[HN Gopher] Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point ...
___________________________________________________________________
Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social
media
Author : pseudolus
Score : 112 points
Date : 2024-01-26 12:50 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbc.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbc.ca)
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| When I was.a kid, I "learned" from some authority (TV? book?)
| that cats and dogs could not recognize process two dimensional
| images, and that a TV was therefore just visual noise to them.
| hnbad wrote:
| Same here and while that's demonstrably not true (the
| explanation I heard was something about the colors and refresh
| rate so maybe this was true at some point in the past) the
| article does state the rats don't recognize themselves - that's
| different from recognizing the picture or being able to see it.
|
| That said, it's really more of an art project than anything to
| do with science as the article makes it clear the rats were
| trained to push buttons to get sugar, the selfies were just
| artistic flourish to make a (fairly overt) point.
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| Same here. Obviously this is not true.
|
| A ton of "science" taught to kids through seemingly legitimate
| channels is in fact just the off the cuff intuitions of some
| thoroughly average adult, and adults on average tend to be
| staggeringly uninformed on most topics.
|
| EDIT: And even more so for history.
| sixothree wrote:
| It may have been true during the days of CRTs. I have had a
| lot of pets and don't remember any of them showing interest
| in the televisions whatsoever, other than a source of warmth.
| And that is definitely no longer true.
| broscillator wrote:
| The observable non-reaction was true, what was not true was
| the cause, which is the low frame rate.
|
| This is the problem with this kind of thing so often,
| people observe something and an explanation that sounds
| completely logical gets spread around.
| 1000100_1000101 wrote:
| I remember a friend's cat following the mouse pointer on
| an Amiga with a CRT monitor. When moved off the bottom of
| the screen, the cat would go right up to the screen and
| try to peer down to see where it had gone.
|
| Not sure about dogs, but cats definitely could see a
| plain 60Hz CRT display... atleast some of them anyway.
| devbent wrote:
| I had a dog growing up that insisted on watching The Price
| Is Right every weekday morning and she'd bark at you until
| you changed the channel. Then she'd push a stool in front
| of the TV, sit on it, and watch Bob Barker for an hour and
| when the show was over she'd get up and leave.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Something about a _dog_ liking to watch someone whose
| last name is _Barker_ makes this a great story!
| Fricken wrote:
| I worked for a TV production company, and we made a show
| called Kitten TV, in which each episode was 45 minutes of
| kittens playing in different custom built themed playsets.
|
| On Instagram we received hundreds of pics submitted by
| viewers of their cats watching Kitten TV, it became a meme.
| araes wrote:
| It may be that at least part of the story was that some
| animals had issues purely with CRT technologies. A shift
| from shooting electrons through a window, to source pixels
| of very specific frequencies, may have been better.
|
| For example, this spectral comparison implies there is a
| rather large difference in the color experience of watching
| CRT vs LCD. Very pronounced and spikey red component vs
| smooth gaussians. Canines are notorious for issues with red
| colors.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alireza-
| Shahsafi/public...
| sbergot wrote:
| My border collie dog was definitely interested by any sheep
| appearing on my old CRT.
| TechRemarker wrote:
| Assuming you looked up the current info on that, according to a
| quick Google current research all seems to show they can
| recognize familiar faces in photos.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| When I was a kid I was taught by _every adult_ that "humans
| cannot discern more than 24 fps".
|
| Except that we could all immediately tell if a Commodore Amiga
| demo was running at 25fps or 50fps and groups that'd have the
| frame rate drop from 50 to 25fps on some frames were "lame".
|
| So I _knew_ it was obviously false that humans couldn 't
| discern when something was running at more than 24 fps.
|
| Same when little Windows 95 utilities allowed to bump the
| framerate from 60 to 72 or 75 Hz. I remember those: they'd
| enhance the experience. Yet everybody was still telling me:
| "Why do you even bother, 60 Hz is enough, humans cannot discern
| more than 24 images per second".
|
| Same for cats and dogs and the TV of course. Which I knew was
| wrong because on my Commodore Amiga I'd take a big circle,
| filled with a solid color, and make it bounce across the screen
| and watch my cats' reactions.
