees at a pretty impressive scale.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Environmental "engineering" by ancestors of elephants is a
| possible factor that contributed to the environmental change
| that likely lead to the extinction of Gigantopithicus, the
| enormous, ancient ape.
| bbarnett wrote:
| So they warred on our cousins! Thus, we shall place them in
| caged enivros, to be starred at by our young, pointed at,
| fed token treats, their humiliation complete.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| "Smart" is a... Bad category. It's just a big breeding ground
| for reification.
|
| We do have a term for animals that do manipulate the
| environment: _ecosystem engineering_. Which includes a variety
| of species, including trees. Which to that extent, it 's our
| scale of engineering that pales in comparison.
|
| I mean, cyanobacteria is implicated in an extinction event, and
| the initiation of the great oxygenation event, and the rise of
| complicated metabolic systems using oxygen as the terminal
| electron acceptor. Very cleverly (intelligently, smartly?) they
| evolved [by chance,] a metabolic niche that was totally vacant
| which coincidentally could also positively amplify for some
| extraordinarily long period.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| if you look at all those groups you can kind of see what each
| lacks compared to humans to get runaway intelligence benefits
| that basically create a continuous selective effect for more
| intelligence.
|
| humans have a solid combination of dexterity, life span, and
| verbal communication. Dexterity allows for manipulation that
| allows intelligence to be used to maximum effect in an
| environment, life span allows for time to learn and share
| knowledge, and verbal communication allows to share knowledge
| effectively which allows group work and knowledge to pass
| through generations.
|
| crows and elephants seem to be the most limited by lack of
| dexterity, crows actually try to use tools to get around the
| limitation. If Elephants had some octopus style multi-trunk
| tentacles that could be used like hands they'd be set I think
| bmitc wrote:
| I am not convinced dexterity has much to do with
| intelligence. It is more an enabler of technology development
| and not raw intelligence.
| shmageggy wrote:
| The idea is that the ability to create technology creates
| an evolutionary gradient whereby increased intelligence
| yields better tools yields increased survivability
| j-bos wrote:
| Reminds me of this speculative piece:https://twitter.com/CWingU
| exkull/status/1554639440873652227?...
|
| tldr is ancient elephants manipulating the environmemt at scale
| and enslaving ancient humans. Short worthwhile read with fun
| details to justify the narrative.
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