Neural network learns to identify group sizes without knowledge of numbers

A cognitive sciences research duo out of Università di Padova, in Italy, have succeeded in building an artificial intelligence network that has through repetition, learned to identify relative group sizes, without counting. Ivilin Stoianov and Marco Zorzi describe in their paper published in Nature Neuroscience, how they built an AI system capable of approximate number sense (ANS). ANS is the ability of living beings to estimate with reasonable accuracy the differences in sizes of different groups. Fish, for example, demonstrate an ability to join the larger of two schools without having to count. Getting a computer to do the same has until now, never been done.