Oriented on making people closer

Robotics and artificial intelligence expert Hans Forsberg taught wild magpies to trade discarded bottle caps for food. He designed a "birdhouse" consisting of a dispenser that releases food pellets and a compartment equipped with sensors to detect when the lid falls into the opening. The magpie drops the cap through the hole, looks at the pipe, eagerly awaiting the reward, and grabs the treat as it lands at the base of the system.

The Magpie is one of the smartest birds, with a body-to-brain ratio that is unmatched anywhere but in humans. Forsberg began by training the birds by setting a feeder on a timer that dispensed food every few minutes to gain their interest and trust. The next step was to teach the birds to press the red button, which opened the door of the drawer, which gave access to food. And then Forseberg put a container with a dozen bottle caps on the table. The birds realized that when they plug the hole, the machine starts to feed.

“After a week or two, they came to the conclusion that the bottle caps were interesting and needed to be lowered into the hole,” says the inventor. Magpies now work as garbage collectors for a fee in the form of food. Forsberg hopes the birds will soon move on to collect fallen fruit, cigarette butts, and more in his yard, and then throughout the area.

Magpies have also passed the so-called "mirror test", which is used to determine whether an animal has the ability to recognize its own reflection - an intellectual test that only four species of animals have previously passed.

ORIENT news