I taught an octopus piano (It took 6 months) [video] | Hacker News Reader

I taught an octopus piano (It took 6 months) [video]

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43 pointsweinzierl14 comments

Ironically, I saw this 3 days ago. Was just watching the tuning fork piano build video. https://youtu.be/VD7xivhWYQ8

TIL: Dulcitone exists that's pretty much a tuning fork piano and Scandinavia has a Harbor Freight-like shop that's called Biltema.

Clickbait nonsense - one of those 'I did [impractical thing], watch what happens!' channels. He buys an octopus at a fish market and trains it to pull on levers styled as piano keys to get a food reward. By preselecting the tuning of the keys, eventually he gets it to play a few random notes in the same scale as his guitar noodling.

What did you expect, complete arpeggios and site-reading Mozart? In six months he taught a wild animal to go from nothing to understanding how to interact with a complex instrument, and do so with increasing sequences in response to a reward. That's really cool. Your expectations might be a tad high.

Octopi are already famous for liking to play with things, and it had little else to do in its undersized tank. This is cat walking on piano keys stuff, not increasing sequences. I hope he released the octopus back into the wild after he got bored with it.

FYI: octopi is not the correct plural for octopus.

Plus from a hacker perspective, there was clearly a lot of work put into those keyboards. He skimmed over it because it's for a different audience.

It's called entertainment. I was entertained.

Cephalopods are the most highly evolved species living on planet Earth. They survived the first surface extinction. They'll survive the second. No wonder they prefer staying down there. Disclaimer: I had a wild dream in jail one night that made me reconsider some notions about...

Surface oceans will disappear in about a billion years. More life must go pretty deep underground to survive longer.

I've seen humans eat these entities parboiled and squirming.

It's a shaft in the existential backside that this is the best infinity can offer. Are we not embued in it?

What a depraved world that is ours. Given the minds we have to understand yet trading them for trivial vittles.

A tongue our lord and eyes, to taste our way through this cosmic mystery.

A three-year-old... Perhaps exaggeration. It hardly makes a difference. A 0.3 year-old would do, if one wished to be disturbed.

I have always opposed cannibalism but wonder if I've been wrong. We probably should begin the final feast soon, and really clean our plates.

Their only fault: being so gosh darn tasty.

Nature is cruel. Every living thing wants energy for itself, but there's only so much to go around. The leaves cry out in ultrasonic frequencies as they're harvested, and then we add insult to injury by drowning them in salad dressing before we chomp away blissfully. You want to live, just like they did. So you eat. If only the universe had infinite resources to go around, but instead the march of entropy leaves us fighting over an ever shrinking pie.

Yes, but for myself I'd rather eat things that aren't as smart as octopuses.

And as long as the sun keeps shining, the pie stays pretty constant on Earth. The pie is shrinking for everybody else only because humans keep taking more of it.

Pigs are quite intelligent too.

But our modern life is built on the corpses of many, including children, and that pile keeps growing

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