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In a new study chimpanzees outplay humans in a two-player
game, suggesting that chimps may have a superior memory and strategy
when it comes to recalling their opponent’s choice history. We
humans assume we are the smartest of all creations. In a world with
over 8.7 million species, only we have the ability to understand the
inner workings of our body while also unraveling the mysteries of th industrial LTE router
e universe. We are the geniuses, the philosophers, the artists, the
poets and savants. We amuse at a dog playing ball, a dolphin jumping
rings, or a monkey imitating man because we think of these as remarkable
acts for animals that, we presume, aren’t smart as us. But what is
smart? Is it just aGrid Analyticsbout having ideas, or being good at language and math? Scientists
have shown, time and again, that many animals have an extraordinary
intellect. Unlike an average human brain that can barely recall a vivid
scene from the last hour, chimps have a photographic memory and can
memorize patterns they see in the blink of an eye. Sea lions and
elephants can remember faces from decades ago. Animals also have a
unique sense perception. Sniffer dogs can detect the first signs of
colon cancer by the scents of patients, while doctors flounder in early
diagnosis. So the point is animals are smart too. But that’s not the
upsetting realization. What happens when, Industrial IoT Router/Gateway
for just once, a chimp or a dog challenges man to one of their feats?
Well, for one, a precarious face-off – like the one Matt Reeves
conceived in the Planet of the Apes – would seem a tad less unlikely
than we thought. In a recent study by psychologists Colin Camerer
and Tetsuro Matsuzawa, chimps and humans played a strategy game – and
unexpectedly, the chimps outplayed the humans. Chimps are a
scientist’s favorite model to understand human brain and behavior. Chimp
and human DNAs overlap by a whopping 99 percent, which makes us closer
to chimps than horses to zebras. Yet at some point, we evolved
differently. Our behavior and personalities, molded to some extent by
our distinct societies, are strikingly different from that of our fellow
primates. Chimps are aggressive and status-hungry within their
hierarchical societies, knit around a dominant alpha male. We are,
perhaps, a little less so. So the question arises whether competitive
behavior is hard-wired in them. In the present study, chimp pairs
or human pairs contested in a two-player video game. Each player simply
had to choose between left and right squares on a touch-screen panel,
while being blind to their rival’s choice. Player A, for instance, won,
each time their choices matched, and player B won, if their choices did
not. The opponent’s choice was displayed after every selection, and
payoffs in the form of apple cubes or money were dispensed to the
winner. In competitive games such as this, like in chess or poker,
the players learn to guess their opponent’s moves based on the latter’s
past choices, and adjust their own strategy at every step in order to
win. An ideal game, eventually, develops a certain pattern. Using a set
of math equations, described by game theory, it is easy to predict this
pattern on paper. When the players are each making the most strategic
choices, the game hovers around what is called an ‘equilibrium’ state. In
Camerer’s experiment, it turned out that chimps played a near-ideal
game, as their choices leaned closer to game theory equilibrium.
Whereas, when humans played, their choices drifted farther off from
theoretical predictions. Since the game is a test of how much the
players recall of their opponent’s choice history, and how cleverly they
maneuver by following choice patterns, the results suggest that chimps
may have a superior memory and strategy, which help them perform better
in a competition, than humans. In other words, chimps seem to have some
sort of a knack when fighting peers in a face-off. Their
exceptional working memory may be a key factor for chimps’ strategic
skills. A movie clip, part of a study in 2007, impressively captures the
eidetic memory of a 2-year old chimp as he played a memory masking
game. It makes jaws drop to see him memorize random numerical patterns
within 200 milliseconds, about half the time it takes for the human eye
to blink. Memory of such incredible precision is rare in human babies
and close to absent in adults, save for fictitious characters like
Sheldon Cooper. It may seem dispiriting to have chimps make chumps
of us. But such human-chimp comparisons point to how the two species
have evolved along different trajectories. The human brain is three
times larger, and has about 20 billion neurons in the cortex, the seat
of cognition, compared to 6 billion in chimps. This means that our brain
is capable of highly specialized functions that a chimp brain isn’t.
For example, we can build and use language in a myriad ways unlike
chimps. But, to get such an advanced brain, psychologists believe that
humans may have had to “tradeoff” the fine working memory and strategic
thinking of the apes. Chimps use their strategic minds to get a
competitive edge over their peers and climb their way up to be the alpha
male. Whereas the human brain, with its unique language-related and
collaborative skills, gives us a survival advantage in an egalitarian
society. It’s the result of use it or lose it, where the environment has
a major say. In sum, what we garner from these studies is that
every species has its own idiosyncrasies. Evolution is not just about
adding on to existing prototypes, it is about fine-tuning them by
eliminating the non-essential to create newer species that are, on the
whole, better adapted to their surroundings — even if, in some
particular ways, they are inferior. Publication: Christopher Flynn
Martin, et al., “Chimpanzee choice rates in competitive games match
equilibrium game theory predictions,” Scientific Reports 4, Article
number: 5182; doi:10.1038/srep05182 Image: Chimpanzee Portrait from Shutterstock
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