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Spotted at Hackaday is a story on positive reinforcement to train crows to pick up litter:
A Dutch startup wants to teach the crow population to pick up cigarette butts in exchange for bird treats.
The whole Corvidae family of birds is highly intelligent so it shouldn’t be a problem training them that they will get a reward for depositing something the Hominidae family regularly throw on the street where the birds live. This idea is in turn an evolution of the open-source Crow Box.
For some, leveraging the intelligence of animals is more appealing than programming drones which could do the same thing. A vision system mixed with a drone and a manipulator could fulfull[sic] the same function but animals are self-repairing and autonomous without our code. The irony of this project is that, although it's probably fairly easy to train crows to recognize cigarette butts, the implementation hinges on having a vision system that can recognize the butts in order to properly train the crows in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @07:08PM (1 child)
with all the aging population and "sin" tax increase,
the diminishing amount of cigarette and (buts), will lead to a
a crow population that makes cigarettes and the butts for their
reward?
of course, soon the crows will start growing coffee too and then only
give you your sweat smelly supper bureaucratic shot of coffee bean
after you collect and weight and rewarded the collected cigarette buts.
(Score: 1) by a262 on Tuesday October 10 2017, @11:40PM
Where's the +0, Incoherent mod?