[HN Gopher] Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping re...
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Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers
understand them
Author : micquigley0318
Score : 113 points
Date : 2024-03-20 16:15 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.northeastern.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.northeastern.edu)
| jebarker wrote:
| I'm glad the parrots are helping researchers understand tablet
| games.
| drewcoo wrote:
| gamification =?= psittacinification
| abruzzi wrote:
| My pet Mitred Conure (Leonard) loves to mess with my iPad while
| I'm reading. On the other had, Leonard >hates< my iPhone. If he's
| on my shoulder he'll engage in a agressive display waving around
| and violently biting my shirt. If the phone is close enough to
| him he will attack the phone. I'm an extremely light phone user
| so its not like I ignore him when using the phone, but I do
| expect it is the size makes it competition for his bonding with
| me.
| jader201 wrote:
| Sounds like we could all be better off having Leonard around!
| amatecha wrote:
| I have a family member with a cockatoo (goffin) and it's
| generally afraid when someone has a phone in their hand. Pretty
| strange, we haven't figured out exactly what the issue is.
| Placing the phone down on a table to play some music seems
| fine, but it seems like once the phone is in someone's hands
| and moving around, maybe it resembles some kind of predator??
| No clue!
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Polarization of the screen might look super psychedelic
| (especially if moving) to a bird's more advanced optical
| system?
| davidmurphy wrote:
| Does it have FaceID? Could it be the sensors emitting things
| bothers the birb?
| amatecha wrote:
| Made me think of this video where a parrot is watching YouTube
| videos it likes, changing to different ones, and seeming angry
| when ads (or the owner lol) interrupt its video-watching
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZSNhJcKFf4
| cracoucax wrote:
| Actually much more impressive than the research videos, he
| clearly knows his way around youtube
| INTPenis wrote:
| Until they make a sudden and illogical change to their
| design.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| YouTube UX: "We have this one weird cohort that's
| responding abnormally to all our UI A/B testing..."
| kibwen wrote:
| Only until enough parrot owners find out about this, at
| which point parrots overtake the human population of
| Youtube and the metrics start catering to them.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _and the metrics start catering to them_
|
| "in order to access this functionality, you must first
| chew through the charging cable"
| ethbr1 wrote:
| YouTube optimizing for toddlers and parrots makes a lot
| of sense, now that I think about it...
|
| And that's to say nothing of the parrot ad click farms.
| riwsky wrote:
| Parrots are the original stochastic parrot
| crooked-v wrote:
| And on top of that, can obviously recognize parrots in the
| video thumbnails.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It's incredible that a 90 second video of someone with a
| pet parrot and an iPad is more illuminating then the
| average paper...
| numbers wrote:
| Wow, so impressive that the parrots knows how to minimize the
| video and browse for other stuff.
| Loughla wrote:
| I don't know if that is sarcastic, but it is legitimately
| impressive to me.
|
| That parrot looks almost exactly like a 4 year old using
| youtube.
|
| It's sort of astonishing to think about. From both the fact
| that the parrot can figure it out, and that the function and
| use of youtube is so intuitive to users that a parrot can
| learn it.
| Culonavirus wrote:
| > That parrot looks almost exactly like a 4 year old using
| youtube.
|
| I've heard people describing parrots like hyperactive 4-5
| year olds so many times... it's nice to see that in
| practice lol. It must be a great pet, I could never deal
| with the constant pooping though. Imagine having to deal
| with them making a mess every 30 minutes for 70 years. How
| many poops even is that? Yikes.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Imagine having to deal with them making a mess every
| 30 minutes for 70 years. How many poops even is that?
| Yikes._
|
| If my math is right, over 70 years a parrot would give
| 1,227,240 shits about you.
| Swizec wrote:
| > making a mess every 30 minutes for 70 years
|
| Oh that's adorable. I have a parrot and poops aren't even
| the biggest mess he makes.
|
| They love to fling food. And shredding. And throwing
| everything you hold dear. And even a tiny 120g parrot
| like mine is strong enough to open cupboards and drawers.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| The bigger problem is that parrots are very social and
| need a lot of interaction with you throughout their lives
| not just until they are teens.
| AnarchismIsCool wrote:
| They're very cute but they're awful pets. Please
| everyone, don't get one because you thought the video was
| cute. They need a massive amount of your time otherwise
| they become horny monsters that shred your life.
| outworlder wrote:
| Generally true, although some species need way more
| attention than others. And 'way more' can often mean full
| time attention whenever they aren't sleeping.
|
| I had an Amazon parrot that needed less attention than an
| African Gray or a Cockatoo.
|
| I'd still not recommend as a pet given that their
| lifespans are so long. It's a decades long commitment and
| they may even outlast you, in which case you need to
| figure out what's going to happen to them.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Are you talking about the parrots?
| bigcoke wrote:
| as a parrot owner (blue fronted amazon), that's true,
| it's like having a child, like, really, it's not
| hyperbolic unlike dog/cat owners.
| tombert wrote:
| It feels like increasingly, we're finding that humans are not
| quite as "uniquely intelligent" as we thought.
