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posted by chromas on Thursday April 12 2018, @07:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the bird-on-a-wire dept.

Of all the zany plans that came from the fertile minds on each side of World War II, few seem as out there as a plan to use birds to pilot bombs to their targets. And yet such a plan was not only actively developed, it came from the fertile mind of one of the 20th century's most brilliant psychologists, and very nearly resulted in a fieldable weapon that would let fly the birds of war.

[...] By the 1940s, B.F. Skinner had spent years studying operant conditioning on a variety of model organisms, using dozens of instruments of his own devising to quantify behavior. With war raging around the globe, Skinner pondered the devastation caused by bombing campaigns, which relied on massive quantities of bombs to make up for the lack of precision in the aiming. He wondered if there would be any way to guide a bomb or missile to its target, and hit upon the idea of using one of the stars of his operant conditioning boxes — pigeons. Easily trained and with excellent eyesight, pigeons might make a workable guidance system for ordnance.

Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/04/11/hacking-when-it-counts-pigeon-guided-missiles/

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard


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  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday April 12 2018, @05:20PM (1 child)

    by Gaaark (41) on Thursday April 12 2018, @05:20PM (#666043) Journal

    especially the statues of those slave owners....

    oh... they're gone already? Wha' happan?

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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 13 2018, @12:25AM

    by Bot (3902) on Friday April 13 2018, @12:25AM (#666262) Journal

    What do you mean, gone already? whose statue was it? Bezos?

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