Teaching Rats to Drive Tiny Cars | Hacker News Reader

Teaching Rats to Drive Tiny Cars

newscientist.com

241 pointstosh103 comments

The story is not rats driving cars. This story is not that rats in enriched environments acquire driving skills more quickly.

The story is that learning to drive relaxes rats.

Furthermore, the rats that lived in enriched environments drove for the joy of driving, whereas the standard caged rats only drove for the food rewards.

"As hypothesized, the animals living in the enriched environment performed better at the driving test, indicating that they did a better job at learning a new complex skill. The enriched rats also maintained a strong interest in the car, even after the reward of food was removed.

On the other hand, the researchers were surprised at the lack of interest shown by the non-enriched rats and their level of underachievement shown in the driving task. "

Intrinsic vs extrinsic reward.

Oh, "interest in the car" meant interest in driving? Hard to know without pdf access.

"Just like us humans, learning to drive and navigate seemed to have a relaxing effect on the rats. In a control experiment, they found rats had higher levels of cortisol when being driven around in remote-controlled cars than when they were allowed to steer themselves."

From the futurism post https://futurism.com/the-byte/scientists-rats-drive-tiny-car...

Seems like a terrible control imo for me to say driving intrinsically has a relaxing effect. A better control would be rats doing nothing vs rats driving and seeing if the rats doing nothing were more stressed than the driving rats, meaning the driving rats were actually lowering their baseline stress.

In this experiment the control of being a passenger in a terrifying vehicle moving all by itself with no autonomy or control over the situation can quite likely be the thing causing elevated stress, rather than rats driving depressing levels of stress. Imagine if someone suddenly strapped you into a bubble that started moving by itself and you have no idea why this is happening, no control over the situation, or where you're going or what's going to happen to you. Stressful af. Hell, people get stressed just being in the passenger seat watching someone else drive.

The vast majority of people prefer having autonomy and control over their own motion vs being helplessly navigated by someone else you don't know/trust with zero context and no idea what's going on. A little misleading if this reflects the actual study.

"Rats are terrible back-seat drivers, scientists find."

A connection with Seligman's https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness experiment

Two dogs in separate rooms with floors that can give them a mild shock. Arranged so they get exactly the same shock. One dog can turn off the shock by performing an action; the other has no control.

This experiment turns the second dog into a shivering nervous wreck... but the first is fine. Same shocks; only difference was control.

>A better control would be rats doing nothing vs rats driving and seeing if the rats doing nothing were more stressed than the driving rats, meaning the driving rats were actually lowering their baseline stress.

What if it's the opposite? What if rats that do nothing are under a higher stress and driving simply allows them to get back to their baseline stress?

That’s a different thing, the actual control was as you describe (measuring stress markers over time). The thing mentioned appear to be an attempt to confirm some previous study's finding about self-sufficiency, which is pretty much related to what you say about autonomy and control.

Never assume bad science when bad journalism would suffice.

And never assume bad journalism when you’re reading comments on HN where most of the commentators haven’t read the article they are commenting on.

I took my first driving lesson on an automatic today, and it was kind of a surreal out of body experience. I felt like I was playing a video game. Maybe because I could control something that was moving the world around me?

Until they put the rats in rush hour traffic, then see how relaxed they are :-)

This was a really a fun paper, I'd love to see it reproduced. Perhaps they could compare mice behavior to rat behavior, although given their size it might be more interesting to train a mouse to ride a tiny motorcycle.

I read a book about a motorcycle-driving mouse many years ago:

https://www.amazon.com/Mouse-Motorcycle-Beverly-Cleary/dp/03...

Reminds me of the chapter of Blink where Gladwell delves into the correlation between a doctor's bedside manner / tone of voice and the likelihood of them being sued for malpractice. The whole thesis of the chapter seems to be that people are more willing to sue docs who are less nice, and then at the end he says if you don't like your doc, your intuition is probably right!

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DINEwuxbI-E

Thank you for the link :-)

Not gonna lie, pretty much the only reason I clicked the article was to see a video of rats driving tiny cars.

Thank you for your honesty.

I, too, prefer the silly video to the underlying scientific premise.

I watch the video and see the next generation of competitors who will be beating me at rocket league.

I was just about to complain about the missing video link. Thanks!

I just want to complain about them continuously helping the rat.

Backseat drivers.....

Thank you, that brought it to life much better than the article even though, of course, the article had a lot more background information.

Please link to a better video.

Scaling that up to rats driving your "self-driving" car, I don't think I'd feel safe with less than 5 rats and a consensus mechanism in-place.

Perhaps some of these rats could even be replaced with sensors and Machine Learning. Just imagine the possibilities

If the rats are able to communicate with each other then I think you might find the consensus would not necessarily be in your favour.

What happens if you get allocated five 'teenage' rats who just love pushing your Tesla to its limits! I mean it's scary enough when it's just me and the Autopilot on the autobahn at 240 km/h.

