Comment by dtsykunov
6 hours ago
> Magawa retired from bomb sniffing in June 2021 owing to his old age, as is standard for APOPO's HeroRATs.
> He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts".
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa
End to life worthy of being envied.
I love that Magawa's wikipedia article is structured just like a human: Early Life, Career, Retirement and Death.
A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.
Just missing the "controversies" and "personal life" sections!
"Alleged embezzlement of soft fruit"
How does one rat mentor another?
You can teach a kid to change a tire without saying a word. It’s the same thing. Rats are very smart and very social. Rats that were good at teaching Rathood to their little ones had more that survived.
Put food in a maze and I’m sure rats would teach other rats how to get it. I expect this is similar.
Our dog learned to find tennis balls by smell off a dog that was good at it. This was after me one walk with this dog.
Every trip to the park got us a few.
Then he ate one and have himself a bowel obstruction and me a great enthusiasm for pet insurance.
My guess, first they send them links to confluence wiki.
All deprecated pages with outdated info of course. But the comments have links to Slack threads about the incorrect info.
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Rats are intelligent social mammals. They teach by actions. Imagine training a dog. You have two dogs, one trained and one not. You say "sit" and the trained dog sits and you give it a treat. The non-trained dog will quickly pick up on that.
Human in the loop reinforcement learning
More specifically, fruit in the loop reinforcement learning.
RatGPT