A Crow Project

I've thought about this. You could make an algorithm that determines the relative value of objects and distributes reward accordingly. That way the crows selectively learn to pick up more and more valuable objects. Could also lead to crows stealing your shit around your house obnoxiously.

>>1094742
I would train for coins, jewelry and gold. Pretty easy for them to focus on these and not become household pests. I think a lot of people have thought of it. It's the actual doing it that is the key..lol. It will take time and money to develop, although I think that the TED video guy did try to market a base kit but I don't think it really got off the ground.

>>1094722
>First, over $200 million a year in lost change. Yes, that's right...Americans lose that much per year in coinage

Oo 60 cents a person.

I'm very interested.
Where would we start?

You would need to get the crows to the machine first, then give them an initial supply of coins that can easily fall in so they knock a few in and get food.

Then gradually reduce the coin supply until they look for more.

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>>1094765
I was doing a bit of math too, and for downtown Los Angeles, where there's 4,770 people per square mile, that's almost $3,000 a year per square mile, or $250 a month.

Then -- this part is really rough estimates -- I took a random 853x853ft area of downtown LA (1x4 blocks, pic related), selected the buildings (painted in black) and used a histogram tool to count the number of selected pixels.

The buildings take up 54,153 pixels out of the image's 150,544 total pixel count, making 36% of the map "indoors". This would bring the average amount of change lost outdoors in one square mile down to $160/mo.

Then I tried searching for the scavenging area for crows, and found numbers for "breeding crows" (not entirely sure what that means), and it lists crows in LA as having a scavenging area of 0.005 miles. 160x0.005 = $0.80

80 cents a month if you set one of these up in LA. I know I haven't used the best metrics. A better ratio than "indoor vs outdoor area" would be "number of vending machines indoors vs number of vending machines outdoors", but even if it was off by a factor of 10, that's still less than $10 a month off of one of these stations.

mind blown

>>1094820
You literally have to be a Jew %100

>>1094722
Dont go messing around with intelligent blackbirds in your windows...

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>>1094824

>>1094823
The whole thing is Jewish. OP could be onto something with the jewelry bit, but you'd have to have some kind of sensor setup that could actually distinguish between silver and tinfoil or gold and a ferrerro rocher wrapper, or else your setup's going to be giving crows a 1 cent peanut every time it brings you 0.001 cents worth of scrap.

>>1094828
A scale in the drop off chute would do a pretty good job of that.

>>1094829
A scale can't tell the difference between scrap metal and precious metal.

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>>1094722
You might find this guy interesting. He was raised by humans and also know how to use the train system.

http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/no-murder-involved-vancouver-crow-steals-knife-from-crime-scene

I think a big problem is that we drop bits of food on the sidewalk a lot more than we drop change and jewelry. If a crow is hungry it's got easier ways to find food than collecting change and flying it back to the collection box.

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>>1094834
>on the sixth day, the new employees decided, enough of working for peanuts, they gonna cut out the middle man..

>>1094820
>http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/carwash.asp
respect to the metholodogy, but, those numbers are average - be vastly more lost in city areas, also, it becomes a problem for the birds, where to find an increased supply of coins, not yours - see snopes link. Basically, if you can organise a crew intelligent enugh to jimmy vending machines, you got it made - problem, article also explains why they do it, literally, to get more tail. They always gonna scam off the best piece to feather their own nest, those fly-by-nights.

>>1094836
>article also explains why they do it
The article is about Starlings. Crows and other blackbirds don't behave that way. They have to be trained to seek out shiny things.

You're right about the coins, though. Average isn't a great metric, but it's the only one we have. It was mostly to demonstrate that $200 million spread across an entire country isn't going to amount to much if you only have a handful of these things set up.

There's also a lot of other factors to consider. For instance, LA crows' 0.005 square mile scavenging area is the smallest I saw. In urban parks, it's up to 0.2 square miles, and in rural areas it can be several square miles. The more people around them, the less ground they have to cover to find food. Just because you'll find more change in an area doesn't mean it's the best place to set up, because it probably also means that the crows don't have to travel as far or try as hard to get food. But we don't really have any good metrics to base this on until someone goes out studying crows and counting loose change.

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>>1094722

>>1094824
This. Crows are fucking mean anon. We caught one to take to the vet with a busted wing and he would have no part of it.

>>1094832
A scale can tell the difference between tinfoil, a Ferrero wrapper, and a coin. Stop moving the goalposts faggot.

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But it couldn't tell the difference between an aluminum can and an earring. You'd need something else alongside it. I've been thinking about it and I can only really come up with 3 things.

Conductivity could identify silver, copper, gold, and aluminum very easily since they're way more conductive than everything else (pic related), you'd just need a tool to do it. There are some multimeters that measure Siemens, which is a measure of conductance, so that's one option.

