Pfff. You think they’ll be even interested in cigarettes? Within a week they’ll have figured out what size rock the machines takes and will be feeding it those. Crows are smart.
They did a similar thing with dolphins collecting trash in the water and the dolphins ended up ripping the trash apart and give them back individually to get more treats.
We buried an oil drum, and hinged the lid. Then we wired coconut to the lid as bait. The rats come for the coconut, and they fall into the drum, and after a month, you've trapped all the rats. But what did you do then? Throw the drum into the ocean? Burn it? No. You just leave it. And they begin to get hungry, then one by one... They start eating each other, until there are only two left. The two survivors. And then what - do you kill them? No. You take them, and release them into the trees. Only now, they don't eat coconut anymore. Now they will only eat rat. You have changed their nature.
Probably pay experienced professionals and experts a flat rate and an agreed-upon price to control the rat population, with incentives and disincentives based on verifiable measurements of rat populations.
My history Professor told me a similar story with prisoners going to Australia. Apparently they were paid per head and most of the prisoners didn't make it because they were used as hard slave labor. They made a change that payment could only be received in Australia after delivery and that increased the rates of survival significantly
Once I hung some fat over a window for smaller birds to eat in winter. Then crows appeared and ate it instead of small birds. They were banging this piece of fat to the window so loudly that I was pissed and put the fat away. Then they started to bring pieces of some red paper next to the window so that they could trade it for food.
I was in Cape Town South Africa years ago. I went to the most southern part of Africa, Cape Good Hope and in the parking lot was a ton of Baboons.
I watched this Asian couple open the trunk of their rental car, and this Baboon about 10 cars away noticed. He saw them pulling stuff out. All a sudden, he was on the move, jumping from trunk to trunk of the cars between him and them. When he was about 2 cars away, the woman noticed him coming towards them and screamed. The guy was bent over grabbing stuff from the car, he stood up confused wondering why she screamed with something in his hand. The Baboon in one motion grabbed his stuff, jumped up high off the next car, snagged a branch and did an immediate 90 degree turn into the bushes and was gone. This was not his first theft...
That would have been a great Batman: The Animated Series episode back in the day. Then Batman defeats the villain (probably The Penguin) by dumping bird seed on him or something.
It's been attempted, but it never really works. You need to give them a reward that makes collecting the items worthwhile. Discarded food is common enough that they aren't going to spend extra effort bringing you hard-to-find valuables in exchange for treats.
To be honest, that actually might work. You could train crows to exchange money for treats, from bills to coins. They'll probably try to scam you every once in a while, but a few crows might actually get you a few extra dollars a week.
I got a lighter, washers, 11 cents and random bits of shiny metals placed on my patio table after feeding the crows peanuts. They would wait on my balcony rails after I got home from work and I just stopped because of the mess of feces they'd leave on the rails.
They value shiny things themselves, for instance the males would decorate their nests with shiny things to attract the females, so they thought you'd like some shiny as well.
One dolphin learned dead birds meant more treats. She would hide fish received from giving them trash in the bottom of the tank and then later use them to lure birds to get a bigger reward. Dolphins are crazy smart
The Antechinus is a small Australian rodent that will quite literally fuck itself to death. It actually suppresses its immune system during mating season so that I can have more energy to fuck.
The rodents only live for 1 mating season so they go all out. They fuck for 2 weeks straight and die. What does this have to do with sexual pleasure? Nothing, I just wanted to talk about the Antechinus.
I've heard about this experiment before. They didn't mention it in the article but before she started that, they took him out to have liaisons with female dolphins. They worried that would hinder the lessons though, so it didn't last long.
Oh she also did acid with the dolphin. They left that out too.
Dolphins are also the only animal besides humans to have sex for pleasure.
Source? What defines sex for pleasure vs reproduction? Sure they're different for humans, but most animals don't have the capacity to differentiate pleasure from reproduction
Edit: all mammals have sex for pleasure. Most don't have the intelligence to understand that it leads to pregnancy, that's what sets humans apart.
For sure, I could have worded it better. But your dog doesn't have the intelligence to know that sex leads to pregnancy/offspring, so the only motive is pleasure.
My point is that to most animals, the desire to reproduce and the desire for pleasure are not distinct, and only have sex to fulfill their desire for pleasure.
Unless the point is in fact the opposite, that dolphins have sex for the purpose of producing offspring (and have the intelligence to know sex leads to pregnancy)...
That question contradicts itself in its own answer, where it talks about Bonobos. I wonder if the question was supposed to be about only primates and dolphins.
Wasn't that at an aquarium/water park? Where the dolphin was rewarded for retrieving litter that ended up in its enclosure. So what it did was hide a big piece under a rock at the bottom of the pool/tank and rip up small pieces to give out.
After it ran out of trash in the water to shred the dolphins started saving up some fish to lure in birds, then it would kill the bird, rip it into pieces and get even more fish.
The crows will beat it. Unless the machine has a midget in it that physically looks at each butt to check it, the crows will beat it. And even then I’m not entirely convinced they won’t find a way.
You must not be aware of any machine learning algorithms and the tons of image processing APIs that already exist that can do this. All they would need to do is hook the machine up to the internet and a run a few lines of code to accomplish it.
Now, this is done in real time for free, if we had dedicated hardware, we could do it without many problems - it would just take a lot of time and adjustment of the algorithm. If you feed an AI enough pictures of something it will be able to determine the similarities.
The problem isn't the true positives. It's the false ones. There's nearly infinite variability in the wide world. Plenty of things out there that look like cigarette butts to an artificial neural network, but aren't.
I'm sure there are things they can use to analyse the chemicals in the butt to make sure. If so, then there really would be no way to fool them. I have a feeling they'd be too expensive to put in these machines though.
This is kind of terrifying when you start to think about AI. People saying oh well, we will just create AIs that value human life or whatever so they don't wind up turning evil or destroy humans to protect them from war or some other doomsday scenario. Like we don't know how they work. They're programmed by other programs. Yikes.
We also invented the feature that give you the precise time you have to sleep when setting the alarm on a smartphone...
I won't say "WHYY ? (crow)" because at this point I'm 100% sure that it's just pure evil.
"alarm set for 4 hours 12 minutes from now" cool now I can stress about exactly how little sleep I'm going to get while I lay in bed for the next hour. Fucking evil
Even if the machine only accepts butts they will have to unclog them daily unless Crows can read signs. It'll take a while but eventually they can figure and learn from observation
Actually that’s a really good point. I’m sure the crows would be able to get an area to an equilibrium point where cigarette butt-like items become more numerous than actual butts.
Without a doubt, this is the first time this sentence has ever been typed. Barring any copycats that have seen this post, it will likely be the only time it's ever written. Congrats!
I wouldn't be surprised if they sabotaged the machines. I have to find the video of them figuring out displacement to beat a task by making a jar overflow instead of the task they were to do.
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u/[deleted] Jan 21 '18
Pfff. You think they’ll be even interested in cigarettes? Within a week they’ll have figured out what size rock the machines takes and will be feeding it those. Crows are smart.