Posted on 09/01/2022 6:31:01 AM PDT by FarCenter
Faced with an impossible puzzle, lab monkeys in a recent experiment showed unflappable resolve: They continued to guess what they thought must be the correct responses, even when rewards were doled out at random or in ways meant to disincentivize the animals from sticking to their guns. In short, the monkeys’ spuriously learned convictions—their seeming insistence that there must be a structure and solution to an unsolvable puzzle—outweighed their desire to maximize rewards during the experiment.
The study, published August 23 in PNAS, suggests that the monkeys create internal representations and assumptions about how to solve a puzzle or address a task that supersede the usual drivers of lab behavior, such as rewards. And even when the puzzle at hand was impossible by design, that internally conjured structure kept the animals guessing long after the Columbia University researchers behind the experiment thought they’d give up. The study suggests that the monkeys did not distinguish between learnable and unlearnable tasks, treating the latter as they had the former—a tendency that the study’s authors say resembles how humans approach random or impossible challenges.
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In later tasks, water rewards were given out not for correct answers (there were none), but first randomly, and then in a way meant to encourage the monkeys to change their answers from what they had guessed before. “We’ve denied them a logical structure that is internally consistent and coherent,” coauthor Greg Jensen, a primate cognition researcher at Columbia, tells The Scientist. In these experiments, the monkeys still proceeded as though they could solve the puzzle, selecting consistent answers even when doing so meant receiving fewer rewards. At this point, the researchers added a third monkey, which had spent less time on the solvable training patterns, to see if their results had somehow been skewed, but it exhibited similar behavior, offering the second-most consistent choices of the three.
“We as animals want there to be patterns to the world; we want to be able to learn our environment,” learning and memory researcher Natalie Odynocki, who didn’t work on the study, tells The Scientist over email. In this case, “The monkeys are taking what they have previously learned will give them reward and applying this learning to a new context.”
Gottlieb says she expected that the animals would monitor their own learning rates, determining how well they were performing based on how often they received a reward. Instead, they seemed to develop an intrinsic reward that kept them focused on attempting to solve the puzzle instead of gaming the task. It’s “very motivating when you believe there is a pattern and you believe you are getting it,” she says.
A similar phenomenon has been observed in humans. In a study Gottlieb and her colleagues published in Nature Communications last year, for example, people tried to complete a similar unlearnable puzzle (disguised among three solvable ones). Many of the research participants were drawn to the challenge of the impossible task, she says, and some said they were confident they could have solved it if they’d only had more time. In the new paper, the study authors also compare the monkeys’ behavior to gamblers who believe they’re due for a win, and of sports fans predicting the winner of games despite not having any relevant data.
“What we learned is that learning is a complex thing, and if you start with a belief that there is a structure” to a task, “you can convince yourself that you’re learning the structure,” Gottlieb says. “You can just take internal cues, or whatever it is the monkeys are using, ignore the reward cues, and call that learning.”
This explains CNN’s death grip on disproven narratives, even while their network circles the drain.
Nature is full of structures and rules. Many are obvious but some are very hard to discover.
Properly designed AI fed random training data would simply fail training and not converge on a solution.
The fact that humans can’t understand why a trained AI works as it does is different from whether the AI is able to recognize a pattern that exists or not.
That would seem to make monkeys as bright as the “follow the science” group. A pox upon them!
Might be fun to give the monkeys hammers and axes and see how long the equipment lasts.
We kind of did that with our government.
That is why slot machines and lotteries are so lucrative............
I attended a neural networking seminar which had a warning about bad data. The Air Force trained their network with pictures of a tank in the open or hiding in the woods along with pictures of the same area without the tank. The only problem was that one set of pictures was on a sunny day and one on a cloudy day. When tested, the network had 100% recognition of the weather, but reported it as tank or no tank.
They continued to guess what they thought must be the correct responses.
Well there we have the evidence democrat hacks are monkeys.
Joey peels banana
And did they test with animals other than primates? What were the results? Is it a widespread phenomenon or limited to some species?
These would seem to be the first questions any real scientist would ask, but the article doesn’t mention them at all. Are they just trying to reinforce a primate-human link through omission or is there really something unique about primates? Or are they just incompetent?
“Gottlieb says she expected that the animals would monitor their own learning rates, determining how well they were performing based on how often they received a reward. Instead, they seemed to develop an intrinsic reward that kept them focused on attempting to solve the puzzle instead of gaming the task. It’s “very motivating when you believe there is a pattern and you believe you are getting it,” she says. “
I think that’s known as “the definition of insanity” - doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Humans may be more susceptible to that than even monkeys.
The scariest thing is to think we live in a unknowable, random world over which we have no control.
And human history, through science, has shown that there are many patterns that we now recognize and understand and they’re dependable and usable for our benefit.
This conviction (for good reason) that the universe is understandable carries over to new phenomenon which at first we don’t understand, or can’t determine the cause and effect, but because of our past successful experience and conviction that there has to be a cause and effect relationship we keep plugging away at it.
One of the biggest mystery we as humans have been trying to solve is why are we here, who ultimately created us, what is the primordial cause.
In the thousands of years of human existence no one has been to come up with a generally convincing answer, but like those monkeys, we just keep plugging away at it.
“That’s how AI works too, recognizing patters but no real understanding.”
In this case AI wouldn’t recognize the pattern because there isn’t one. So unless it’s programmed to go on trying forever, it will eventually stop after so many tries.
In this sense AI is “smarter”. They are not saddled with a false conviction that something must be so - unless the programmer programmed it in.
And separately, what does it mean to “understand” something?
Well about 2.3 billion people (about a third of the world's population) believe in Christianity.
Another quarter of the world's population are convinced it is Islam (or at least pretend to for their own safety).
Only a minority of the world's population do not believe in a Monotheistic God behind it all. A law maker who wrote the laws that we observe.
So I am not sure that its true to say no one has come up with a generally convincing answer. Perhaps it would be more accurate to sum up as: "Not everybody accepts the prevailing answer."
Gambling in a nutshell. Gamblers fitted with head electrodes show a lot of brain stimulation after *losing*, but only a modest amount from winning.
And counterintuitively, winning a little at first does not set you up for a losing streak as much as losing from the start. This blows up the gambler’s idea that “They will let me win at first; but when I start losing I will quit.”
The 2.3 billion Christians includes lots of people who never participate in any Christian organization, as well as a lot who only appear at their baptism, marriage, and funeral.
“Perhaps it would be more accurate to sum up as: “Not everybody accepts the prevailing answer.”
Now compare that to the level of acceptance of Newton’s laws, thermodynamics, chemistry, the law of supply and demand, etc.
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