Previous experiments had shown that the corvid songbird crania contained neurons that would light up for one, two, three, or four dots respectively, but nobody knew if there would be a similar reaction to a display of zero dots. While they played the game, the scientists monitored their brain activity. The crows’ objective was to correctly indicate whether the two displays had the same number of dots as each other. The researchers trained the birds to play a kind of computer game, Nieder explained, where they were presented with two displays, one after the other, consisting of between zero and four dots. “But they are smart enough to be able to learn this abstract category.” “These animals may not need the concept of numerosity zero – unlike countable numerosity – in their day-to-day living,” study co-author Andreas Nieder told IFLS. In a paper published this month in the Journal of Neuroscience, scientists have shown that the brainy birds can not only understand zero as a numerical quantity – as “something” rather than “nothing” – but they also may well have an idea of it as the smallest number on a mental number line. So it may come as a surprise that humans are not the only animal who can understand the concept: there’s convincing evidence that honeybees can conceptualize zero as a quantity, and so can the (already impressively numerate) rhesus macaque. And according to new research from the University of Tübingen in Germany, crows can too. You’d say something like “pass the opium, Esagil-kin-apli, all my sheep are dead, I’ve no sheep left, it’s been a hell of a day.” Even if all your sheep died from some sheep plague, you wouldn’t say “I have zero sheep” like some nerd doing a math test. And when you think about it, that’s not surprising – after all, if you’re an ancient Babylonian trying to keep track of your sheep, zero is pretty useless. It was discovered way later than numbers like two or 14 or even 3.9 or 64/13. They must overcome various deadly factors - conflicts with other hired soldiers, devastating environment with fallen meteorites, and side effects of forbidden drugs - and cooperation will be the key to completing the mission.ĬROWZ, hired by powerful nations, are to be formed in a large troop and secure the Q-on extraction sites in the fields of conflict.Īlthough seen as cold-hearted, these merciless soldiers thirsting for coins are divided into two factions and engage in a massive battlefield to obtain the resources.It’s hard to imagine a world without zero, but it’s actually a surprisingly recent idea. However, they are not the only one who are looking for the resources. Mercenaries are hired for the sake of nations, and people start to call them the "CROWZ".Ī mercenary squad is dispatched to the mission of securing Q-on in an open-world map. To survive as a hired soldier for the powerful nations, players either compete and accomplish the missions in a squad or experience major combats between factions in a disputed territory.īackground Countless meteorites fell all over the world one day, spurring endless conflicts between powerful nations to secure rare resources named Q-on. CROWZ is a multiplayer game where players engage in battles as a mercenary called CROW.