different objects in, they'd have to tap the box which corresponded to number four. Didn't take very long for Ai to learn how to do that. Ordinality, what they would do they would show two digits, say six and seven, so single digits between one and nine, and the chimpanzee had to learn to press the lowest one and then the highest one in order to get the food. They learned that pretty quick as well.
But I owned a lot of stuff. So I had an ordinal system of bins and boxes in my basement. And I used to weigh 80 pounds more than I weigh now.
How do you teach a chimpanzee to count? Well you have to teach the cardinality of a number and the ordinality of a number. In the early 80s when Japan was sort of pioneering in touch screen computers they got a chimpanzee called Ai from West Africa and started to teach her both the cardinality and the ordinality
same thing. That I think really shows that what makes it distinctive for us humans is that we can slip between cardinality and ordinality very easily and chimpanzees cannot. But while they cannot do that --
We look at volunteer activities, frequency of contact with family, frequency of contact with neighbors. So there's both an ordinal and a content component of this.
Well, quite a lot bizarre. They also include Cantor's infinite ordinal numbers, which are not very familiar to people. So I suppose you know nothing about them.
of zero, when there's a zero there there's a box with nothing in. When there's a box with nothing in it's a zero. And then they did the ordinality test: they showed two digits of which sometimes one was a zero and they waited to see which number the chimpanzee would touch first. Often I have to hesitate when I say chimpanzee 'cause I want to say monkey, but a chimpanzee is not monkeys they're apes and apes and monkey are very different. And once when I was there
All he was getting was a series of rejections, one after the other. This computer was called OMIBAC, which is ordinal memory inspection-- binary inspection computer,
It goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on. They're wonderful things, Cantor's ordinal numbers. It means counting numbers.
Then the chief researcher there realized, "We've not taught the chimpanzee zero. Why don't we teach the chimpanzee the cardinality of zero and then see if the chimpanzee can work out what the ordinality is?" So for us it's just like dead easy, yeah it's below one, it's less than one, so yeah it's gonna be zero's before one, one is more than zero. We get that; it's so obvious to us. So is it obvious to a chimpanzee? So what they did first they taught the chimpanzee the cardinality
close to us, they're called students and the lab is called a classroom, it's like kinda weird, but it's kinda brilliant too. So they taught the chimpanzee the cardinality of zero, came to the ordinality, did it a bunch of times and then did the average amount of times of when the chimpanzee, which numbers they were and when it was the zero tapped first, when it was tapped second. And where was zero?
Anyone who's studied sort of the philosophy of maths or maths will know all this, but most people I think are quite surprised they think that you can't make anything simpler than a number, it's obvious what it is. First of all, you can divide it, it has two separate parts, it has cardinality and ordinality, those are just the sort of long words for amount and position. So the cardinality of the number of chairs in the front row is gonna be five 'cause there
and the ordinality of a number. In the early 80s when Japan was sort of pioneering in touch screen computers they got a chimpanzee called Ai from West Africa and started to teach her both the cardinality and the ordinality using these touch screen computers. And so it was reward driven: you set a task and if they get it right they get a bit of food like shoots down the sides. If they get it wrong
the highest one in order to get the food. They learned that pretty quick as well. So in the late '80s you could say that there was a chimpanzee who had learned the Arabic numeral system because had a working, functional knowledge of both cardinality and ordinality. Then the chief researcher there realized, "We've not taught the chimpanzee zero. Why don't we teach the chimpanzee the cardinality