Why bother with all that trouble of teaching computers to drive by themselves, when you could just get some rats instead?

I would love to see fleets of rat-piloted quadcopters delivering parcels, or to grab a ride in a rat-taxi.

Plus, considering you’re never more than 6 feet away from a rat, the convenience would be off the charts.

B.F. Skinner trained pigeons to pilot bombs during World War II: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

This is where my mind went as well. But perhaps we could find better uses like rats trained to drive mini 4x4 solar powered vehicles through a crop stopping at weeds with their little machine and plucking up the weeds all while not damaging the crop.

The ancient Egyptians trained baboons to wait tables.

Source: Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts

I'm guessing just one incident was the end of that idea

Wellll, you jest but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

"During World War II, Project Pigeon (later Project Orcon, for "organic control") was American behaviorist B.F. Skinner's attempt to develop a pigeon-controlled guided bomb."

OMG at the bottom of the page is a link to a bat-bomb

"Bat bombs were an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with over a thousand compartments, each containing a hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a small, timed incendiary bomb attached. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats, which would then disperse and roost in eaves and attics in a 20–40-mile radius (32–64 km). The incendiaries, which were set on timers, would then ignite and start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper constructions of the Japanese cities that were the weapon's intended target."

That's ingenious, and even more horrific.

And highly unsuccessful.

At one point some bats escaped, roosted under a fuel tank, set fire to the testing facility and burned down a hangar as well as the overseeing General's car.

The bats needed to be put into hibernation to get them into the bombs, but sometimes they weren't awake enough before being dropped, so the bats would plough into the ground still frozen.

The project was cancelled just after the invention of the atom bomb, on the grounds that it might do a bit more damage than a few bats. Dr Adams, the dentist who came up with the bat idea, still thought his was better. Don't disagree.

It was better, in terms of not outright vaporizing entire cities in a single flash.

> At one point some bats escaped, roosted under a fuel tank, set fire to the testing facility and burned down a hangar as well as the overseeing General's car.

I wonder if this was the start of the trope about the experimental subject escaping containment and destroying the secret facility.

"Monster turns against its creator" is at least as old as Frankenstein and the Golem of Prague.

This reminds me of the almost completely forgotten use by Anzac forces of the "bat-arang" in the Middle East during WWI.

I guess pigeons are aerial rats, so it checks out...

Don't forget Ox. They have been pulling carts for ages, not totally autonomous though.

I don't think it would work. Aside from the ethical questions, I'm not aware of animals being used to perform complex tasks without human supervision and care. And if you have the human in there, you don't need a rat.

But if one human could have a hold of a mini army of rats, would that not result in some efficienies to be gained :)

It's certainly possible - saw a documentary once about some rats that cooked so well they wowed a top restaurant critic.

>I'm not aware of animals being used to perform complex tasks without human supervision and care.

Shepherd dogs did legitimate work with minimal supervision.

Guide dogs effectively supervise their owners.

Animals aren't nearly as dumb as people seem to think based on their interactions with cattle and decorative pets.

Well, much like a service dog (or a horse!), you'd have to train the rat, and feed it, and change its cage. It would be less expensive to care for than those larger animals for sure, but still a hassle.

Interesting world to imagine though!

Uber's problems with driver classification would disappear overnight. Are drivers contractors or employees? No, they're pets!

And the cars would still be cleaner than some of the NYC yellow cabs I've been in...

To make this idea more concrete: why not use the brain of the rat (or any similar animal) in place of the NN, I.e. remove the brain in embryo stage and train it with visual stimuli relevant to the problem to be solved.

I’d wager that a rat brain would be more powerful than any state of the art AI systems in solving complex tasks such as this. How to sustain it biologically and train using optical paths are complex problems but I could be easier than training the animal and much more scalable: make NN layers with these brain-based nodes.

Do you work as a writer for Black Mirror by chance?

I take that as a compliment :-)

It's not clear how the BM cookie technology works (https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/Cookie) but is understood to be hardware based, i.e. not brain in a vat, biological technology I described above.

I was speaking more to the general theme of callous disregard for suffering.

You did see how often the rats drove into the wall, right?

A better link imho: An article with links to the original papers .. https://futurism.com/the-byte/scientists-rats-drive-tiny-car....

posted to earlier submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21340128

ty! fixed url for futurism article:

https://futurism.com/the-byte/scientists-rats-drive-tiny-car...

paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016643281...!

Maybe Uber can train rats to drive around clients ? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247303

I remember a short-story where a cat learns to pilot a customized glider. It has always made me wonder about the plausibility of it. Were I not allergic to cat, I would probably have built a customized controller for a roomba and see if they are interested in learning to drive it.

