Parrot understands nothing

According to LiveScience.com, a parrot has grasped the concept of zero, something other Americans can't do until at least the toddler phase, researchers say.

Alex, a 28-year-old African gray parrot, is not a Norwegan Blue, so he will not go voom if you put nine million volts through him, making him ideal for IT experiments. Being an African parrot he can also carry a fully laden coconut.. [Enough Monty Python. Ed]. According to Brandeis University in Massachusetts, Alex when confronted with no items on a tray where usually there are some, he says "none".

He can also say if there is one item on a tray, which means that he has mastered the whole binary thing necessary to build a supercomputer.

The boffins are working out how well Alex can add and subtract and if he can stop swearing in the presence of the nice people from the media. We made the last bit up.

However, we estimate that if you have a million parents all deciding if a switch was on or off, you should have the same brain power as a Commodore Pet. The only problem would be the occasional "pieces of eight" error. µ

L'INQ
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