xRobot: Parrots, Piraha, and Prolog I Videos

maksiiiskam2 Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - I agree that Alex only learned given quantities on their own, but I disagree when you seem to imply that humans do otherwise: the only difference is that humans succeed in learning the _names_ for the numbers.(cont)

maksiiiskam2 Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - Imo, the only thing Alex lacked was therefore the memory to remember the linguistic units of numbers (names numbers from 1 to 12, names of tens, words for "hundred" and "thoudand"...) and the system to expand it arbitrarilly high (suffix "-teen", composition of tens and units "fifty-two", and so on).Four-year-olds cannot count arbitrarily high: they can count as far as they can remember the names.(cont)

maksiiiskam2 Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - That's why I think that if learning the quantities on their own is not really counting, no one ever counted except philosophers of mathematics. Grasping the underlying system of counting, maybe thinking in terms of successor function, is not the way people learn to count, they do by learning the name of the numbers, helped by learning the algorythms that were designed by mathematicians to be systematic in the naming.

randyhelzerman Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - Mak!! Finally somebody replied, I was beginning to fear that nobody would challenge my outrageous claim that animals can't count :-) I hear you about the memory which can fit into a bird brain--let me try to explain why I don't think its mearly memory capacity which is holding Alex back. Alex apparently had a vocabulary of over 150 words, and was learning new words all the time. Check out my latest video in my "favorites' section for an example of him learning the world "spoon". (cont)

randyhelzerman Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - (cont, to mak) if he could learn the word "spoon", why couldn't he learn the world "eight?" I think it is quite telling that the maximum number which we can teach animals to count to is also the maximum number which we can count "at a glance" using so-called "eidetic counting". Getting beyond that is not a memory problem, its an pattern-recognition, bandwidth problem, and apparently humans suffer the same limitation. To count to 10, you need to be able to do something more.

randyhelzerman Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - (cont, to mak) You need the concept of the sucessor function, which you mentioned. No animal has been shown to be able to do that. I agree that learning the names of these numbers is central, but I'm a bit surprised that you think that only philosophers of mathematics ever counted. I think, rather, that what philosophers of mathematics are doing is desperately trying to play catch-up: it seems to me that they are doing a very bad job of trying to systematize what any 5 year old can do :)

maksiiiskam2 Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - "To count to 10, you need to be able to do something more. You need the concept of the sucessor function, which you mentioned."I disagree on that. Just because a human is able to perceive a difference that he did not notive at first by comparing carefully a set of 9 items to a set of 10 items does not mean that the concept of the successor function was already there.(cont)

maksiiiskam2 Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - I do not think that humans learn to count with a concept of the successor function: take languages where there are no number names past a certain quantity. They just did not bother to compare higher quantities.It seems simpler to me to conceive of the view of numbers as an unbounded list as a meme and the successor function as an academic tool. Said otherwise, "there will always be a number after the last you can count to" is useful to explain pure math, not human psychology.

randyhelzerman Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - But either way you take it, it still remains to be explained why Alex the parrot couldn't learn the apropos use of the word "8" when he *could* learn the apropos use of the word "6" and "spoon". Do you agree that its not just memory which is holding Alex back? What do you think is holding Alex back?

CousinoMacul Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - I shed a tear when Alex died.

randyhelzerman Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - ;-( me too. RIP Alex.

maksiiiskam2 Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - I did think it was just memory, and I still think it influences it but maybe in a lesser way, because of the angle you took with counting at one glance. Do you know how was Alex counting? Was he only pulling the numbers at glance or could he recite the numbers as counting them like "one key, two keys, three keys...".(cont)

maksiiiskam2 Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - If he was able to count with the list of numbers, I'd say that his limitation was memory, care for numbers higher than his first glance capacity or both. If he only pulled the number name, I'd say it is an inability to conceive of quantities as something independant of the first glance impression.I still think that memory might be in cause, since remembering the name for an object might be easier than for an abstraction: particularily if this abstraction is impossible to observe.(cont)

maksiiiskam2 Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - But you are right, somethign more crucial might be missing in non-human animals like an ability to conceive of something unperceivable, in this case, a quantity of eight things.

randyhelzerman Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - Hi mak, yes, if Alex worked by ticking off the numbers while looking at the keys "one key, two key!!" (basically, making a 1-to-1 pairing of the numbers with objects) then that would be genuine counting. I hazard a theory in this vid that he isn't doing that--that he is just kind of pattern matching like prolog does in the "count/2" predicate I program in this video. But who knows for sure eh? :-)

Trollschool Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - It's difficult to know how much a being really understands math. I remember memorizing the exponent laws in high school - I didn't know how exponents actually worked, I just knew how to apply the rule. It's kind of like dividing an inequality by a negative number - you just know to flip the inequality sign when that happens. Its just a trick, not understanding.

randyhelzerman Says:

Jul 6, 2008 - LOL Trollschool, reminds me of a quote by Johann von Neumann: "In mathematics, you don't understand things. You just get used to them."

thinkeatingmachine Says:

Jul 7, 2008 - I'd bet some people watch that and do not accept that Alex can count but rather they'd say that Alex was "lucky" I wonder how many times it would take Alex to count 'till they stop accepting it as something "lucky". IDK I think what's going through my mind is that there are obviously numerous ways to explain what's going on. I agree that Alex probably wasn't counting but doing something close just because that seems alot more likely but IDK I feel like Az looking at the number "18" on a wall.

Mike1977a1 Says:

Jul 17, 2008 - Randy, Regarding Binary systems and complexity,do you think that all objects represented on a computer screen point to digital binary objects or do they point to nothing they are abstractions?

randyhelzerman Says:

Aug 6, 2008 - Hi dude, sorry, I just saw this..... yeah, the objects represented in digital form point just as, for example, a marriage certificate says which woman I'm married to :-)

Mike1977a1 Says:

Aug 9, 2008 - So therefore without our conciousness constructing the meaning of digital representations they are nothing in-themselves they have no content except that which we project apon them in our experience.When you close your computer program does it cease to exist? or does it exist at all? is it just an image which crunches numbers then presents a new image and then no longer exists when you press the X button on the top of the window?