[bloppe]

I often bristle at the implicit hubris in these assumptions about human uniqueness. Why would we assume that humans are the only species capable of understanding recursion? Why is it at all surprising that other animals can understand it too?

I'd be much more shocked by a study that provided any sort of evidence that animals cannot understand recursion, but that would probably be more difficult to draw a strong conclusion about.

[mrandish]

It's all a matter of perspective. From CrowNews.com: "Humans Found to Be Dumber Than We Think."

[pencilguin]

https://falseknees.com/405.html

https://falseknees.com/347.html

[tanseydavid]

Very well-played. (I had to check the URL for good measure)

[ChuckNorris89]

"Crow tech slaps"

- Rick Sanchez

[jb_s]

Because probably 30% of my 1st year undergrad class did not understand recursion..

[steve_adams_86]

I won’t phrase this properly, but: maybe you did understand recursion, but not as the mathematical or computer science abstraction you needed to learn.

I remember when it clicked for me and I wrote a function that conditionally called itself, I had this distinct sense that I already understood this concept perfectly well. I was just struggling to understand it in the way a specific programming language needed me to.

The idea of recursion is very simple, but can be complicated by the rules and syntaxes of their abstractions.

Apologies if this wasn’t your experience and I’m incorrectly assuming it must be similar for other people. I’m really not sure if it is or not.