|
| People can be really extremely dumb, even in the face of
| evidence.
| stephen_g wrote:
| The claim that nobody could discern more than 24 fps is an
| odd one (and not one I've ever heard), since it's been
| generally known that's not true even back before 24 fps was
| chosen as a standard. Originally some (including Edison)
| wanted to standardise on higher frame rates for better
| motion. 24fps was basically compromise to balance against the
| amount of film used, being fairly close to the minimum speed
| that was considered satisfactory for motion.
|
| Even then, a two bladed shutter was used to flash the image
| on the screen twice for each frame, and more modern
| projectors used a three-bladed shutter to reduce flicker.
| Izkata wrote:
| > being fairly close to the minimum speed that was
| considered satisfactory for motion.
|
| Basically that: It's a repeated and extremely common
| misunderstanding of the actual claim, that 24fps is right
| about the threshold between interpreting a series of images
| as motion instead of a series of images.
|
| A lot of people assume that once you see it as motion,
| there's nothing more that can be gained.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Fake knowledge was the most common thing circulating among
| people back then.
|
| People mostly couldn't verify anything.
| ale42 wrote:
| Indeed, I think that you can definitely see the difference
| between 25 and 50 fps... even 24/25 fps and 30 fps don't
| exactly look the same.
|
| The 60/72/75/... Hz (some screens could display 85 or even 90
| Hz) of the Windows 95 epoch was the refresh rate of the CRT
| tube: the higher, the less flicker. Once you tried 75 Hz, you
| clearly didn't want to go back to 60 Hz (or at least, that
| was my experience).
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| i can feel 144-200hz. above that i cant tell anymore, but
| probably pixel response times arent good enough yet on
| consumer hardware to provide a real test to me. 60hz feels
| awful to me. side note, i can discern stutters at 144hz +
| when i take a deep breathe.
| araes wrote:
| Do you actively practice being able to discern high frame
| rates, or is it a "born with skill?" I often wonder if FPS
| gamers self select for those who can discern high frame
| rates, which then drives screen sales. Do you attempt to
| increase your frame rate perception?
|
| Do you find normal movies in the theater difficult to watch
| because of your "high frame rate?" If I could see gaps in
| 144 Hz, then it seems (totally imagining with math), like
| it would be the equivalent of a 4 Hz frame rate for
| "normal" eyesight. 24 Hz / 144 Hz ( 24 Hz normal movie) = 4
| Hz. 4 Hz looks super choppy bad. Seems like it would turn
| into the Flash trying to watch a human movie.
|
| Course, I asked colorblind people about colorblindness, and
| it was totally crazy all the different colorblindness types
| they talked about. So could be bad mental picture.
| svara wrote:
| This is basically just a misunderstanding. There are multiple
| overlapping effects. Most of the 'hard' numbers for claims
| along those lines come from the flicker fusion frequency [0]
| around 50 Hz or so, which means that a video recorded at 25
| fps and replayed by flashing every frame twice (like in old
| movie theaters) will not appear to flicker.
|
| However, there's another important factor, which is that if
| you move an edge accross your visual field and sample at a
| certain frequency, depending on the speed of the edge, you
| might get a stroboscope-like effect and see multiple parallel
| edges. This is something a lot of people notice in 60 Hz
| computer rendered video, or when moving quickly under a lamp
| flickering at the mains frequency, because every frame is
| sharp without any motion blur. By contrast, you can run video
| filmed at an exposure time similar to the frame time at lower
| frame rates and it'll look fine, because the motion blur
| removes that stroboscope-like appearance.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold
| docfort wrote:
| There is research on humans showing that we can perceive at
| 500 Hz. There are devices that try to simulate a color by
| modulating a single LED (no color filter) and they don't
| work on humans until you go past around 1 kHz.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/srep07861
| svara wrote:
| Yes, that's what I was referring to. If you have an edge
| flickering at a high frequency and perform a saccade
| (fast eye movement) over the edge, your retina will be
| exposed to the edge at regularly spaced intervals. So the
| motion will not appear smooth. That's what they call a
| 'flicker artifact' and I called a 'stroboscope-like
| effect'.
