Right now the crowbox site is in Beta as we look for people to turn our raw files into a fully-functional How-To. Please email me if you want to participate!
This site began with a 2008 crowbox experiment, which turned nature’s pests into practical players in society by autonomously training crows to conduct mutually beneficial behaviours with humans.
I did the initial experiment in 2008 in an attempt to teach crows how to live more purposefully for man, so that man would not annihilate the species.
At the time, I taught some captive crows, remotely, through basic operant conditioning, to feed coins into a vending machine so they could get peanuts. The idea is that a group of wild crows would teach other crows, including their offspring, to find the coins and put them into the vending machine to get peanuts. For this experiment, I received coverage all over the globe – from the New York Times, TED.com, Gizmodo and even Oprah covered the experiment!
But now – it’s your turn. The crowbox experiment is open source and this site exists to let the whole world know how to make a crow machine and then share the results.
Download the files, post some questions in the forums, add a page or three to the wiki. The open source crowbox experiment is still in beta, but together we can build it into something great.
