[sukuriant]

There's a lot of really cool information here, especially for animal lovers. From the technical side of things, though, one part stood out: the dogs are more effective at finding mines? That's not something I exactly expected; though I suppose it makes sense. Dogs and their nose, like humans and their eyes are great pattern matchers. Humans are great at seeing and recognizing faces, and specific faces to a degree, better than humans, at least historically (we have put a lot of research into face recognition). I suppose the reason that dogs are so good at this is a similar reason.

[nl]

Yes, dogs are very effective at detecting mines.

I used to work at a company that had a large mine detection section (clients includes most militaries and mine clearance organisations).

Mine detectors work similarly to metal detectors, but are tuned differently. However, because of the conditions they are used under they aren't generally as effective as civilian metal detectors because they need to work in all conditions and be used by people with only basic training.

For example, a top-of-the-line metal detector will detect very small amounts of gold well over a metre underground, while ignoring aluminium-trash in heavily mineralised soil. But that requires the operator to carefully tune the detector to the soil.

A mine detector rarely needs to detect things so far down. But OTOH it isn't possible to ignore trash, as mines (and especially improvised explosive devices) are often disguised to seem like trash. It also needs to work reliably in all soil types with little tuning.

That all means that mine detectors tend to suffer from false positives (last thing you want is for a mine detector to be overly aggressive in throwing away signals)

A dog, OTOH is much better at distinguishing trash and mines and they can be trained fairly easily.

In practice both are often used together.

There are other technologies (Machine olfaction and ground penetrating radar). These work well in labs but haven't been very successful in the field.

(Also, trained rats haven't been very successful in the field: turns out they don't really domesticate that well)

[richardwigley]

There a smell from the explosives - it's quicker to cover an area for the smell-ee than with a metal detector. ------ "After a few months underground, almost all landmines leak vapours that betray the presence of explosives."

http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21603239-...

[sukuriant]

Indeed, and it's awesome. It's just impressive that we can detect that odor better with dogs than with some sort of engineered odor detector