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Comment by max_ | Hacker News Reader

May be zoologists have been underestimating the intelligence of mollusks

We've known for a while that octopuses are surprisingly intelligent. Great read: https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/

(tl;dr: don't eat octopus!)

I was wary of eating octopus, but fell relieved now, knowing that dolphins also love them as delicatessen. :-P

delicacy - a delicatessen is somewhere you'd buy delicacies

It's both...

Not in English as far as I'm aware.

Dunno, Merriam-Webster list it as both,[1] though from your comment I get that it is most commonly understood as the store. Thanks for the tip though, I was only aware of the food meaning.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/delicatessen

Perhaps it depends where you are, Oxford English Dictionary only mentions the shop meaning.

Weird! :-O

This is what I get:

1: ready-to-eat food products (as cooked meats and prepared salads)

2: sing, pl delicatessens [delicatessen (store)] : a store where delicatessen are sold

It's fine as a modifier ("it's a delicatessen salad") but not on its own ("it's a delicatessen")

Delicatessen is also plural in German if you use it to mean "delicacy", instead of an adjective ("chai tea"-style).

False. It's fine as a noun if you leave off the article, which OP did.

The "ready-to-eat food products" meaning surely comes as an abbreviation of "delicatessen-style".

It's a wonky marketing term like "lite".

The store is usually shortened to deli where I live.

And Dolphins themselves are very tasty too.

Haha, now my next deep learning project will be named octopus :P

I doubt that. There are huge batches experiments (performed by zoologists) experimenting the limits of octopus intelligence. Some have demonstrated that their tentacles have some limited brain power on their own, being able to perform some limited reasoning and problem-solving when isolated from the central brain.

> when isolated from the central brain.

does that mean "cut off" ?

No, in the experiment I read about they forced the tentacles to go out of the water to reach some hidden area, which apparently somehow disconnects the tentacle sensitivity and reasoning from the "central unit".

I dunno...gastropods do seem pretty dumb. Cephalopods are where the money is at.

Cuttlefish!

Speaking of cuttlefish, there was a cool paper in Science last year about how they actually exploit chromatic aberration in the pupil to see colors - it's been an open problem for years in biology how cuttlefish can obviously react to color, yet their retina only has one type of cell so their vision should be monochromatic.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/how-colorblind-cuttle...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13084534

Or perhaps we overestimate the intelligence of mammals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com