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[Traveler]

Pigeons Beat Humans at Solving 'Monty Hall' Problem

In the experiments, the birds quickly reached the best strategy for the Monty Hall problem - going from switching roughly 36 percent of the time on day one to some 96 percent of the time on day 30.

On the other hand, 12 undergraduate student volunteers failed to adopt the best strategy with a similar apparatus, even after 200 trials of practice each.

Ouch.  I hope the students have managed to remain anonymous.  Otherwise, the amount of teasing they would endure would be epic.  It does remind me of the Simpsons episode in which Lisa's science fair project is to prove Bart is dumber than a hampster.

[spiney]

Not surprising.

Since the answer is counter intuitive, random guessing is better than getting it wrong by misunderstanding probability theory.

Maybe pigeons should now start working out an Iraq exit strategy ?

[Traveler]

Maybe pigeons should now start working out an Iraq exit strategy ?

It would probably have something to do with "flying the coop".

[DeepGlue]

Not surprising.

Since the answer is counter intuitive, random guessing is better than getting it wrong by misunderstanding probability theory.

Maybe pigeons should now start working out an Iraq exit strategy ?

Yeah, trained behavior is a help here, rather than intuitive behavior.

Were those the right adjectives? Well, you all know what I mean.

[spiney]

Since there's 2 choices, a strategy that gets this systematically wrong is worse than 50% chance .........

maybe pigeons should run banks ?

[JoelWhy]

That's hilarious!

[whitedevilbrewing]

Pigeons are smarter than undergrads.


I'm not surprised.

[MikeHz]

I wonder what breed of pigeon they studied. There are over 300 breeds, and traits vary widely among them. For instance, racing homers have a brain 1/3 larger than feral pigeons.