Attentive readers of the article I shared yesterday will have noticed Ted Chiang’s mention of a 2019 experiment in which “researchers taught rats how to drive”.
They put the rats in little plastic containers with three copper-wire bars; when the mice put their paws on one of these bars, the container would either go forward, or turn left or turn right. The rats could see a plate of food on the other side of the room and tried to get their vehicles to go toward it. The researchers trained the rats for five minutes at a time, and after twenty-four practice sessions, the rats had become proficient at driving. Twenty-four trials were enough to master a task that no rat had likely ever encountered before in the evolutionary history of the species. I think that’s a good demonstration of intelligence.
Ted Chiang – Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art
I will be delighted if these rats make their way into Chiang’s fiction. Experiments with crocodiles are bound to follow.