Don't underestimate the abilities of pigeons

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Vince called me into the office the other day to watch a clip someone had forwarded to him. Sixteen ‘volunteers’ were chosen to undertake a two-week course identifying benign from malignant cancer cells from photographs. Normally such a short course would not be countenanced but, at the end of the time, the average individual diagnostic accuracy reached an impressive 85%. This rose to 99% when the most common answer among all groups was used. This was akin to the accuracy of a pathologist. This is all good news surely but what is even more incredible is that the so-called volunteers were pigeons. They were rewarded for correct answers and before long they were correctly identifying photos of malignant cells. One pigeon was removed from the study as he was pecking at photos in a very random manner but the rest were spot-on. I think that is very cool. The photo is mine. And here's a link to the article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/using-pigeons-to-diagnose-cancer/