Breaking the Bird Barrier: Scientist Decodes Zebra Finch Language

Very interesting topic, but a strange choice of source. I'd recommend these instead:

Coller foundation press release: https://www.jeremycollerfoundation.org/news-and-insights/pre...

The actual publication in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads8482

A lot of interesting information here, but this one paragraph blew my mind:

> Although the birds occasionally made mistakes, they more often confused calls with similar meanings rather than similar sounds. “Their responses indicated they have a mental imagery of the meaning of their vocalisations,” Elie said. “In other words, that they understand the meaning of their call types.”

I remember hearing about an interesting paper; it argued that Zebra finch songs were as complex as recursively enumerable languages on the Chomsky hierarchy. I wanted to see if I could find it but came across another paper arguing that their embedded context sensitivity can be explained by simpler rules.

    https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908113106

Left this comment as another computer science connection.

No doubts the crows are all having a good laugh at our expense.

Does anyone have a link to a decoded message?

Another win for machine learning:

>She then applied machine learning to analyse how information was encoded in the calls before testing her findings through behavioural experiments.