There are a zillion cute cat videos on the Internet. This one is food for thought. It tells you a lot about the nature of animal intelligence, and it demonstrates that animals are still far ahead of the best robots and artificial intelligence computers in many ways. This is a 6-second video GIF.
http://mlkshk.com/p/1691Z Let me list the events shown here. 1. A cat is sitting on a dining table after a meal, with a glass half full of water on her left. 2. The cat wants to drink some of the water from the glass but she cannot reach into the glass with her mouth to lap it up. So she reaches into the glass with her left front paw, wets the paw, brings it to her mouth, and licks it off. 3. She is looking down and away from the glass. A human reaches over and removes the glass. The cat does not notice this. Without looking in the direction of the glass, she reaches back into where the glass was a moment ago, again using her left paw. She reaches up and over where the glass should have been. 4. She notices that the glass is not there and looks to where it was, and then looks up, in the direction of the human. What can we learn from this? The cat has clear intentions and short term goals, and knows how to act on them. (This may seem obvious to you, and not extraordinary, but it is difficult to simulate such intentions and plans in a robot.) The cat knows how to use her paw in place of her tongue to get water. This may be instinct. The cat knows that inanimate objects do not move. I doubt she would attempt to reach for a mouse without visually reconfirming its presence. The cat knows that the immediate past is similar to the present. She knows you can usually depend on this. But she also immediately realizes that in this case an anomaly has occurred and the present does not resemble the past. She knows that objects she cannot see or that she has turned away from remain in existence. This is called "object permanence." Human babies develop it between 1 and 8 months of age, in increasingly sophisticated ways. The cat has superb three-dimensional memory, body awareness and sensormotor awareness. She understands how she fits into three-dimensional space. She knows that in order to reach into the glass she has to lift her paw up and over the edge. A biologist described a dramatic example of this. Suppose a dog is carrying a stick in its mouth, while it trots toward a wooden fence with a boards missing, making a narrow space. The dog intends to pass through the fence. To fit through the fence carrying the stick, the dog will turn its head sideways as it approaches the fence. In a fraction of a second the dog sees the three-dimensional space and adjusts its body to fit the geometry, knowing that if it keeps its head level the stick will bash into the sides of the narrow space. The cat recognizes an anomalous event (the disappearing water) and immediately looks to visually confirm it. I wonder whether the cat also realizes that a human being caused the change. Probably she did. I think it would take the fastest supercomputer and robot much longer to take all of these actions, and I doubt that it would synthesize an understanding of events as complete as the cat does. That is to say, I do not think the robot would even attempt to reach for something outside its visual range, and if it did and failed to find the object, I do not think that you could query the robot and show that it "understood" why it failed. ("Because the object was moved.") Robots can drive automobiles nowadays but they cannot do something as simple as this. Yet animals even smaller and less intelligent than cats can handle this sort of task. Robots still "think" very slowly in some ways, even though they can handle real-time traffic while driving automobiles. I have heard that robots can fold laundry but it takes hours. This does not mean that robots will never learn to do things as swiftly or as sophisticated as this cat does, but it does mean that researchers have a great deal more work to do. - Jed
