Can a Particularly Clever Crow Solve These Elaborate Puzzles?
Continuing his pattern of testing the intelligence of animals, Mark Rober designed a kind of escape room for a clever crow named Cheryl.
With the exception of his legendary glitter bombs, Mark Rober’s most popular videos have featured animals. Those videos showed off obstacle courses for squirrels and an underwater obstacle course for an octopus. Both the squirrels and the octopus proved to be very intelligent, but there is another common animal known for its smarts: the common crow — or, more accurately, corvids. After noticing that his neighborhood crows have an affinity for chicken nugget deliveries, Rober decided to test the genius of the genus by setting up a series of puzzles for one particularly clever raven to solve.
The bird in question is Cheryl, a crow from a local rescue. Cheryl likes yummy chicken nuggets, so Rober chose those as the motivation for solving the puzzles. If Cheryl could solve all of the puzzles, she’d receive the feast as a reward. The puzzles were designed after enrichment toys Cheryl was already exposed to at the sanctuary, so she would have some idea of what to do.
There were nine puzzles in the avian escape room and all of them incorporated electronic components to detect success or trigger additional steps.
Because Rober’s videos are mostly for entertainment, he doesn’t give us a lot of detail about the specific components involved. But we caught a glimpse of a Adafruit PN532-based RFID reader, which was inside a box to detect the RFID tags attached to dollar bills that Cheryl was supposed to drop through an opening in the box. A microcontroller development board monitored the RFID reader and opened a door in the box using a servo motor. That door revealed a tool for the next task.
In another puzzle, Cheryl’s task was to pile coins on one side of a traditional weighing scale. Doing so would cause the scale to tip to that side and press on a limit switch. As with all of the other puzzles, that turned on a light above the next puzzle in the sequence so that Cheryl would know what to do next.
The final puzzle tested Cheryl’s understanding of gravity by challenging her to drop a small Fabergé egg onto the ground, cracking it open to expose an infrared transmitter inside. Using the same infrared communication technology as an old TV remote, that would send a signal to a receiver that would, in turn, trigger the lifting of the cage surrounding the final prize — a cage constructed by none other than Adam Savage.
To see all of the puzzles and watch Cheryl in action, be sure to check out Rober’s video.
Writer for Hackster News. Proud husband and dog dad. Maker and serial hobbyist. Check out my YouTube channel: Serial Hobbyism