New study: pigeons solve problems in a way similar to artificial Intelligence

CTOnews.com, Oct. 29 (Xinhua) A study conducted by researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Iowa found that pigeons use a "brute force algorithm" similar to artificial intelligence in solving problems.

Brandon Turner, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University in Tuyuan Pixabay, said the researchers found "very strong evidence that the learning mechanism of pigeons is similar to that of modern machine learning and artificial intelligence technology."

CTOnews.com noted that the researchers showed pigeons some stimuli, including lines of different widths, concentric circles and segmented circles, and asked pigeons to classify stimuli by pecking buttons on the left or right. If the pigeon answers correctly, it will be rewarded with a piece of food.

Through trial and error, pigeons increased the proportion of correct answers from 55% to 95% in a relatively simple task. In the relatively difficult problems, the "correct rate" has also increased from 55% to 68%. The researchers conducted the same tests using artificial intelligence and found that artificial intelligence also learned to reduce the number of errors. The artificial intelligence models and pigeon problem solving methods used in this study are "associative learning" and "error correction".

The study, published in the journal IScience, points out that pigeons have advanced cognitive and attention processes that can solve a "very wide range" of classification tasks.

Turner said the findings suggest that pigeons are naturally "very efficient" learners, but cannot generalize information as humans do.

Turner says pigeons use associative learning to connect two things, such as dogs knowing that they get food when they sit down. It is generally believed that associative learning is regarded as "the beginning of Taiyuan" and is unable to carry out operations such as visual classification, but this is obviously not the case for pigeons.

The researchers say that when humans are unable to find patterns to understand the tasks given to pigeons, they tend to give up. "Pigeons don't try to make rules. They just use this violent way of trial and error and associative learning, which helps them perform better than humans in certain types of tasks." Turner said.

"celebrate how smart we are because we designed artificial intelligence, and we belittle pigeons as stupid animals, but the learning principles that guide the behavior of these AI machines are very similar to those used by pigeons," Turner said. "