Hacker News Reader

I do think this is fascinating. However, perhaps we ought to have expected a flying creature to have rather good spatial reasoning skills...

View on HN

I'd disagree... look at flying insects. Occasionally, a bee flies into my house through an open window. It often tries to fly through closed windows afterwards, suggesting that it is unable to perceive a transparent solid.

Also, there's the cliched moth flying into a candle/lightbulb. Birds and bats, however, don't do that.

Speaking of bats -- it might be interesting to see similar experiments studying bats' reasoning abilities. Does "seeing" the world through SONAR make them reason differently from birds (or us)?

Birds do fly into windows -- once. I've seen it happen sitting inside the sliding glass doors that open onto the patio of my parent's house. They either don't survive the event, or they learn.

Flying insects don't learn as well. They mostly have hardwired programs that work well for them most of the time.

That's true. I'd forgotten about insects. There's been some interesting work done on their visual system (google 'optic flow' insect).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com