By Hanes® “Boxer” Noonoo, shorts editor
When ABC News reported that a chimpanzee named Ayumu had outperformed college students on a test of short-term memory, this journal was skeptical. We sent our youngest reporter, Brand Newnew, to investigate.
The test involved recalling where the numerals 1 through 9 had appeared on a computer screen and then being able to touch in numerical order squares that replaced the numerals. Ayumu was the best of several chimps who together beat the humans by performing the test more rapidly.
What Brand learned was that the chimps, under the leadership of Ayumu, had cheated. They had apparently helped one another by making unintelligible chimp noises when one of them was about to touch the wrong square. Test administrators were aware of the noises, but just took them to be expressions of excitement. In fact they were highly detailed instructions and warnings about what would happen if the chimp touched the wrong square. Brand was able to recognize the warning, “Touch that and I’ll break your finger, you stupid humanoid.”
Further proof came when Brand noticed that the chimps were crossing their toes in patterns that corresponded to computer responses to the accuracy of each touch. The subtle movements were signals picked up only by the chimps until Brand began watching them.
Finally, Brand learned that the chimp Ayumu had programmed the test software, although humans had designed it. Test organizers felt that programming a computer is not necessarily a sign of intelligence, given the quality of much of the software available today. They discounted the importance of Ayumu’s accomplishment saying, “Yea, a chimp could do that.”
In other news, President Bush said that the discovery that Iran had shut down its nuclear weapons program four years ago would not prompt him to take a U.S. military option against Tehran off the table. “They fooled us and they are not going to get away with it,” he said.
Elsewhere, Christine Comer, Texas’s top expert on science education, was forced to resign for forwarding an e-mail advertising a talk by an opponent of “intelligent design.”
