In Search of King Solomon's Ring: Cognitive and Communicative 
Abilities of Grey Parrots

Irene M. Pepperberg, MIT Media Lab and Department of Ecology and 
Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona.

Computers may be 'smart' in terms of brute processing power, but their 
abilities to learn are limited to what can easily be programmed.  
Computers presently are analogous to living systems trained in 
conditioned stimulus-response paradigms. Thus, a computer can solve new 
problems only if they are very similar to  those it has already been 
programmed to solve. Computers cannot yet form new abstract 
representations, manipulate these representations, and integrate disparate 
knowledge (e.g., linguistic, contextual, emotional) to solve novel problems 
in ways managed by every normal young child. Even the Grey parrots I study, 
with brains the size of a walnut, succeed on such tasks; I will discuss the 
capacities of these birds and the training that enables them to learn. I 
suggest that by deepening our understanding of the processes whereby 
nonhumans advance from conditioned responses to representation-based 
learning, we may begin to uncover rules that can be adapted to nonliving 
computational systems.