In the award-winning children’s book ‘Don’t let the pigeon drive the bus’ by Mo Willems, (Hyperion Books for Children,
2003) a persistent pigeon ‘asks, pleads, cajoles, wheedles, connives,
negotiates, demands and uses emotional blackmail in attempts to get
behind the wheel’.
The bus driver is decidedly reluctant to let the
pigeon drive. But why?
“On the one hand, the bus driver might have been
concerned that the pigeon would not be able to safely drive the bus. On
the other hand, maybe the driver was more concerned that the pigeon
would not be able to take a route that would efficiently pick up all the
passengers at the various stops throughout the city.”
– explain researchers Brett Gibson, Matthew Wilkinson and Debbie Kelly at the department of psychology,
University of New Hampshire, US. The team are commenting on the
scenario because they have experimentally determined that, along with
humans, pigeons are able to make reasonably accurate predictions about
solutions to simple examples of the notoriously tricky Travelling Salesperson Problem (TSP):
“We presented pigeons in a One-way and Round-Trip group
with TSPs that included two or three destinations (feeders) in a
laboratory environment. The pigeons departed a start location, traveled
to each feeder once before returning to a final destination. Pigeons
weighed the proximity of the next location heavily, but appeared to plan
ahead multiple steps when the travel costs for inefficient behavior
appeared to increase. The results provide clear and strong evidence that
animals other than primates are capable of planning sophisticated
travel routes.”
The resulting paper:‘Let the pigeon drive the bus: pigeons can plan future routes in a room’ was in the journal Animal Cognition.
