Sunday, February 12, 2012

Skinners Birds

Skinner used pigeons to learn about reinforcement learning, yes pigeons! These pigeons were put into a box/cage and were left there for a few days, the birds were put in fairly hungry, so that the want for food was increased. There was a random timed feed distributor in the box. When ever feed would come into the box, the pigeons did a little computing in their brains and thought that whatever the actions they were doing before the feed was distrubuted must be the reason they were recieving food. Resulting in something like this ........





Just kidding, ;)
but really pigeons were doing all sorts of things they thought would let them receive the food. If one was bobbing its head when the food came. It would continue to bob its head until the food came again.



Another experiment, that I find to be cool, that Skinner did with pigeons is teaching them to play ping pong with each other.




These birds quickly learned that the winner, or the pigeon that could successfully get the ball past the other pigeon, the opponent, then they (the winner) would be rewarded with food. 

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