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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

Amazing. Most humans couldnt come up with an escape plan like this.

It's possible he exhibiting long term goal oriented planning here.

Have we considered octopi might actually be more intelligent than humans?

Wouldn't it be funny if in the future we figured out how to communicate with them and they ended up solving our hardest problems or making breakthroughs in physics and math?

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Octopi aren't more intelligent than humans, because intelligence in humans is partly external.

We're fairly dumb as feral individuals, but give us a herd memory for science and math and we can fly to the moon.

Octopi not only don't live very long, they're also aggressively solitary. So they have the usual smart-animal problem of starting life as a blank slate with a few baked-in instincts and no way to learn from previous generations.

The blank slate cycle has been repeating for millions of years, so they're unlikely to change now.

If they did, we'd be in trouble.

What if we shared all of our knowledge with them to fix the blank slate problem?

But you're right. A single human with no knowledge is not very intelligent. It's disconcerting if you think about it.

Sometimes I feel we are precariously positioned at the tip of human achievement. I think we're lucky that the earth is abundant in resources to make up for our mistakes.

But what if they CAN fly to the moon but have decided not to because they realise it's a very big mistake ...

Or just biding their time. "So long, and thanks for all the fish."

The mice got there first.

Wasn't the plan just "Squeeze through a gap, then slide down a pipe"? I'd hope that most humans could come up with that.

Well, there brains can handle 8 arms all moving independently and with many control points in each arm all acting with out pattern. Can humans do that?

Before we jump on the intelligent octopus bandwagon, lets realize that intelligence in one area does not mean they are intelligent or some how superior in another. Qualification and acceptance in society transcends beyond intelligence.

My understanding is that octopus arms are semi-autonomous and borderline 'intelligent' on their own. Each one is equipped with a sophisticated nervous system and can process a wide swath of sensory inputs. Severed octopus arms have been shown to behave as though they are connected to the intact octopus's brain. [1]

[1] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/octopus-chronicles/even-...

Humans can tell where their appendages are without looking at them and can use this ability to form mental images of objects by touch.

The cost of being able to manipulate 8 arms is octopus arms don't provide a lot of feedback to the brain and handle a lot of things reflexively.

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