Ammon News - A West African-born chimpanzee who was able to identify more than 100 Chinese characters as well as the English alphabet, died in Japan at the age of 49.

Ai, widely known as a “genius” chimpanzee, passed away on 9 January from multiple organ failure linked to old age, surrounded by staff who had cared for her for decades, Kyoto University’s Center for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behaviour said in a statement.

Arriving in Japan in 1977, Ai became the central figure of what would later be called the Ai Project – a pioneering effort to understand how chimpanzees perceive, remember, and interpret the world, according to the centre.

Her participation began when she was just a year old, and her natural curiosity soon turned her into one of the most closely studied primates in scientific history.

Researchers equipped Ai with a special computer-linked keyboard when she was only 18 months old, allowing her to communicate choices and responses in cognitive tests.

By the age of five, her abilities were already remarkable. In a 1985 scientific paper, the primatologist behind the Ai project, Tetsuro Matsuzawa, wrote that Ai had “mastered numerical naming from one to six and was able to name the number, colour, and object of 300 types of samples”.

Ai was Mr Matsuzawa’s most celebrated research participant. Her name Ai translates to “love” in Japanese.

Over time, Ai’s skills expanded dramatically. In 2014, Mr Matsuzawa said Ai could recognise Arabic numerals from zero to nine, 11 different colours, more than 100 Chinese characters, and the English alphabet.

According to The Japan Times, in one experiment, Ai was presented with a computer screen displaying the Chinese character for pink, along with a pink square and an alternative purple square. The chimpanzee correctly chose the pink square, Mr Matsuzawa said.

In another, when shown an apple, Ai picked out a rectangle, a circle and a dot on the computer screen to draw a “virtual apple”.

Independent