It didn’t work, but sometimes it did, often enough to keep trying. Dis hadn’t thought about B.F. Skinner since her undergrad days, but after the millionth retry to reach Seth, Tam and Gretyl, she looked up “intermittent reinforcement” in their locally cached wikip. That’s what it was: intermittent reinforcement. Give a pigeon a food pellet every time it presses a button and it’ll press it when it’s hungry. Change the lever’s algorithm so it randomly drops a pellet and the pigeon will peck and peck, as the pattern matching parts of its brain sought to figure out the trick of a reliable jackpot.
