Who knows how to guess?

I don't know. Maybe she has feelings for people. There is an example, which may not be appropriate, but it seems reasonable. It is amazing that animals can do arithmetic. It might help you.

It is reported that Qiqi, a "genius" puppy in Shijingshan District of Beijing, not only knows numbers, but also knows four operations. The master writes the arithmetic problem on the card and asks its answer, and it will answer it with the correct number of calls. Add, subtract, multiply and divide everything. It is said that it has been performed on TV several times, and the reporter has also checked it.

This news reminds me of a famous horse in history, "Smart Hans". It is the pet of German mathematician von Hostains. At the beginning of the 20th century, von Hostains taught Hans to count and do arithmetic. Unlike Qiqi, Hans gave the answer not screaming, but stamping his feet.

Von Hostains is not interested in making money from Hans' performance, but he is willing to be tested by researchers, including many people who are strongly skeptical. He allowed them to test Hans at will, and they could do it in his absence, so that he could rule out the possibility of sending signals to Hans. Even if von Hostains is not present, Hans can still solve the arithmetic problem accurately. At that time, the consensus of the scientific community was that Hans was really a genius horse who could calculate.

However, after a long-term study of Hans, the experimental psychologist Oscar Pfister came to a different conclusion. In his opinion, Hans didn't really understand the meaning of the question he was asked to answer. You can "ask questions" to Hans in all kinds of strange ways. Even if you just think about the question in your head, Hans can give the correct answer. But Hans doesn't know the answer. If the questioner and the observer don't know the answer, Hans suddenly loses the ability to count and calculate, and even the simplest question he can answer before can't make a correct answer.

Therefore, Hans must be consciously or unconsciously responding to the signal sent by the questioner or observer. Pfister found this to be a visual code. In the absence of observers, let the questioner hide behind an opaque screen to ask questions, Hans completely lost his talent in mathematics, and even von Hostains himself could do nothing. This code word is subconsciously issued by questioners and observers through body language. When people looked back at Hans' foot, Hans knew it should start stamping. When it is stamped to the right number of times, people can't help but make a relaxed expression. At this moment, Hans knew it was time to stop. Pfister found that even after he understood the mystery, it was difficult for him to control himself not to signal Hans to start and stop stamping.

So Hans' "mathematical ability" is actually a conditioned reflex. The dog Qiqi's "mathematical ability" should also belong to the same situation. These animals are really clever, but their cleverness is not manifested in mathematics, but in observing words and colors. We humans have a similar situation. Brilliant fortune tellers and "masters of prediction" can sometimes guess the minds of inquirers, not because they have the ability to predict the future, but because they are good at reading and reading.

The revelation of the Hans incident is that we are easily confused by the superficial phenomena we see, even scientists are no exception. Some animals' seemingly clever actions are probably just instinctive or conditioned responses, which are not necessarily related to intelligence. This requires careful observation and well-designed experiments to distinguish it.

But we can't go to the other extreme and deny that other animals also have a certain degree of intelligence. Through rigorous experiments, we can draw the conclusion that some animals are quite intelligent and even have a little mathematical ability after training. Researchers at Kyoto University in Japan trained a chimpanzee named Ai with a computer. After years of training, Ai can not only recognize numbers from 0 to 9, but also learn to arrange numbers from small to large. It can remember a five-digit sequence at a glance, and its number recognition ability is equivalent to that of preschool children (adults can remember seven digits at a glance on average). However, Ai does not seem to fully understand the meaning of 0, and often confuses 0 with 1.

Darwin pointed out in 187 1 the origin of human beings that the intelligence of human beings and higher animals "is definitely only different in degree, not in nature". After years of research, scientists have proved the correctness of this prediction. However, we still have to be very careful about any surprising statement to avoid being "fooled" by a clever animal like Hans.