Are Crows the Ultimate Problem Solvers? | Inside the Animal Mind | BBC Earth
BBC Earth2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2017–2021
demo · general · evergreen · 2017–2021 on HN
A BBC Earth clip from Inside the Animal Mind in which a crow named 007 solves an eight-step puzzle to get a reward. It showcases crow problem-solving.
Shared in crow-intelligence threads as a striking demonstration that changes how people see crows.
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4 comments from Hacker News
This one impressed me so much, I never looked at Crows again the same way: "Are Crows the Ultimate Problem Solvers?" ▶ this video
I hope that people here will enjoy this amazing video ( ▶ this video ) as much as I did. I knew that crows are smart, but this is clearly the next level of intelligence ... By the way, I have discovered this video via the relevant cool project's website: link .
Crows actions are on par or exceed Octopus level of smartness "Smart Crow uses cars to crack nuts in Akita, Japan" link "Are Crows the Ultimate Problem Solvers?" ▶ this video
I'll refer to what I assume you called the sokoban example, the "banana test" from part 2, which is the most relevant to our discussion. In it, a pigeon who has been trained that sometimes pushing stuff around is rewarded with food and sometimes climbing stuff is rewarded with food manages to solve a puzzle where it must push a box to below a banana and then climb the box to reach the banana. First of all, thanks, that's a really cool video and exactly the kind of research I'm looking for. However, I don't think it goes far enough to actually measure what I'm interested in. In the comments of this similar video [1] about a crow who has been trained to do each of A, B, C, D separately to get food doing A+B+C+D to get food, a comment captures what's wrong with it perfectly by saying: > 2:20 The "use everything on everything" stage of playing a point-and-click adventure game. Sure, we know birds can figure out that if step 1 is sometimes good and step 2 is sometimes good, then step 1 and then step 2 might be good. But that's not at all enough to solve, say, level 2 in [2], a video of a Sokoban game. If I trained a toddler to solve puzzles like level 1 (so it knows how to walk and it knows how to push crates), if could spend weeks moving and pushing crates around and not reach a solution. The repertoire of behaviors that allows them to play the game is just a foundation for a whole world of logic and planning that needs to be mastered to actually solve nontrivial Sokoban levels.