Turns out it was really good at reading people. It would notice the subtle changes in facial expressions as it tapped the correct number of times. When the horse and participant were blocked by a partition, it couldn't math anymore.
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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I too math better with thunderous applause.
The modern version of this trick is bunny the dog, that dog that "talks" by pushing buttons.
I always just wrote this little tale off as "good at reading people", and honestly that's still my assumption. After reading Blindsight though, I think it's a good allegory for possible intelligence without consciousness. What if the horse just has the ability to perform those kind of calculations when incentivized, but has no concept of what it's actually doing beyond responding to stimulus.
Then again I knew a horse that would recreationally lick electric fences, so probably not that. Interesting thought though.
I know a guy that has multiple kids because he doesn't think condoms work, but that didn't stop Ramanujan from immediately recognizing 1729 as the smallest number expressible as the sum of two (positive) cubes in two different ways while he was sick in a hospital
Feels kinda presumptuous to assume that horses don't have consciousness.
Wikipedia Link. He died in WWI :(
Good lord a mathematician and a soldier.
I guess there were a few different horses that could do this because my first reaction was "I thought his name was Hans?"
he "disappeared" in WWI, says the wiki. It could be that he's out there right now, tapping away to the cube roots of all kinds of things.
That's nothing, once I went through the desert on a horse with no name.
Well, how was it? Do you any good?
I suppose it felt good to go out in the rain.
And, what of it? Were you able to remember details about yourself?
No, but it's not like there were a lot of people around giving me a hard time about it
I'm just going to start singing "ba laa laa lalalala" and I hope you will join int.
Calculators are a fucking joke, you can't even ride them or feed them carrots.
How else would he extract the cube root of numbers if not mentally?
From human body language. Which is in all likelihood what it was.
Get out of here with your "facts" and "logic" horsemath hater!
Pencil and paper. Or a calculator. Obviously. My CPA is a horse. Loves stomping around on his giant TI83.
STOP limiting horses.
Perhaps the leg was possessed.
🐴 I drew Muhammad.
Look at my horse, my horse is amazing