How frigate birds soar around the doldrums

How Birds Combat Ectoparasites

Birds are plagued by an impressive diversity of ectoparasites, ranging from feather-feeding lice, to featherdegrading bacteria. Many of these ectoparasites have severe negative effects on host fitness. It is therefore not surprising that selection on birds has favored a variety of possible adaptations for dealing with ectoparasites. The functional significance of some of these defenses has been...

Understanding how birds navigate

Creatures as varied as salmon, honeybees, and migratory birds such as European robins have an intriguing ‘sixth’ sense that allows them to distinguish north from south.1–4 Yet despite decades of study, the physical basis of this magnetic sense remains elusive. Detailed understanding of magnetoreception in animals has tremendous applications. For example, it is well known that windmills construc...

How Do Birds Sing?

Soar-RL: integrating reinforcement learning with Soar

In this paper, we describe an architectural modification to Soar that gives a Soar agent the opportunity to learn statistical information about the past success of its actions and utilize this information when selecting an operator. This mechanism serves the same purpose as production utilities in ACT-R, but the implementation is more directly tied to the standard definition of the reinforcemen...

The Soar Development Environment

The Soar Development Environment (SDE) is an integrated environment for developing rule-based programs in the Soar language. It is designed to provide editing and debugging facilities, commands for creating skeleton source code for common constructs, facilities for locating the deenitions of task components, and other features. It emphasizes context-sensitive operation by maintaining informatio...