Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér.
Today we are going to try to teach a goldfish to drive a car…of sorts. Now,
you may be asking, are we talking about a virtual fish,
like one of the virtual characters here? No-no. This is a real fish! Yes, really.
I am not kidding. This is an experiment where researchers took a goldfish, and put it into
this contraption that they call an FOV, a Fish Operated Vehicle. Very good. I love it.
This car is built in a way such that it goes in the direction where the fish is swimming.
Now, let’s start the experiment by specifying a target and asking the fish to get there,
and give them a treat if they do. After a few days of training,
we get something like this. Wow, it really went there.
But, wait a second. We are experienced Fellow Scholars here, so we immediately say
that this could happen by chance. Was this a cherry picked experiment? How do we know
that this is real proficiency, not just chance? How do we know if real learning is taking place?
Well, we can test that, so let’s randomize the starting point,
and see if it can still get there. The answer is yes… yes, it can! Absolutely amazing.
This is just one example from the many experiments that were done in the paper.
So, learning is happening. So much so, that over time over time, our little friend
learned so much that when it made a mistake, it could even correct it. Perhaps this means
that in a followup paper, maybe they can learn to even deal with obstacles in the way.
Now, note that this was still just a couple of videos, there are many many more experiments
reported in the paper. Now, at this point, we are still not perfectly sure that learning
is really taking place here, so let’s run a multifish experiment and assess the results.
Let’s see…yes! As we let them train for longer, all 6 of our participants
show remarkable improvement in finding the targets. The average amount of time taken is
also decreasing rapidly over time. These two seem to be extremely good drivers, perhaps they should
be doing this for a living. And if we sum up the performance of every fish in the experiment,
we see that they were not too proficient in the first sessions, but after the training,
wow, that is a huge improvement. Yes, learning indeed seems to be happening here.
So much so that…yes, as a result, I kid you not, they can kind of navigate in the real world too.
Now note that the details of the study were approved by the
university and an animal care committee and were conducted in accordance with government
regulations to make sure that nobody gets hurt or mistreated in the process.
So, this was a lot of fun, but what is the insight here? The key insight is maybe navigation
capabilities are universal across species. We don’t know for sure, but if it is true, that is
an amazing insight. And who knows, a couple papers down the line, if the self-driving car projects
don’t come to fruition, maybe we will have fish operated Teslas instead. What a time to be alive!
Thanks for watching and for your generous support, and I'll see you next time!