Raccoons solve an ancient puzzle, but do they understand it? | Hacker News Reader

Raccoons solve an ancient puzzle, but do they understand it?

phys.org

82 pointsdnetesn17 comments

> A third raccoon surprised the scientists by inventing an entirely new method for solving the problem. She found a way to overturn the entire, very heavy, tube and base to get the marshmallow reward.

I see these scientists are not particularly familiar with racoons. That's a raccoon, all right. Weld it to the floor and they'll still make a mess of it!

I'd quite like to know what the third racoon did. A little frustrating they didn't say.

Sounds like she was the one raccoon that unequivocally understood the problem.

Raccoons: they hold no truck with your bullshit.

Probably used the top of the tube to get mechanical advantage and tipped it towards the narrow part of the rectangular base.

This is ridiculous. Obviously if you want to test whether a raccoon understands the concept of displacing water with rocks you can't just have one experimental setup. You have to present the raccoon with very different cases where it could apply this concept and see if it has generalized or whether it has to learn each case on its own. (And you may find that there is no bright line; in some relatively similar experimental setups the raccoon may immediately start piling rocks into something and in more different ones requiring more ingenuity it might not. And the same thing goes for human understanding: there is no sharp line between grasping a concept at all and being able to cleverly use it.)

> there is no sharp line

Tell me about it. I often thought I understood the concept from the lectures, and then when faced with the problems on an exam realized I was unable to apply it.

I learned the hard way to do all the homework problems.

If you figure out that A + B = C, do you need to understand how you got A and B to truly have solved the problem? Can't you take this further and say, without understanding every possible underlying system in our universe, we understand nothing?

It runs into the Chinese Room debate, which I mean isn't settled or anything but there is a body of literature arguing about the point.

Then "nothing", you know the word, will mean nothing? I think what we can do is make observations and assertions. We then have degrees of certitude on how much is true about our observation and assertions.

If you were trapped inside a computer, then by reaching the "Binary Theory" you have basically unveiled the building stone of the Computer Universe. Everything is in bits in computers.

That's what we are trying to do with quantum mechanics and finding a unified theory for physics. The theory of everything.

Point is, if you discover the Binary Theory inside the Computer Universe, you don't unveil the whole truth. Bits are the "real" building blocks. But then everything is powered by electricity, processors, RAMs and human developers. A real sophisticated world which is itself quantum.

So a "Binary Theory" might explain "everything" inside the Computer Universe, but still is not "reality". Finding reality will require breaking outside of the binary world.

You know what, whatever.

Maybe, but if you go down that rabbit hole the answer is just going to be something along the lines of, 'because wibbly-wobbly quantum timey-wimey.'

Maybe you don't always need to understand the problem to solve it. Understanding things is a luxury for us entertained thinkers.

Evolution comes up with solutions to problems, which is what happens every time a brain did not think about mutating that gene, which is almost all the time.

Instinct, behavior, habit and muscle memory are not thought processes, yet they seem to solve a lot of problems.

Sure - for some definitions of "understand".

Also, ants seem to use arithmetic and (maybe) information theory when they communicate:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235654126_Ants_and_...

Just like atoms use quantum theory when they interact.

Somewhat unrelated, I recently discovered that monitor lizards can "count as high as six"[0].

[0]: https://www.earthsfriends.com/monitor-lizards/

Wow. Raccoons solved a puzzle that nobody since ancient times have solved?

Click link

Oh. Click baited.

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