The math-solving horse who fooled scientists still haunts AI research
Von Osten never charged spectators admission. In 1904, a 13-member commission — including a veterinarian, a circus manager, a cavalry officer, and the director of the Berlin zoo — concluded no tricks were involved. Psychologist Oskar Pfungst then ran an experiment using a blindfold on Hans.
- ▪Von Osten never charged spectators admission.
- ▪In 1904, a 13-member commission — including a veterinarian, a circus manager, a cavalry officer, and the director of the Berlin zoo — concluded no tricks were involved.
- ▪Psychologist Oskar Pfungst then ran an experiment using a blindfold on Hans.
Boing Boing files mainly under tech. We currently carry 255 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/07/27/clever-hans-horse.html |
| Publication time | Mon, 27 Jul 2026 13:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-27T13:26:22.295Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-27T13:26:22.295Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | nZu25bzSmkXd · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The math-solving horse who fooled scientists still haunts AI research Ellsworth Toohey 6:00 am Mon Jul 27, 2026 Clever Hans — Karl Krall / Public domain (via Wikipedia) In early 1900s Germany, a math teacher named Wilhelm von Osten toured the country with Clever Hans, a horse who could apparently add, subtract, multiply, divide, tell time, and answer questions like "If the eighth day of the month comes on a Tuesday, what is the date of the following Friday?" by tapping his hoof eleven times. Von Osten never charged spectators admission. In 1904, a 13-member commission — including a veterinarian, a circus manager, a cavalry officer, and the director of the Berlin zoo — concluded no tricks were involved. Psychologist Oskar Pfungst then ran an experiment using a blindfold on Hans.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Boing Boing
