Game Theory: Can a Goose DESTROY YOUR LIFE? (Untitled Goose Game)

where would birds do something like that anyway why would they just attack [Music] hello Internet welcome to game theory ruining childhoods faster than an overly aggressive puzzle solving waterfowl today we're taking a gander at a recent little indie gem untitled goose game get it gander named for male goose haha that is some spicy writing there matpat anyway if you're not familiar with this game allow me to break it down for you get it down like out feathers cuz geese have down feathers all this stuff is gold sure we were nominated for the best gaming channel and the best editing for the Streamy Awards this year but man best writing how could you not appreciate these quality goose puns but I digress an untitled goose game you play as the titular goose looking to carve out his place in the greatest game Birds Hall of Fame alongside Falco Kazooie chocobos the stupid owl who talks too much from Zelda and uh the angry bird bird yes alright so greatest birds and video games it's not a very long list you'll spend your day completing a checklist of daily activities all with one goal in mind making everyone around you miserable and that's it it's not about saving the day or protecting your clutch of eggs act weren't even looking for food your one and only purpose in this game is to be nature's biggest troll by flapping honking and straight-up attacking the locals it's all pretty basic things that we've seen birds do time and time again but what about some of the more complex goals in this game like tricking someone to cut the award-winning rows or dressing up a statue pack even convincing someone to put a ribbon around your neck I mean those are some pretty big asks for a literal birdbrain creature so our question for today is a goose actually intelligent enough to perform the level of complex thought that we see demonstrated throughout untitled goose game or is this goose only that smart because it has a human brain us as the player controlling it you could say that this episode is one that's for the birds to answer the question of goose intelligence demonstrated an untitled goose game we first have to look at how intelligence is measured in humans we typically resort to measuring this based on IQ however what we commonly refer to as an IQ test is actually a combination of several different kinds of standardized tests specifically designed to measure your reasoning and problem-solving abilities with questions like this one Frankie likes the number 169 but not 168 he likes 900 but not 800 he likes 225 but not 224 based on those rules which does he like 1600 or 1700 here take your time think through it leave your response down in the comments along with your rationale as to why you think that's the answer and then see if you're right I'm gonna give you the answer later on in this video but obviously researchers can't just sit a goose down in a classroom and start asking it questions and therefore they don't typically try to give animals an overall general IQ score instead they usually test them on individual tasks that are intended to measure various cognitive skills like memory language use of tools and weapons reasoning and problem-solving and also something they call theory of mind which is really just the ability to understand that other living creatures have mental states that are different from your own and might affect their behavior and it's those sorts of animal tests that matter the most for our theory today by observing the gooses behavior as he performs some of the more complex tasks in the game we can then identify what cognitive skill the goose is best demonstrating and then see whether there are any scientific studies that show geese having the skill in the real world I don't know about you but it's enough to give me goosebumps maybe that's a bit extreme but I couldn't think of another way to work in another goose goose Willis it's an episode that would make goose Willis proud let's start with theory of mind in our case the gooses ability to assess humans and particular behavior in the game we see this in a variety of different ways the goose terrorizes the kid outside the local market because he knows this kid is scared of him and won't flip back on the other hand the goose keeps his distance from the various shopkeepers that do pose him a physical threat the goose even performs in front of a few pub goers like a trained monkey but you know - the mammalian hair live births and cute little Fez hat so it's pretty clear that an untitled who's game our protagonist approaches people in different ways to achieve different desired outcomes but how does this apply to geese out in the real world well believe it or not but geese are able to size up humans and adjust their behaviors accordingly a good example of this comes from the work of dr. John Mars luff at the University of Washington in Seattle who researches how humans affect birds and their behavior the behavior of white-fronted geese snow geese and of course the Canadian goose according to dr. Marrs luff when migrating geese often encounter hunters who they'd obviously want to avoid simply put human equals death right so you'd assume that they'd be on guard when around humans or outright avoid congregations of humans altogether right but that's not actually what happens in the wild instead when geese arrive in Seattle the geese fearlessly parade around the humans they become docile they even sleep out and open as humans watch well that might seem like needlessly reckless behavior for a migrating goose it's actually a migrate idea being vigilant at all times requires a lot of energy so it's actually advantageous for geese to be able to identify friendly neighborhoods where they can let their guard down versus areas where they're more at risk for hunters dr. Marrs loves research showed that geese were able to switch between two modes of behavior high vigilance and also complete unconcerned depending on the types of humans that they sensed nearby this means that geese are able to understand basic human behavior and predict the level of threat coming from those humans for a given situation guns out certain mode of dress fly away city folk come out to play that said I don't know if this is a credit to the intelligence of the geese or it just shows how impossible it is to be intimidated by people wearing Birkenstocks beanies and drinking Lacroix we are talking about Seattle after all so to eliminate the potential hipster bias actually looked at another study only to find that it found similar results Michael Ward is an ornithologist at university of illinois meaning he's an expert in the study of orange but just a study of birds Michael and his team wanted to figure out why there were so many Canadian geese in Chicago during the winter his initial hypothesis maybe they were just fans of deep-dish pizza and dub airs but that Pleasant it surprisingly quote from him we thought the geese would fly to forage on nearby agricultural fields during the day then fly back to the city to roost but that wasn't the case what we learned is that they weren't going to the city for food they were going there because there were no hunters end quote long story short geese it seems are able to understand that not all humans are the same and they take stock of their surroundings to figure out whether they're around the safe or dangerous kind of humanity and that ability to observe how humans behave and react accordingly is core to what we see throughout the various missions in untitled goose game so that first feet of intelligence absolutely checks out but what about the second one using tools tool use is considered a pretty important indicator of animal intelligence since it requires a certain level of adaptability one way to think about it is like this it can't be in a Goose's genetic programming to close a garage door or open a gate like we see the goose do in the game because these sorts of things didn't exist when the geese were first evolving the ability for a goose to perform tasks involving tools or objects things that its ancestors would have never interacted when indicates that the goose has the ability to learn and innovate based on materials in its surroundings and like a feathery Elon Musk so do we see our goose using tools in the game okay well sure I mean he uses tools and so far as he grabs rakes and shovels and drags him around with his creepy little geese teeth but that's not what I mean using tools in this context means using an object to complete a task or make something easier or to enable something that was impossible before and it's not like our goose is the one out there using the hedge clippers to cut that prize rose that said our goose in the game does indeed show himself to be a master of one simple