Anything denser than gold would most likely be Platinum or Tungsten, so you could combine the scale with a beaker of liquid to measure for that. This would require a way to dump metals that fail the test without losing all the water, or repeatedly dumping the water and replacing it. Not sure how the water getting dirty as shit would affect this, nor gemstones.

Scrap iron, nickel, and cobalt are worth money if you manage to get enough, which can all by identified by magnetism.

Anything that fails these 2 or 3 tests could be dumped in a bin without rewarding the crow, teaching them that what they brought isn't valuable.

You gentlemen are severely underestimating the training ability of crows. They can most certainly be trained to a particular type of object and can discern easily between tinfoil, coinage, loose gold flakes and nuggets. Once their training is complete it will not be a problem. Think about the vast areas of national parks and other locations that are unaccessable to humans either because of remoteness or other reason where gold and gemstones are located. These birds fly over and around them every day.

Its not just coinage or jewelry we are looking at here.

>>1094834
>I think a big problem is that we drop bits of food on the sidewalk a lot more than we drop change and jewelry
But the upside to the feeding station is that instead of flying around the city searching for food, they know where the food is and can reliably get food
It's one of the reasons humans, for the most part, don't scavenge or gather anymore than specialized jobs such as farmers
There aren't always going to be scraps in the same place every day, you aren't always going to be fast or strong enough to make sure other crows/birds don't also get those scraps, and crows are smart enough birds to figure that out

>>1094832
You're trying to jew crows. Over peanuts. I have no words.

>>1094886
why would there be quantites of
>gold and gemstones
simply laying around, waiting to be picked up, in
>vast areas inaccesible to humans..
- theory dont compoot, boss.

>>1094889
Until you start losing your trainees to the local bird of prey population.

>>1094848
Never happened but I love the idea

>>1094828

Rewarding them for false positives isn't a big cost.

Just weigh it, determine the reflectance ... if it weighs more than a gram and is either metallic or shiny give them food.

>>1094722
Oh, you mean the TED talk by Joshua Klein where he talks about having crows use dispensers with coins they find? The one which was later found to have never worked?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12letters-t-CORRECTIONS-1.html

Better go look for spare change yourself.

>>1094963
Well shit. Doesn't really mean they can't be trained, I guess, just probably not as successfully as OP might be hoping.

>>1094722

>people are training wild animals to farm gold and currency for them while they sit back and collect

Fuck humanity is bad ass.

>>1094820
Is that just for one crow though?

>>1094963
>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12letters-t-CORRECTIONS-1.html


Well, as long as we are being thorough, lets get Mr. Klein's explanation on what happened, eh?

http://www.josh.is/correction/

>>1094897
Gold and gemstones are very commonly found on the surface if you know where to look for them.

http://gemstonehunter.blogspot.com/

However, many locations are inaccessible to humans but not to crows. I am very sure there are thousands of locations never touched by human hands or feet that crows know that have gold and gemstones just lying there on the ground.

It seems he actually has a kit available now. Well, this might be easier to get going on than I thought. I will be buying the kit and will keep the forum updated on my progress.

http://www.thecrowbox.com/

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>>1095556
They don't look very different from regular rocks in their raw form.

>>1095531
Yeah, but it's really a question of the area they cover. 1 crow covering a 0.005 square mile area still has a maximum limit (based on the average) of 80 cents. 100 crows covering the same square mile area would still have the same maximum limit of 80 cents.

This is assuming they use the machine as their "home" -- the center of their search space. If they have their home elsewhere and the machine happens to fall into their search space, then that ups the radius from 0.04 miles to 0.08 miles, bringing the area of their search space to 0.02 instead of 0.005. An infinite number of crows would still have a maximum of only $3.20 a month.

>>1095556
>One prospector reported recovering 30 diamonds
Wow one whole prospector. And 4 more. What a huge sample.

It's only "very commonly" if you look at base numbers instead of ratios. If you read that a bunch of people went looking for gemstones and found them, you might think it's a common occurrence. If you read that the other 99.9% of people who went looking for gemstones didn't find shit, you wouldn't be too inclined to go out yourself.

>>1094907
> not giving your bird employs mini back mounted Sam turrets

Have u considered building a some sort of crow habbit at and daily feeder to attracted trainees?

I for one would start with domesticated ones if u can find them. Not sure of other blackbirds but I was not exaggeratin the unprovoked violence these fuckers are prone to. Carry a fucking judge 410 revolver or 2 and wear face protection.

Most lost change is not lost on the street because most transactions don't take place there.

It ends up in car seats, which anyone at a salvage yard knows to slice before the car goes to a crusher.

Have fun training crows but the business model is stupid even if douchenozzle managed to make it to popular media.