|
| Don't get me wrong, humans are still the smartest animal on earth
| obviously, but it does seem like we greatly underestimated the
| intelligence of a lot of others. Birds like parrots and crows in
| particular continue to impress me when I see them solving
| increasingly elaborate puzzles, and figuring out how to open
| windows and the like.
|
| Also I just think parrots are cute.
| tocs3 wrote:
| > humans are still the smartest animal on earth obviously
|
| I think this is correct but not obvious. It could be we (I am
| assuming you are also human :) are just the most ambitious.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| Orcas are smart enough to give each other distinct names and
| seem to understand the concept of verbs/nouns when
| identifying human words[1]. They could very well be smarter
| than us, but they'd never dominate the planet
| technologically: their flippers have no evolutionary path to
| developing fingers and thumbs.
|
| [1] Some people point out that we've never learned orca
| language but they've learned ours. This is true, but it's
| also true that orca scientists have never kidnapped human
| children and intentionally tried to teach them orca language.
| So it's more of a poetic comparison than a scientific one.
| gregfjohnson wrote:
| Heard the following joke a while back, seems pertinent:
|
| Gaia making a mental note: "Hmm. The jury is definitely out
| on whether it's a good idea to combine large fore-brains
| with opposable thumbs.."
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/mobot31753002909064/page/84/mode.
| ..
|
| (1658) > _Loqui vero eos easque posse, Iavani aiunt, sed non
| velle, ne ad labores cogerentur : ridicule me hercules._
|
| "Indeed, the Javanese say that [the Orang-utans] are able to
| speak to them, but they do not want to, lest they should be
| forced to labor (pull the other one it's got bells on)"
| tombert wrote:
| I am human (at least as far as I am aware), though I guess
| with the advent of LLMs that's becoming less evident.
|
| It seems obvious to me, though I might be redefining
| "smartness" in a very human-centric way.
|
| It seems pretty clear to me that humans are the smartest in
| terms of analytical ability; you hear things in the media all
| the time like "crows are smarter than 7 year old humans", but
| I think that really depends on how you measure it. I am
| pretty sure I could teach a seven year old child that four
| quarters, ten dimes, twenty nickels, one hundred pennies,
| five dimes and ten nickels are all equal to the same amount.
| I don't even think that a seven year old human child would
| struggle with that terribly; I'm pretty sure I knew that five
| one-dollar bills was the same thing as a five dollar bill at
| that point. I don't think any other animal is capable of
| making those equivalencies though; I am pretty sure that a
| crow could not be taught this, no matter how hard you tried.
|
| Now, it's entirely possible that assigning weight to this is
| demonstrating bias towards human concepts; this stuff might
| be obvious to humans because humans invented it, and thus
| comparing human and non-human ability in terms of human
| creations might be an entirely malformed premise. I know
| nothing about neurology or philosophy (or really anything
| outside cartoon trivia), so this is just kind of "gut
| feelings" on my end, which I will admit that that's not very
| firm ground to stand on.
| simonklitj wrote:
| Is this more of a limitation of our ability to communicate
| with the animals? If we could talk intelligibly with a
| crow, maybe we could teach it? Conversely, if our
| communication with a 7-year-old child were limited to the
| level we achieve with crows, could we teach the child and
| know for sure that they understand it?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _are all equal to the same amount_
|
| This may be modern schooling at work. I've heard that one
| motivating factor for the ancient egyptian's strange-to-us
| mathematical style (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_fraction ) is that
| when they divvied stuff up, they needed to do it in a way
| that was more obviously fair than we do.
|
| Example: we have four workers on our gang and need to pay
| them with 3L of beer and 3 loaves of bread at the end of
| the day. The beer is easy; just pour equal levels in three
| similar containers. For us, the loaves are easy too: give 3
| workers 1 * 3/4 loaf and the last one 3 * 1/4 loaf. For the
| ancient egyptians (who might complain the last one either
| got smaller portions or more things) it'd be important to
| give everyone obviously the same portion: 1 * (1/2 + 1/4)
| loaf.
| Veserv wrote:
| There is a pretty profound communication gap that you seem
| to be discounting.
|
| A closer analogy might be trying to teach a 7 year old who
| speaks a different language. Or even deeper, a 7 year old
| child who only knows sign language and you do not.
|
| The communication gap makes it very hard to figure out how
| much is a "intelligence" difference versus just being
| unable to even communicate the contents of the test.
| tombert wrote:
| Sure, but even then isn't that making an assumption that
| animals have the same capacity for communication that we
| do?
|
| Let me try and explain; I don't speak Spanish, but if I
| had teach a 7 year old who only knew Spanish, presumably
| I, as a human, _could_ learn Spanish and then teach the 7
| year old whatever I needed to.
|
| I'm not sure there's an equivalent "crow" language that
| is even possible for _anyone_ to learn, at least in the
| same way that humans have language. I know that animals
| "communicate" in some senses with mating calls and the
| like, but I don't think they have anything even
| approaching "grammar" and "syntax".