machine in particular the inclined plane check this out sure to you it might just seem like a pile of junk but in actuality it's a goose wrap the ramp ramp forgot the M goose wrap hey I'm a goose take a gander at me your new MC flying free cut your bush and spilling your tea but in actuality it's a goose ramp you see domestic geese can't fly so without the tool of a ramp that goose would have been trapped there it doesn't stop there either the goose uses baskets to carry groceries uses a garage door tether even unlatches gates and untie strings in this way the goose show is that he has a rough understanding of the tools that humans use but what about geese in real life well he might think it odd for a goose to possess a brain that's well adapted to using tools it's actually quite common for Birds to possess this sort of skill you ever heard of a nest well a nest matches all the qualifications of tool use and animals the bird carries an object for future use in this case a stick or a twig or a piece of twine it then uses that building material to help with the problem ensuring the safety and stability of its eggs and lastly the twigs and twine are modified by the bird with the specific intent of building the nest in fact geese in particular are uniquely suited to dealing with unfamiliar nest building materials because they're migratory unlike a lot of other birds which might spend their entire life living in a single habitat geese that migrate have to create nests in a variety of different environments and are therefore constantly choosing the best materials for the job in the modern day sometimes that means using artificial materials like human-made Nets or say a pile of bells geese even know enough to build their nests that jason-2 man-made structures to help them protect against the wind now I know what you're saying matpat you said that you would give us an answer to that IQ test from earlier and yeah I'm getting around to that but otherwise I know what the rest of you are saying most of this stuff is just primitive learned behavior and to that I say yes yes it is but don't get your feathers all rustled because now we're on to the Big Daddy reasoning and problem solving in geese this concept might seem like a straightforward idea but it's important to understand what exactly is meant by problem solving skills when applied to the animal world many animals are engaged in what would initially look like problem solving behavior but really they're just performing certain actions by instinct for instance an earthworm responds to rain by crawling out of the wet ground so it can get oxygen but this isn't proof of thought for any sort of cognition a worm is just biologically programmed to seek out the surface when the ground is wet it's not thinking oh no I'm gonna drown I gotta get to higher ground so I can breathe it just does these things immediately from birth without having to learn them likewise succeeding through trial and error doesn't indicate problem-solving either let's take the observations of C Lloyd Morgan a famous scientist of animal behavior Morgan observed that a dog in a latched enclosure would eventually discover how to lift that latch and after doing so for the first time would then be able to repeatedly perform that step in faster and faster instances this is an example of learning however prior to learning how to unlock the latch the dog wasn't making any deliberate attempts to unlock his confines he was just randomly flailing around until he eventually discovered the solution by trial and error it never thought about the problem and mentally formed a solution to try out sure dogs can be taught how to solve a problem but they can't figure out how to solve the issues themselves other than by trial and error on the other hand wolfgang köhler another early animal investigator found in 1917 that chimpanzees were actually capable of reasoning after realizing that a fruit was too high for them to reach these chimpanzees responded by placing a box underneath the hanging fruit and then climbing onto the box in order to reach it this was not just a random act that led to a solution these chimpanzees deliberately observed a situation and mentally formulated a potential solution to try out this is what is meant by reasoning and problem-solving when you talk about the animal kingdom no obviously not all animals are gonna be a smartest chimps they are some of our closest living relatives after all but could our white feathered hero do the same thing or is his performance just gonna give us a big old goose egg well it turns out that being a birdbrain isn't as strong of an insult as you might think birds are in fact some of the few animal species that are indeed capable of reasoning out cause and effect specifically the bird type corvids are shown to possess similar reasoning skills that rival even the reasoning of chimps now corvids include your crows Ravens and rooks an experiment conducted by researchers Nathan John Emery and Christopher David Bird yes that is his real name talk about your nominative determinism solve rooks with food that could only be retrieved by raising the water level in a container huh now why would that sound familiar they also provided these rooks with rocks simple solution right you put the rock in the container of water which displaces the water and raises the water level allowing them to access the floating food it's a pretty complex solution isn't it but not only where the rooks able to make this connection but they also figured out that larger rocks would raise the water level more than smaller rocks I mean that is a shockingly deep level of problem solving for an animal like a bird they assess the problem they realized a solution they even figured out an optimized solution with the bigger rocks and they chose the best tools for the job that is better reasoning than half of team theorists over here I mean seriously Chris you're a birdbrain and I'm not talking about corvids sorry I think I don't really know what you mean but here's the catch this was a test with rooks we're concerned about the intellect of a goose and unfortunately as it turns out corvids are in a league of their own when it comes to this kind of advanced cognition in fact the corvid family is unique not just among Birds but within the entire animal kingdom possessing this level of advanced problem-solving ability just isn't very common in most animals and geese well let's just say geese aren't in the Corvette family heck they're not even part of the same order as Corvettes basically the only commonality between geese and corvids is that they're both birds two wings two feet one beak all evil so if we're talking brass tacks if this had been untitled crow game pretty much everything you see in the game would have been possible by the actual bird in real life but that doesn't quite have the same charm so we're left with geese geese that clearly based on this episode are smart they have the ability to read their environment they learn from observing the behavior of humans they're even able to use simple tools so it comes to understanding chains of cause and effect he's just aren't able to reason and problem-solve in the same way that other animals like rooks crows and chimpanzees do geese like dogs are stuck figuring things out by trial and error which when you look at the task list of untitled goose game is most of you need quite honestly this is a game of stealing shinies and chasing children of the games 45 different tasks only 13 really require an upper level of reasoning but yeah if we're assessing whether a goose is smart enough to do all of the things we see in this game then this goose is cooked but hey you want the answer to that IQ puzzle from earlier writes well 1600 is the right answer while you might think that Frankie likes numbers that are divisible by five or having even or odd number or something like that but it all boils down to is that Frankie just really likes his perfect squares 225 is 15 squared 169 is 13 squared and 900 is just 30 by 30 so 1640 squared he likes it hey Frankie and since you wanted to hear that solution so badly and waited until the end of the video to get it here's a last one for you debate down in the comments how many four-sided figures appear in this diagram good luck I'll give you the answer as well as a cool new theory next week until then Hong Kong it's an episode that will make goose Willis proud famed actor of the waterfowl world famous for his movies die hard Armageddon I can't think of any bird puns to go in with any of those sixth sense the six I feel like there's so many I'm leaving on the table right now Armageddon armed mm shoot die hard die hard Wow I can't think about I can't think of a single goose or bird pun for any of those three I'm so disappointed in myself

