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Re: Did Doug really work on the Cortana Letters? *LINK*
Posted By: thermoplyaeDate: 1/27/07 7:16 a.m.

In Response To: Did Doug really work on the Cortana Letters? (Andrew Nagy)

: http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/19/000257

: Quote: "The Cortana Letters defined a new trend: viral marketing."
: Now *that's* journalism. (I'd copy and paste the whole article in case it
: moves/goes down, but as usual it's late and I'm lazy.)

A snippet from a forum thread that might find interesting:

Birds have been tested in some cognition tasks which show really impressive abilities. One example is the "string pulling task", in which a string is tied to a perch and at the bottom of the string there's a little bucket of food. Now, most birds can't hover like hummingbirds, so they can't fly to the dangling food and eat out of the container -- it just doesn't work. And they can't jump and reach it from the ground. So how do they get the food?

Well, many bird species figure it out (corvids are famous for it, parrots are great at it *unless* they are language trained [Alex the famous gray parrot sucked at it -- he just kept requesting the food], finches can do it, etc.). What they do is pull up the string a bit with their beak, then step on the string on the perch, holding it in place, then reach down and pull up more string, step on that, and repeat until food is in reach. It's brilliant and elegant. it takes motor coordination, but more than that, it takes a sort of planning -- many do it on the first trial, never being exposed to string before.

But what's of interest to me is that they find that most birds (especially corvids again) will do it even when the food bucket is empty. In fact, they'll do it when the food bucket is full and they just don't eat the food sometimes. So it's not just that they do this to get at the food -- they seem to find it inherently rewarding to solve the task (rather than just randomly messing around with the string, chewing on it, ignoring it, pulling it partway then doing something else). In other words, it seems like they enjoy solving the string task, like it's fun, like it's play.

Maybe this has a clue as to why viral marketing works so well. Life doesn't solve puzzles to survive; it solves them because it's personally enjoyable to do so.

full text here


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Replies:

Did Doug really work on the Cortana Letters?Andrew Nagy 1/26/07 9:53 p.m.
     Re: Did Doug really work on the Cortana Letters? *LINK*thermoplyae 1/27/07 7:16 a.m.
     Re: Did Doug really work on the Cortana Letters?Ender 1/28/07 11:01 a.m.

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