what od you think about this?
looks like its not just mammalians, birds and octopuses that are capable of high level cognition?
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Would you really call this high-level ? Even a robot with reinforcement could earn that…
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I always get the impression people underestimate insects.
What those bees just did was to look at a scene, parse a high level description of the objects in it, infer what affordances objects have, infer that some objects are actually agents that can act on their own, watch those agents perform high lwvel actions and learn new cause-effect relationships, then infer that they themselves can perform the same actions to get the same effect.
finally they take all this high level knowledge and convert into a complex sequence of low level leg movements to actually push the balL
The impressive part is the abcense of trial and error, they just observe and actually understand whats going on.
To me it seems way beyond any RL algorithm I ever seen.
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Yeah in approx. 1M trials. Animals can’t afford that so they evolved very quick learning algorithms.
That needs to be benchmarked not how close they get to perfection (accuracy)
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even if those bees needed 100 trials to learn this, I’d still be confident to say that they are probably smarter than my dog.
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I doubt it needed 100 trials, I don’t think they have that much … patience.
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Here-s a follow-up study, bumblebees learning to unlock food by watching bees that know how to. The trick is too difficult to figure out by themselves, so the first ones had to be trained with intermediate step rewards.
The cultural assumption might be a bit of a stretch, nonetheless they aren’t as stupid as previously assumed.
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If the bee dance communicates an external flight path location to a source of food, then in comparison simple mirroring of a smaller pattern that looks like a lot shorter dance would seem more easy. i.e. the initial stick example to follow.
It’s possibly more about the mirroring feedback process (communication) and less of self determining what works or where the food is. The shortest distance is more of the self determination.
Are bees just really good at communicating the results of lots of trial an error / searching.
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