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 3,007,372

Rating: 4.916625 out of 5

Keywords: untitled goose game, goose game, untitled goose game theory, birds, geese, speedrun untitled goose game, goose game speedrun, how smart is a goose, untitled goose game gameplay, untitled goose game funny, untitled goose game ending, game theorists, game theory, matpat, game theory goose game, gtlive goose game

Id: Q1KowXSwKZI

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 09 2019

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[u/AzureLightsmith09]

I count 25 four-sided figures in the diagram. Anyone get the same or something similar?

Also great work as always MatPat. Looking forward to your next theory.

[u/thesamenull]

i was thinking, and while it's not really super smart or exiting matpat mentions how both since the goose is domesticated and how it's not actually looking for food in this game who the hell does this goose belong to?

[u/ty-rant_13]

My favourite Goose Willis movie is Un-Beak-able, written and directed by M Night S-honk-alan. 🙃

[u/DiabloGraves]

Okay, that Sherlock Goose thumbnail more than makes up for the bird puns ruffling my feathers a bit.

[u/ChrisOhio]

Funny how I solved the first test with another method. Even though Timmy likes squared numbers my thought was that he just doesn't like the number 8. How come. The first number that he didnt like had a 8 in it which made me curious while the other two, if you added them with each digit, like for example 224 = 2+2+4=8 and the other one 800 = 8+0+0 = 8 So 1700 wouldn't be the answer as it was 1+7+0+0=8

Funny how different methods still bring the solution sometimes and yeah. I know, completely off topic but I thought to share it to my fellow theorist.