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dtsykunov 4 hours ago

> Magawa retired from bomb sniffing in June 2021 owing to his old age, as is standard for APOPO's HeroRATs.

> He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts".

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa

End to life worthy of being envied.

caseyohara 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I love that Magawa's wikipedia article is structured just like a human: Early Life, Career, Retirement and Death.

A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.

beAbU 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Just missing the "controversies" and "personal life" sections!

frereubu 2 hours ago | parent [-]

"Alleged embezzlement of soft fruit"

gavmor 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How does one rat mentor another?

sonofhans 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can teach a kid to change a tire without saying a word. It’s the same thing. Rats are very smart and very social. Rats that were good at teaching Rathood to their little ones had more that survived.

Put food in a maze and I’m sure rats would teach other rats how to get it. I expect this is similar.

dtsykunov 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My guess, first they send them links to confluence wiki.

fmbb an hour ago | parent [-]

All deprecated pages with outdated info of course. But the comments have links to Slack threads about the incorrect info.

pimlottc 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

“Feel free to update the wiki to correct anything you find that’s outdated”

thinkingtoilet 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Rats are intelligent social mammals. They teach by actions. Imagine training a dog. You have two dogs, one trained and one not. You say "sit" and the trained dog sits and you give it a treat. The non-trained dog will quickly pick up on that.

yzydserd an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Human in the loop reinforcement learning

mrandish an hour ago | parent [-]

More specifically, fruit in the loop reinforcement learning.

tedmiston 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

RatGPT