Eventually, it was shot and killed by a random hunter in Canada who had no idea who that bear was. The bear didn't know Canadians could also be dangerous, otherwise it probably wouldn't have let anyone see it there either...
I think a lot of animals are probably very good at what they've evolved to do. Bears are great at tracking and surviving being tracked (probably more typically by bigger bears); reading about it felt like getting a glimpse into another animal's domain and being totally outmatched.
When I was getting into weightlifting, which I had always dismissed as a pursuit for dumb bro types, I was similarly impressed with the knowledge out there about nutrition, anatomy, the way that muscles tear and repair and grow, etc.
I think it's an all too common "nerd social fallacy" to assume that people who don't have that "traditional" scientific/math intelligence aren't smart, but as I've gotten older it seems to me that, on average, most humans are pretty damn smart about one thing or another.
Dunning-Kruger effect. It's all too common on places like HN.
I talk to people like that at work often.
Do you think they might actually be bears?
The humans really don't like that and Lem's story struggles to really sell it because of course Lem was human, so it's hard to play the role of "Machine which is just categorically more intelligent than my whole species" effectively.
One of the clever tricks in Vinge's "Tatja Grimm's World" is that Tatja is way more intelligent than everybody else on her planet, yet because of why she's more intelligent than everybody else Vinge doesn't need to somehow imagine being far smarter than he is.
Interestingly, I believe the engine + grandmaster combination can still defeat the best engines.
In relation to your above comment I felt they did a good job throughout the series showing the difficulties in communicating amongst lowly people and entities and creatures that are higher up in the pecking order.