|
| Importantly though, this is not us humans detecting 500
| Hz flicker itself, quite the opposite -- the reason the
| artifact is visible is that our retina is _not_ sensitive
| to fast motion, it integrates over a period of time in
| which the edge appears to be in multiple locations.
| somedude895 wrote:
| What's really crazy to me is that when you watch any film in
| >24(30?) fps, it looks like trash. I suppose it's because
| we're used to higher fps being home video? I wonder if films
| will ever be accepted or made in higher fps. Maybe if VR
| films actually become a real thing.
| swid wrote:
| Part of the issue with higher fps is that it should be
| balanced with a shorter frame exposure time, so motion blur
| matches the frame rate. The rule of thumb is shutter speed
| should be 2x the fps, so shoot at 30fps, you want the
| shutter around 1/60s, if you shoot at 60fps, you should use
| 1/120.
|
| This means anything that adds or remove frames is going to
| quickly cause the motion to look unnatural or at least
| different from the original.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| Cats and dogs need higher refresh rates to see TV as a movie
| rather than a slideshow of images:
| https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/8921/why-can-cat...
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| Very interesting. Its like smaller brains have a higher clock
| speed. global oscillations?
| skydhash wrote:
| Less processing to be done? Something like a fly has a much
| lower reaction time than a chicken.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Smaller systems tend to tick over faster. Compare a fly
| heart with the heart of a mammal and the heart of the child
| with the heart of an adult. Or an elephant... Neural
| pathways will be longer and so slower, they may have more
| synapses in them. Overall it would be highly surprising for
| a larger system to have a higher clockrate than a smaller
| one.
| sebtron wrote:
| It is very easy (and amusing) to prove this wrong by playing a
| video of birds / fish / other wild animals and let your cat
| watch :)
| Lewton wrote:
| Sure, now it is very easy. But back then animals rarely
| reacted to CRT tvs
| dudefeliciano wrote:
| depending on your age that may have been true, I think old crt
| tvs refresh rate made it so that dogs would not be able to
| perceive the actual image.
| wvh wrote:
| Cats and dogs rely on other senses such as smell and hearing a
| lot more than humans, who are very visually focussed. They just
| "see" the world differently and might not be that excited about
| something that mainly revolves around visual stimuli. I suppose
| a theoretical cat or dog TV would included a lot of smells,
| which might not be something you'd actually want in your living
| room...
| stronglikedan wrote:
| My sisters dog will bark incessantly at the TV if there are
| specific animals on the screen, such as horses and elephants.
| Surprisingly, cats and dogs are allowed.
| telman17 wrote:
| My aunt's dog does the same! Horses are not allowed nor are
| people swimming in any way on TV. The dog also seems to
| prefer when the actors have British accents.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| this brings up complicated questions about perception, and the
| way that thinking links to senses.
|
| In other words, it is quite possible that dogs see (poorly,
| without red) very much what we see, but the cognitive ability
| and then the "thinking" that happens after that, is very
| different.
| tokai wrote:
| The connection to selfies is really weak. Its just classical
| conditioning. The stimulus is the food not the selfie taking, and
| the continued pressing of the selfie button without food is
| conditioned response.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Even that is attributing too much. When you give animals food,
| they tend to do things to get that food, humans being no
| exception. If you plant a soft-serve machine in the middle of a
| city square, you can bet people will press the lever to receive
| free ice cream. Hell, just give out coupons for free anything
| and people will show up. In either case, if you take away the
| free thing, people will keep returning in hopes the thing will
| come back, not just because they've been conditioned but
| because they want more of the free thing.
|
| Neat little art project, but it's not that insightful when you
| think outside the 34th percentile.
| moolcool wrote:
| > not just because they've been conditioned but because they
| want more of the free thing
|
| That is what literally what "conditioned" means. You're
| belabouring a point that OP is already making, and then
| following that up by sneering at the "34th percentile". Maybe
| the real art is always in the comments section.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > You're belabouring a point that OP is already making
|
| I don't believe I am. I'll try to clarify.
