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Pigeon Plays Tap Tap Revolution On iPhone — But Sucks

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Blogger Chris Ainsworth tried to get his pet pigeon, Brisby, to play the popular iPhone music game, Tap Tap Revolution, a version of Dance Dance Revolution for your fingers. Unfortunately, Brisby wasn’t very good, leading Chris to conclude that pigeons suck at video games. But with the proper operant conditioning, the bird could probably be a killer Tap Tap player.

After all, psychologist B.F. Skinner in 1944 built an experimental guided missile that pinpointed  targets by putting three pigeons in the missile’s nose cone.

The pigeons were trained to peck at an image of the target in the middle of a screen. If the missile wandered off course, the image of the target would wander out of the crosshairs. But when the pigeons pecked the screen to center the target, the missile would correct its flight.

Skinner’s Pigeon Project was judged impractical, but not the pigeons’ pecking skills. The birds performed well, pecking at the target up to 10,000 times in 45 minutes.

3 comments

    To be honest if he wanted to he could beat any human at that game or any other,

    bit of random info.. Birds see a lot faster than we do, so if they were to go watch a film it would be like watching a very slow keynote.

    In other words there are not enough FPS to fulfill the birds vision and so it has to sit for an age to wait for the next slide which shows only very very slight changes

    make a tap tap bird edition and it’d kick ass although we would never be able to see him d it without slowing it down

    NEEEERRRRDDDD!!!

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