
Raccoons solve an ancient puzzle, but do they understand it? - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2017-09-raccoons-ancient-puzzle.html
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LeifCarrotson
> _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!

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

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adamiscool8
Sounds like she was the one raccoon that unequivocally understood the problem.

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Avshalom
Raccoons: they hold no truck with your bullshit.

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ykler
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.)

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WalterBright
> 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.

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orthecreedence
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?

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Avshalom
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.

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jokoon
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.

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Koshkin
Sure - for some definitions of "understand".

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

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235654126_Ants_and_...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235654126_Ants_and_Bits)

~~~
Koshkin
Just like atoms use quantum theory when they interact.

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

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

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

 _Click link_

Oh. Click baited.

