Isn't that where the Negro prostitute tried to frame the white boys?

Maths monkeys give students close race

A mental arithmetic challenge between two monkeys and 14 university students ended in a close finish.

The pair of female rhesus macaques, called[color="Red"] Feinstein and Boxer, were as quick at working out sums as the students and nearly as accurate, scientists in the United States found.

Both followed a similar pattern, finding certain problems more difficult than others in the same way.

It was already known that some animals can discriminate between larger and smaller groups of objects.

The new study showed for the first time that, like humans, monkeys can add numbers in their heads.

In the experiments at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, F[color="red"]einstein and Boxer were first trained to use a computer touch-screen by being offered food rewards.

They were then shown a display containing a variable number of dots. These were removed, and after a delay of 500 milliseconds, replaced by a different dot array.

Finally, a third display appeared with two boxes, one containing a number of dots equal to the first two sets added together, and the other an incorrect number of dots. Touching the right box earned the monkeys a fruit juice reward.

Over hundreds of trials involving 40 different addition problems the monkeys had an average accuracy of 76 per cent. The students were correct 94 per cent of the time.

However, response times for monkeys and students choosing their answers were not that different - 1,099 milliseconds compared with 940 milliseconds respectively.

The ability of Feinstein and Boxer to pick the correct answer was significantly better than that expected by chance, irrespective of whether the "wrong" number of dots was larger or smaller than the "right" one.

They were not simply choosing the box with the most dots, said the scientists in the online journal PLoS Biology.

The performance of both monkeys and university students worsened when the two choice boxes contained a more similar number of dots, the scientists found.

Being able to juggle numbers may have helped in assessing enemy strength during territorial disputes, or when working out how much food should be gathered, said the researcher

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/18/nmaths118.xml