|
| > That is what literally what "conditioned" means.
|
| Yes and no. I'm suggesting that attributing the effect
| merely to "conditioning" is reductionist. There's some
| level of conditioning to all biological behavior, and
| repeating a behavior in response to a reward is not
| entirely irrational. In principle, it's very rational for
| rats to keep returning to perform an action they know
| through experience provided food at some point. The rats in
| this art project aren't necessarily as thoughtless as
| conveniently suggested by the conditioning explanation.
| There's plenty of evidence that rats have the ability to
| remember details about the past and plan for the future.
|
| > and then following that up by sneering at the "34th
| percentile".
|
| I didn't mean it that way, and in retrospect I admit
| shouldn't have said that. It was rude but that's truly not
| the attitude I had in mind. Apologies to whom I was
| replying to.
| ta988 wrote:
| When you give human likes...
| everforward wrote:
| The selfie taking draws a parallel between rats in a Skinner
| box and humans in social media. The point is to make people
| wonder whether social media companies view their users the same
| way Skinner viewed his rats in a box: dumb, and able to be
| manipulated with meager and cheap rewards.
|
| It is not a functional piece of the "experiment", but I don't
| think it was ever meant to be functional or a real experiment.
| The artist says the rats don't recognize themselves, so I would
| assume they predicted the selfies would do nothing.
|
| The selfie taking is the only interesting part of the piece,
| imo. Without that, it's just replicating an 80 year old
| experiment that has already been replicated to death.
| moolcool wrote:
| It's an artistic remix of the classic Skinner Box experiment.
| The creator is an artist, not a scientist, and his point is
| being artistically rather than scientifically.
|
| As a sidenote: Social media has been described as a skinner box
| a million times before, but expressing it literally like this
| is, IMO, clever, interesting, and also cute. The idea using
| scientific experiments as metaphor to make art is cool, and I
| hope people start to do more things like this.
| lukan wrote:
| I don't know, it seems a bit dishonest to imply that the rats
| wanted the selfies(I got that impression), when all they
| wanted was pressing the button, because they learned, it
| would produce treats reliable, and later at least sometimes.
| If at some point, there never would be treats coming anymore,
| that would uncondition themself and at some further point,
| they would not care about that stupid button anymore. Unless
| of course, they would have nothing else to play with. (Is
| that also a metapher about FB?)
| moolcool wrote:
| I don't see how it's dishonest. The artist is transparent
| in his methodology, and the metaphor (engagement = treats)
| is clear. Either way, this is an art piece so it isn't
| subject to the same kinds of rigor or scrutiny of a
| scientific experiment.
| lukan wrote:
| "For me, they're really like performers, you know? They
| perform for the camera," he said. "They look cute."
|
| Yeah, it is art. It wants to be interesting nested in
| many layers. I still don't buy this.
| dmonitor wrote:
| you're allowed to disagree with the message of the piece
| lukan wrote:
| Here I disagree and criticize, how it is promoted.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| The constant reward is a way to quickly condition a
| behavior. Random reward has a higher permanence... however,
| it's clear that they weren't doing it for the treats when
| they started ignoring the treats they received.
| lukan wrote:
| Yeah, after they were full, they were just after the
| conditioned kick. But where they ever looking at their
| picture, or even had the chance to do so? In my
| understanding no. So they never cared about the camera,
| or the picture.
| ehwhwhwhahhwh wrote:
| Chase truth. Not coolness. Don't fool yourself.
| moolcool wrote:
| How am I fooling myself by appreciating a well executed
| metaphor? I see a lot of comments interrogating an art
| piece as if it were a scientific experiment, and to me that
| misses the point. You wouldn't look at Van Gogh's Starry
| Night and say "Well actually..."
| montjoy wrote:
| I don't think it matters. While it would have been interesting
| if the rats got pleasure looking at themselves, ultimately this
| is an art project about human society that is meant for human
| consumption. The fact that we read about it means it was
| somewhat successful. The issue of whether the rats got a
| dopamine kick from just pressing the button is irrelevant.
