Well, do they?

December 14, 2018 10:13 PM

Upon observing the behavior of his Welsh corgi, Elvis, when chasing a thrown tennis ball, Professor Tim Pennings asked: Do Dogs Know Calculus? [PDF]

Via Futility Closet

posted by the man of twists and turns (22 comments total)

For much more on this general topic, you might enjoy The Math Instinct, by Keith Devlin, Stanford math professor and NPR's occasional Saturday morning "Math Guy."
posted by PhineasGage at 10:27 PM on December 14, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm a simple man - I see a corgi, I approve. But I have a dilemma here - there's clearly a very good and patient corgi here in this story, but where are the photos?
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:32 PM on December 14, 2018 [9 favorites]

The thing that made more sense to me, it also being an explanation that naturally points to other ways to approach complex situations is:

the dog, through the course of the retrieval, looks, estimates, corrects her movements, repeating this process until she's caught the ball.
posted by mulligan at 10:33 PM on December 14, 2018

I asked my dog what kind of calculation he does and he said ‘rough’.
posted by Segundus at 12:22 AM on December 15, 2018 [66 favorites]

I think he meant he utilises the technically sub-optimal but practically robust gaze heuristic, like the RAF.
posted by Segundus at 12:40 AM on December 15, 2018 [14 favorites]

looks, estimates, corrects her movements, repeating this process

Ah, numerical methods.

(But no, the gaze heuristic is even cooler than that!)
posted by clew at 12:53 AM on December 15, 2018

The gaze heuristic was summed up neatly by Yogi Berra: keep your eyes on the ball

Also: science
posted by chavenet at 2:00 AM on December 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

Dogs know more calculus than I do, that’s for damn sure.
posted by Bella Donna at 3:12 AM on December 15, 2018 [4 favorites]

My dog took a little calculus as a required course when he got his Electrical Engineering degree. Like most dogs, now he just has a computer do the calculation for him rather than using a slide rule like he was taught. You can teach an old dog new tricks I guess.
posted by AzraelBrown at 4:13 AM on December 15, 2018 [12 favorites]

I'm a simple man - I see a corgi, I approve. But I have a dilemma here - there's clearly a very good and patient corgi here in this story, but where are the photos?

I thought the same thing, but there is a small photo of corgs at the top of the PDF paper, at least.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:01 AM on December 15, 2018

Elvis may or may not know calculus, but as a professor who just finished administering and processing a semester’s worth of Final Exams, my burning question is: can he fill out the Scantron sheet correctly?



*grumble, grumble*
posted by darkstar at 7:39 AM on December 15, 2018 [4 favorites]

Elvis inspired a number of further articles:

Do Dogs Know Calculus of Variations?

Do Dogs Know Related Rates Rather than Optimization?

Do Dogs Know Bifurcations?

Dogs Don't Need Calculus
posted by Wolfdog at 8:08 AM on December 15, 2018 [3 favorites]

The inverse of the gaze heuristic is a key tool in avoiding huge ships.
posted by simra at 8:21 AM on December 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

I use a similar example as part of a (very) basic introduction to game theory (and formal theory more broadly).

A common objection is that nobody* actually sits down and solves these equations to make a decision; nobody is drawing a game tree and determining that thus-and-such a move is not part of a subgame perfect equilibrium and therefore they'll move this pawn here instead of that knight there.

So, I stand up and toss a pen in the air, letting it rotate once around its pitch axis before it lands back in my hand. I do of course routinely mess this up, because klutz.

In order to do this, I have to solve some ugly set of differential equations in order to know how big a vector to apply to the pen and where to apply it. (Aside: I really should get a physicist to tell me what that ugly set of diff eqs is). I have no idea what those equations are, and I have no idea how to solve them. But yet *toss* I can *toss* almost effortlessly solve them *toss* in a small fraction *toss* of a second.

The point being that the language we use to precisely describe something can be much more complicated than the experience of actually doing it.

I also use Jeff Dahmer as a sterling example of rationality.

*Except for economics graduate students
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:22 AM on December 15, 2018 [6 favorites]

This one is funny: Dogs Don't Need Calculus

tl;dr: Sophisticated algebra is sufficient.
posted by sjswitzer at 12:15 PM on December 15, 2018

I once had a differential equations professor describe me as "methodical." Perhaps he meant to imply that I was "persistent in effort; stubbornly tenacious."
posted by Nerd of the North at 1:48 PM on December 15, 2018

Yes, diffeq was hard and greuling. But it is where science happens. (I mean what is science except change over time from a given state?). Any way to make diffeq less formidable is a social good.
posted by sjswitzer at 3:35 PM on December 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

More specifically, what I want to say is that all of science, the very definition of science, is differential equations.
posted by sjswitzer at 3:38 PM on December 15, 2018

Gigerenzer says no... and also says that social media is messing with our 'fast and frugal' gut judgements that ususally work well.
posted by anthill at 1:14 AM on December 16, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm guessing that Ryker doesn't.
posted by McCoy Pauley at 7:09 AM on December 16, 2018

My family's dog can't catch a chunk of leftover ham in the air to save his damn life, so I guess at least one dog doesn't know calculus.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:14 PM on December 16, 2018

My family's dog can't catch a chunk of leftover ham in the air to save his damn life, so I guess at least one dog doesn't know calculus.

Have you tried throwing it into Lake Michigan?
posted by EndsOfInvention at 7:03 AM on December 17, 2018 [1 favorite]