|
| But I suppose if you're going on a deeper level, if you
| had some way of directly communicating with a crow (like
| beaming information directly into their brain already
| translated in a form that they could understand), I still
| don't know that you could teach them that money
| equivalence analogy I used.
|
| Again, I'm speaking out of my ass here, I don't know
| anything about this stuff, just spitballing.
| Veserv wrote:
| No. I am pointing out how being unable to communicate
| makes it very hard to determine intelligence. It is hard
| to determine if another _human_ is smart without being
| able to speak the same language or explain the procedure
| and contents of the test.
|
| Given that there is no known means to effectively
| communicate with animals, we are restricted to tests that
| do not demand shared communication to identify
| intelligence. These tests must be benchmarked on mutually
| unintelligible humans.
|
| For instance, a grade school Chinese exam might be a good
| way of gauging the intelligence of Chinese children, but
| is a terrible way of gauging the intelligence of French
| children. Such a test is lousy in certain domains. We
| must be cognizant of such testing methodology limits in
| the design of animal intelligence tests.
|
| tl;dr A test that would fail animals and speakers of a
| different language are not good tests. An animal
| intelligence test needs to at least pass all humans of
| comparable intelligence regardless of language to reach
| the bare minimum of acceptability.
| riwsky wrote:
| Raven's progressive matrices, obviously intended to test
| the intelligence of birds.
| timc3 wrote:
| "four quarters, ten dimes, twenty nickels, one hundred
| pennies, five dimes and ten nickels are all equal to the
| same amount" - only a human could come up with something so
| unintuitive.
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| i think it depends how you quantify it. seems like there are
| many other species that might have things worked out better
| than we do
| krunck wrote:
| "Seventeen completed the study; three dropped out after showing
| slight signs of aggression or a lack of interest during the
| training period. "
|
| Avian rage-quitting? So it's not just humans... I feel better
| now.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| Rage quitting or issues with rage WHEN quitting? I can imagine
| a game-addicted bird might get upset if you turn off the tablet
| or remove them from the gaming area. Similar to a toddler
| throwing a tantrum if you turn off a movie they are watching.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Birds totally experience rage at inanimate objects like
| humans. If an objects get in their way or doesn't behave the
| way they want for long enough, they'll start smacking it.
| Vicious and intelligent things.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| To parrot the above, if you've never seen a goose in
| Florida get pissed off at a parked car bumper, you haven't
| lived.
|
| They're hilariously _persistent_ in their anger.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| I don't know what it is about geese but they seem like
| they are total jerks most of the time. Maybe just because
| they are one of the more common large wild animals humans
| can interact with and film and the geese make it clear
| they want to be _left alone_.
| static_motion wrote:
| I, too, have watched that one video of a bird getting angry
| at a box of blueberries whose lid wouldn't stay up.
| charklet wrote:
| Reminds me of the Ted Chiang (Arrival) short story "The Great
| Silence" https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-
| chia...
| mutagen wrote:
| My African Grey will engage a bit with the sampler app Keezy. I
| thought I had video of it on YouTube but I can't find it, maybe I
| never uploaded it.
|
| https://keezy.net/
|
| Thought the sounds would engage him but he's very entertained by
| the center black button expanding menu on that app. Now I need to
| make a bird game...
|
| He likes both our phones and our tablets, mostly to chew on but
| he sometimes engages in weird social ways. He'll let me scratch
| his head while it is resting on the phone but otherwise not, only
| my wife gets to scratch his head usually. It isn't a usual one-
| person-bird bonding thing, I can otherwise interact with him
| normally, train him, and hang out with him but the head
| scratching is her time unless there's a phone there.
|
| He also likes my stylus/Pencil but mostly because there's a nice
| soft tip to destroy on the end.
| superkuh wrote:
| What a wonderful site design. Everything, even the video clips,
| work without javascript execution. This is a site that a parrot
| itself could load and use.
|
| On that topic, I recently saw a video of flocks of parrots that
| learned to manually spin a water pump windmill by flying up and
| sitting on the top of it on windless days.
| ideasphere wrote:
| I thought the exact opposite from a UX angle. Swiped down and
| it started scrolljacking and then I read the line about touch
| screens helping us "to snag Lightning deals on Prime Day" and
| it was enough for me to just stop reading and close the tab.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I hated it but reader mode fixes all.
| Lalabadie wrote:
| > Last year, the team showed a group of parrots how to video call
| one another, finding that the birds both overwhelmingly enjoyed
| the activity and could make the calls themselves, when given the
| option.
|
| My heart! There's a separate article dedicated to it:
| https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/04/21/parrots-talking-vid...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Are these the same folks that did the parrot videoconferencing
| thing?
|
| These are cool.
| johnyzee wrote:
| Pretty good forward vision, better than I would have expected.
| Usuallly (non-predatory) birds turn their head to examine things.
| Maybe a curved screen would be one idea for better parrot UI.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| They are not really playing games, they are picking at dots
| appearing at the screen, as they would do with seeds and insects.
| So is it play a tablet game?
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(page generated 2024-03-20 23:00 UTC)