| skazazes wrote:
| Isn't basic conditioning the point the artist is attempting to
| make? I interpreted the project as pointing out that social
| media uses fundamentally similar reward mechanisms as we use in
| training animals
| tokai wrote:
| Yes, and I'm saying I'm finding his point weak. It is a old
| and well know experiment and the social-media-is-a-skinnerbox
| talking point is as old as social media. I find the selfie
| angle tacked on without adding or illuminating the subject
| further. The work doesn't work for me. But I appreciate the
| cute rat photos.
| broscillator wrote:
| This is an odd comment to me.
|
| It's like saying "people have been painting realistic
| portraits of women for centuries, Leonardo, and this one
| doesn't add anything or illuminate the subject of portrait-
| taking further. Still, I appreciate her ambiguous smile."
| WarkFlark wrote:
| > Yes, and I'm saying I'm finding his point weak.
|
| This would be a stronger point itself if you didn't
| succinctly validate it with the second sentence of your
| initial post!
| phkahler wrote:
| >> After the rats were trained to push the level for sugar,
| Lignier changed the experiment's parameters. Sometimes taking a
| picture would yield a piece of sugar, and sometimes would not.
|
| And this part is using an extinction schedule. When you provide
| a reward for a behavior consistently and then take away the
| reward (extinction), the behavior tends to stop immediately. By
| randomizing the reward and maybe gradually decreasing the
| frequency you have a much better chance that the behavior will
| persist without the reward. Because he did this we can't really
| be sure the selfies are their own reward, since the rats may
| have been simply trained to push a button.
| calamari4065 wrote:
| Rats simply like playing games, I'm not surprised that they
| thought pressing the button is fun.
|
| But really this is a variant of the mirror test. These rats
| were freshly adopted and have probably never seen a mirror,
| and have no idea what they look like. If they were given a
| mirror for a while before running this experiment, we might
| see different behavior.
|
| I found a paper [0] suggesting that rats do recognize other
| rats in mirrors, still photos, and video, but the results
| aren't very strong. I think the theory is that their eyesight
| is pretty poor and they rely mostly on scent to identify
| other rats.
|
| [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5849344/
| WarkFlark wrote:
| > The connection to selfies is really weak. It's just classical
| conditioning.
|
| Isn't the idea that the compulsion to take a selfie being
| classical conditioning the very point of the piece?
| hn_acker wrote:
| The rats were conditioned to push the button. Whether the
| rats were conditioned to take a selfie is unclear. The sugar
| is an unconditioned stimulus, the rat's pleasure of receiving
| sugar is an unconditioned response, and pushing the button is
| a conditioned response. The button is a conditioned stimulus.
| Is the selfie a conditioned stimulus as well?
| Melodramatically put, is the selfie more than a pearl cast in
| front of a swine?
|
| My killjoy answer is: give the rat two tunnels. The rat can
| see partway into the tunnel from the entrance. One tunnel has
| a selfie inside. The other tunnel has a picture of the wall
| in the background of the selfie. Add more tunnels and check
| which tunnels the rat prefers.
|
| My artistic answer: give yourself the pleasure of assuming
| that the rats like the selfies.
| WarkFlark wrote:
| Well sure--I'd also like to point out that rats aren't
| human, if that helps you understand the piece better.
| timeon wrote:
| Maybe they continue with pressing the button because if it
| brings them food maybe it will also free them from Skinner box.
| lukeinator42 wrote:
| Very true, although this type of conditioning is operant
| conditioning since the rats are performing a voluntary
| behaviour as opposed to classical conditioning like Pavlov's
| dogs.
| bashmelek wrote:
| I guess I don't really see this as hacker news material.
| Popular media aggregators tend to promote these kinds of
| statement art projects. I suppose I'm a little weary and wary
| of it all. I do not need a sanctioned individual--that we must
| know an Artist or Philosopher did this--to command some
| reaction from me on a rather tired topic.
|
| One might argue that the fact we still argue over something
| shows the need for such art. Perhaps some people could use that
| slightest nudge. But I find these works often subtly
| disingenuous, and maybe serve better to reinforce a crowd's own
| thinking. Like I heard taking shallow versions of opposing
| views tends to just strengthen already held beliefs, might some
| art be the same?
