Breaking the Bird Barrier: Scientist Decodes Zebra Finch Language
54 points - last Tuesday at 9:27 PM
SourceComments
ileonichwiesz today at 2:56 PM
Very interesting topic, but a strange choice of source. I'd recommend these instead:
Coller foundation press release: https://www.jeremycollerfoundation.org/news-and-insights/pre...
The actual publication in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads8482
ghurtado today at 6:06 PM
A lot of interesting information here, but this one paragraph blew my mind:
> Although the birds occasionally made mistakes, they more often confused calls with similar meanings rather than similar sounds. “Their responses indicated they have a mental imagery of the meaning of their vocalisations,” Elie said. “In other words, that they understand the meaning of their call types.”
bluechair today at 5:24 PM
I remember hearing about an interesting paper; it argued that Zebra finch songs were as complex as recursively enumerable languages on the Chomsky hierarchy. I wanted to see if I could find it but came across another paper arguing that their embedded context sensitivity can be explained by simpler rules.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908113106
Just the same, these little fellows are some of the cutest on our planet.Left this comment as another computer science connection.
ChuckMcM today at 5:52 PM
No doubts the crows are all having a good laugh at our expense.
esafak today at 6:12 PM
Does anyone have a link to a decoded message?
deleted last Tuesday at 9:27 PM
AndrewKemendo today at 5:18 PM
Another win for machine learning:
>She then applied machine learning to analyse how information was encoded in the calls before testing her findings through behavioural experiments.