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Are Crows the Ultimate Problem Solvers? | Inside the Animal Mind | BBC Earth

BBC Earth2 HN recommenders · 2017–2021
4.8M views · demo · evergreen · Uploaded 2014-09-10

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.

Animals & nature

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4 comments from Hacker News

@ablekh2017 · in “The Secret Lives of Urban Crows”

I hope that people here will enjoy this amazing video ( [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] .

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@SonOfLilit2020 · in “Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute”

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.

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@belter2021 · in “Photographer captures 'odd but exciting' crow behaviour known as anting”

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?" [VIDEO]

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@belter2021 · in “Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero”

This one impressed me so much, I never looked at Crows again the same way: "Are Crows the Ultimate Problem Solvers?" [VIDEO]

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