I really wonder how far animals can in tool usage if we were to build custom-designed ones for them.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cat+ice+maker

https://www.gwern.net/Cat-Sense suggests that cats wouldn't really be the right pilot. Dogs would be much easier to train.

Dogs seem to be able to drive cars:

https://www.livescience.com/25299-dogs-learn-drive.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chrzpnL1OEM

You can easily order dogs. For cats, you have to make the task fun and in their interest.

Please see the linked article. There's more than that.

Is this funded by rideshare companies so they can pay their drivers literal peanuts ?

And direct them through every little neighborhood rat-run.

You joke, but do have a look at https://www.idiosyncraticwhisk.com/2019/10/california-wants-... and https://www.idiosyncraticwhisk.com/2019/05/uber-and-wages-in...

Summary: Uber couldn't pay more, even if they wanted to.

I really feel like we should be teaching them how to ride little bicycles or take public transportation instead.

Not really surprising. From what I have seen of rats, they are very good at spatial perception and physical manipulation of their environment, where they easily outperform most cats and dogs I have had the pleasure of knowing. A smart rat clearly enjoys exploration and challenge, and likes to be in control - it would appear more unexpected if these joyrides didn't relax them.

Shoo-in for the Ig Nobel

If this interests you, you may want to read Robert Sullivan’s Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants.

It is all about rats and made me much more appreciative of them. Now when I see one I think about what it’s doing and why.

The book also has some interesting stuff about US history.

There are no videos of rats driving tiny cars in the article :(

pubby posted this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DINEwuxbI-E elsewhere in the thread.

AMP-free URL that actually works without javascript:

https://www.iflscience.com/brain/teaching-rats-to-drive-tiny...

sigh.

The AMP link loads faster, the page is easier to read, and there aren't any ads.

I'll take the AMP link this time around!

The original site has a video of rats driving tiny cars, the whole reason I clicked in the first place. The AMP link does not.

Using noscript makes most sites faster and ad-free, all while getting rid of more untrusted code running in the browser.

I'll take the AMP-free web thank you very much.

Wow! Let's train them a little bit more then put them in Formula-E race cars on a circuit :D

Forget that. I'd pay to see rat drone racing. Especially if it turned out that practiced rats flying local could often beat humans flying remote.

...Helps Them Relax, Scientists Discover

"Article was about more mundane stress relief experiment than title led me to believe" grumbled one HN reader. "I felt cheated."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash#Rat_Things

This is pretty cool. Reminds me of a movie I saw in early 1990s as a kid where there are rats who drive toy cars. If only I could remember the name!

Stuart Little?

ah, that is a nice movie but no, this is from early 1990s (or maybe late 1980s). The premise was kinda similar to Stuart Little but I remember there were multiple mice who were able to talk to each other, some toy car driving scene and a boy who perhaps owned them.

I see a lot of comments joking about rats driving Tesla's and maybe Uber could use them, obviously not but are there any real world application where this could possible be useful? The one I came up with was rats in a crop driving little solar powered 4x4 machines around pulling out weeds. Any other thoughts on how these could realistically be used?

The researchers should set up a company making the vehicles for sale. In various size perhaps for different animals.

I have a driving licence, but I don't drive and haven't for years. It's way too stressful, being responsible for a high-speed machine and all the lifes of people passing by, not even speaking about my own or passenger's. I can relax in a train, but definitely not in a car ;p

There was no traffic or pedestrians in the videos.

While you struggle there with that computer, I'm naked, clueless and feeling good driving my tiny car!

https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-01-29

Wow, how can that soon be 26 years old ...

That's what I'd call disruptive technology. Imaginative even. I'd bet the dumbest flea on one of those rats is still way smarter than the gaudiest most over-hyped “AI” our professional snake-oil salesmen could throw at us.

Teaching ants to drive would likely produce less congestion. Probably other risks might come into play.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21340583

video: https://twitter.com/iflscience/status/1187008909246115841?s=...

No Video in the article?!

Here it is: (YouTube with obligatory ads):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYErLcG6aCQ

Sure, but driving is easy. We teach 15 year olds to drive.

Color me impressed once the rats learn counter-steering, drifting, and parallel parking.

Gotta love the devotion to the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy by the authors here. Also this is super cool.

To make this work at all, you have to carefully tune your learning rat - @fchollet

It’s a rat race :-b

https://youtube.com/watch?v=AmkMEoVb6rA

people should ditch their SUVs and get an ROV (Rodent Operated Vehicle as described in the article)

now try simulating spending 2 hours a day commuting and see if their stress level is affected.

"Teaching Rats To Drive Tiny Cars Helps Them Relax, Scientists Discover"

Yes, but the rats might be thoroughly stressed out

But WHERE IS THE VIDEO?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DINEwuxbI-E

THANK YOU!

Url changed from https://www.iflscience.com/brain/teaching-rats-to-drive-tiny..., which points to this.

let them take a selfie

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