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| What if the quality and quantity of rewards were linked to the
| engagement metrics on the selfie posts? Wouldn't that be a
| better approximation of our current addiction?
|
| * More likes -> more food
|
| * Retweets -> better food
|
| * More followers -> larger cage
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| What's the copyright situation of rat selfies?
| simiones wrote:
| I think it's established that photos taken by animals are not
| copyrightable works, so you can do anything you want with them,
| at least in the USA.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| That currently applies to photos with animals deliberately
| triggering the shutter. I would hesistate to say "it's
| established" without more than one precedent in US case law.
|
| However, candid nature photographs taken with camera traps
| are copyrighted, and Wikimedia Commons has tolerated this
| status since 2011.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_trap
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Photos_taken_wit.
| ..
| chmod775 wrote:
| Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?) it's not the first time that
| question has come up.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
|
| Note that this also may have implications for AI-generated
| work.
|
| Here's how, ignoring the many legal theories, it's handled in
| practice in the US right now:
|
| > On 21 August 2014 the United States Copyright Office
| published an opinion [..] to clarify that "only works created
| by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which
| excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by
| machines without human intervention".
|
| However note that whether it's "copyright free" will depend on
| the jurisdiction and also that the article is talking about a
| french artist. While copyright law is very same-ish across the
| globe (and countries recognize each other's copyright), it
| often varies in the fine details.
| wongarsu wrote:
| > Here's how, [...] it's handled in practice in the US right
| now:
|
| Forgive my ignorance of the nuances of US copyright
| enforcement, but in what form is the opinion of the US
| Copyright Office important? The US joined the Berne
| Convention in 1989, which includes automatic copyright
| protection without the need to register anything. And if you
| believe somebody violated your copyright you take them to
| court, which also doesn't involve the US Copyright Office.
| Unless they release actual regulation I don't believe their
| opinion on how to interpret existing regulation really
| matters, or am I missing something?
| lainga wrote:
| In the very ultimate limit, because it falls under the same
| jurisdiction as the USS Nimitz.
| beej71 wrote:
| It was a serious oversight to not have the rats take selfies
| against a green background.
| neom wrote:
| Tangential, but come on.. how can you not love the lady who
| "taught her rats to paint"?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M9us5DQyrY
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NFTMuNxQhY
| omoikane wrote:
| Is it still called a "selfie" if the rats don't get to see the
| resulting pictures? The dictionaries I consulted define "selfie"
| as the photographic output, and not the act of taking
| pictures.[1][2]
|
| I don't see any display device in that setup, so it seems the
| rats are just pressing buttons for sugar, independent of any
| camera activity.
|
| [1] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/selfie_n
|
| [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/selfie
|
| Edit: Looks like I just didn't see the screen but it's there.
| hn_acker wrote:
| > In Lignier's box, when Arthur and Augustin pushed the lever,
| a camera would snap their picture and display it on a screen in
| front of them.
|
| The rats do see the pictures.
| fallinghawks wrote:
| The idea that the rats are taking photos of themselves for the
| (self-aware) pleasure is pretty silly. The rats could have been
| trained to do anything with this method. Moving from rewarding
| every time for the desired behavior to occasionally rewarding
| causes the animal to keep doing the behavior for the reward. And
| if you stop rewarding entirely, the behavior will continue for a
| while, and it'll eventually stop. But by then the artist has made
| their point and doesn't care.
| woliveirajr wrote:
| > (self-aware) pleasure
|
| Made me think: when humans take photos on {plataform} to
| receive likes, doesn't it means that humans know to apreciate
| what comes after those likes? Money, sex, lots of "friends",
| relationships, oportunities... The pleasure doesn't come from
| the post itself, and every like isn't a simple like, it is a
| whole bunch of things that comes with "I like that from you"
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